THE dollar is falling, the markets are crashing and the Spice Girls have cancelled the rest of their world tour. As the effects of the American sub-prime mortgage crisis continue to be felt around the globe, it seems as if only a superhero could rescue us from the horrors of full-blown recession in the UK. But what if that superhero was a woman, or indeed an entire female workforce? Could women save the world from recession?
This is one of the many questions that co-authors Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland set out to discover in their new book, Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution. Women, they argue, aren't just a
n integral part of today's business world, they are its economic future.
"Women are now driving growth across the developed world and they're the engine of growth," says Maitland, who formerly wrote for the Financial Times and who is a senior visiting fellow in the faculty of management at Cass Business School at London's City University.
"There really is a compelling business case now for why women have become the most talented pool in the workforce. Don't forget, 59 per cent of our graduates now are female."
Maitland and Wittenberg-Cox call this "womenomics". They point to statistics such as the fact that women make 80 per cent of consumer purchasing decisions, and a recent UK government report that suggested the country could gain £23 billion by better harnessing women's skills.
They argue that no business, large or small, can afford to ignore the growing economic power and potential of women in the 21st century. While such ideas may have some traditionalists up in arms, the book is littered with ringing endorsements from senior British business figures – and yes, they are mainly men.
Larry Hirst, chief executive of IBM UK, is quoted as saying: "The emerging force of women in the 21st century is part of major social and economic change, which has to be acknowledged by any organisation looking for a competitive edge."
Wittenberg-Cox, who is the chief executive of consultancy 20-First, adds: "Womenomics isn't just a women's issue, it's an economic and political issue. It's an issue for every business, and companies who are waking up to this notion are realising it gives them an enormous competitive advantage. Women have for too long been dismissed as a minority, which they have never been."
And yet women remain a minority at the higher levels of the business world, particularly in the boardroom. There are still only three FTSE-100 companies with female chief executives (Marjorie Scardino at publishing group Pearson, Clara Furse at the London Stock Exchange and Cynthia Carroll at mining conglomerate Anglo American) and only 11 Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs in the US. Improvements may be taking place, but they are happening at an extremely sluggish pace. The book predicts that, unless things change radically, by 2016 no more than 6 per cent of the CEOs of the Fortune 1000 – the list of America's largest companies – will be women.
"It's what we call 'gender asbestos'," says Wittenberg-Cox. "Rather than the glass ceiling, we believe that it's something that gets into the walls and the structures and the systems and the processes of companies. They're built on 20th-century male-dominated models, and while many companies are actively anti-discrimination, there still remains a lot of unintended bias against women."
It's an issue that's gathering pace. Prowess, the women's enterprise organisation, will this week hold its international conference, where one of the subjects under discussion will be the impact of a 2003 Norwegian law that made it compulsory for the boards of publicly listed companies to be 40 per cent female. Could such legislation work here?
Jackie Brierton, director of policy at Prowess, says: "Ideally (legislating is] not what you want to do, but when you look at how things are panning out in the UK and how long it takes to get change, you think, 'We can't wait that long.'
"There's a whole generation of women coming up now who have much higher expectations about the workplace, but if they're going to find the door barred in the same way women have for the past 30 years, that's a really frightening prospect. It's getting to the stage where we do need to look at a legislative framework around the equality issue. It's not just about female representation, but about equal pay as well. But no-one wants to be in a position where we have to do it."
So if the answer is to be less dramatic than legislation, then what needs to happen, say Maitland and Wittenberg-Cox, is a change in the entire way companies do business.
"One example you might take is the way companies deal with high-flyers. Often they're being put forward for leadership training and really being pushed to achieve during an incredibly narrow age band of 28 to 35," says Maitland. "By doing that, companies are unintentionally working against women, because often that is absolutely the point where they're starting a family, their child-bearing years, so they're juggling having a family with their next big career move.
"So one of our suggestions is to widen that narrow age band. There are many people who, towards the end of their career, are able to travel more, have better leadership skills, more experience. Their fifties is a great decade for women. Companies should be exploiting that. It will help them in the long run."
So, can women save the world from recession?
"The best answer to that is another question," says Wittenberg-Cox. "If there were more women in the financial services industry, and had been over the past ten years, would we be in the mess we're in today? We don't know the answer, but I would hazard a guess that we wouldn't be."
• Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, is published by Jossey-Bass, priced £16.99
• The 5th Prowess Annual International Conference will take place on 20-21 February in Peterborough. For more information, call 01603 762355.
