Breaking glass: How do we get more women into senior management roles?

18 March, 2021, 10:00-12:00 GMT, Virtual event

Panel session one

Moderator
Aisling Conboy, higher education specialist, Department for InternationalTrade

Panellists

Karen Clince, chief executive, Tigers Childcare
Carole Edmond, chief executive and founder, Glassmoon
Nicole Ponsford, co-chief executive & founder, Global Equality Collective
Pam Mundy, director, Pam Mundy Associates

Panel session two

Panellists

Denise Priest, director of employer partnerships, international, Bright Horizons
Sharon Gneissl, principal, Onex
Kristine Scott, partner, education team, head of cheltenham office, Harrison Clark Rickerbys
Gemma Wild, sector head, education – MENAT, HSBC

This event explores why gender diversity at senior management level is key to better business outcomes and what needs to be done to get more women into senior roles.

It’s proven that businesses with diverse teams have better outcomes, including higher returns on investment. According to a recent analysis by Goldman Sachs, all-women and mixed-gender US fund teams outperformed all-male portfolio management teams this year. 

While this is not the first piece of evidence that diverse teams perform better financially, women-led funds remain a rarity across investment and business. In the US, just 14 of 496 funds analysed by Goldman Sachs were run by all-women teams, while 380 funds had male-only teams. Just as rare is finding a female investor, looking at the education sector, where many funds only have male partners.

With such a strong business case for gender diversity, why is the investment industry so slow to address the problem? Additionally, companies with female leaders – or a diverse management team – tend to outperform their male-only competitors, and have been said to deal better with a crisis, such as we’ve seen over the pandemic.

While the world has changed, with more opportunities for women and minorities, change has been slow and there’s still much to be done to achieve equality – and this proves there’s a business case for it, too.

In February 2020, Goldman Sachs announced it would only underwrite IPOs of private companies that have at least one diverse board member, raising the target to two diverse candidates by 2021. A bold statement for a company that has worked with many big companies with white-male-only teams in the past. Driving change isn’t easy. Companies and investment funds still struggle to attract women to their management teams, but perhaps more concrete actions are needed?

This event will unite those in the business of education working to break the glass ceiling. It will explore why it’s a struggle, even for the most willing companies, to get women in senior leadership roles, and what can be done, while highlighting the business case for doing the leg-work to achieve this.

Finally, it will look at how employers can help build a more inclusive work environment that encourages women and minorities to leap into a bigger role (and how education companies can help other industries).