Nearly two-thirds of women executives in Canada say their workplace culture and values favour their male counterparts when it comes to success, a new survey indicates.
The fourth annual POLLARA survey for the Women’s Executive Network (WXN), released last week, indicates many of Canada’s top businesswomen don’t feel fully accepted into executive-level culture.
Sixty-nine per cent of those surveyed said a lack of comfort by men in dealing with them on a professional level is a barrier to their advancement, while 66 per cent say their exclusion from “the boys’ club” and the “meeting after the meeting” is holding them back.
“While women are present during formal meetings, they say they’re not always part of the informal networks through which many decisions and deals are made,” said Angela Marzolini, vice-chairman of POLLARA. “They say this is a highly significant barrier to their professional success, and a big component of the glass ceiling."
Asked to name the tools that have helped overcome or avoid the barriers to career advancement, some of Canada’s most successful women executives cited their own persistence, determination, networking and contacts. “They said they’ve learned not to take no for an answer, and to be highly pro-active. Some have even established alternate networks of their own,” Marzolini said.
WXN founder Pamela Jeffery said the findings aren’t a surprise. “WXN is made up of 7,500 highly successful women across Canada who learn a lot from each other. It’s a group of women executives who have achieved considerable success already through sheer persistence and determination; who want to develop further professionally and at the same time meet others who are facing the same challenges,” she said.
Two-thirds of executive women also believe that the barriers to women’s advancement onto corporate boards are either falling slowly (53 per cent) or not at all (13 per cent). Only three per cent say these barriers are falling quickly, while 20 per cent say change is occurring at a moderate pace.
“Executive women are frustrated by the lack of progress being made by corporate boards in appointing female directors,” said Marzolini. “They flatly reject the notion that there aren’t enough qualified women available to create a gender balance. Female executives attribute the current situation primarily to gender-based discrimination, but they also cite the fact that they are not part of the informal networks that lead to directorships.”
However, “There’s a good opportunity in the current climate, as part of reforms to corporate governance, to take steps to reduce the huge gender imbalances that exist on today’s boards,” she noted.
The Moving Forward 2002 findings are based on 350 telephone interviews with executive women in seven Canadian urban centres between June 25 and July 5. The results are considered accurate to within +/-5.3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
More on the findings will be presented at a series of breakfast meetings in several Canadian cities, including a session in Calgary on Oct. 10 at The Petroleum Club.
