The Working Week 43: Why Women Mean Business

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Women make up half the workforce in the developed world and more than half of those with tertiary education. They dominate consumer spending decisions. Yet at senior levels, you would be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed over the past fifty years. Women may hold the keys but men still control the locks.

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The continuing male domination at top of organisations and the fact that so few women climb to the top of the career ladder is the subject of a new book, Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our next Economic Revolution, by Alison Maitland and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox.

Alison Maitland is a business writer and was a Financial Times journalist for 20 years. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, named as one of the top 40 women leading change in France, is a Paris-based management consultant who runs 20-First, a consultancy that helps organizations to become gender-bilingual. She also founded the European Professional Women's Network more than a decade ago.

They join Wayne for this week's Working Week to explain the compelling economic arguments for changing this state of affairs. As they tell Wayne, it isn't a problem that just affects women. It's a problem for the whole economy, particularly as organizations struggle to respond to the challenge of an ageing workforce and the demands of the next generation of knowledge workers.

Companies that really understand what motivates women in the workplace and the marketplace understand that men and women are not the same – and so they can't be treated the same.

Just as a company opening a satellite in a foreign country needs to learn its language and culture if it is to be successful, so organizations need to understand the different language, culture and attitudes of women.

Those employers that can optimize women's talents will boost their bottom line – although taking action to achieve this will require sustained courage and conviction from today's corporate leaders.

The intro music to the Working Week is "The Warrior" by The EMP Project, used with permission of Blue Canoe Records.

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Show synopsis

"The Working Week" is a weekly digest of news, blogs, and opinion from the pages of www.management-issues.com. Each week, host Wayne Turmel leads a spirited discussion on matters important to business, management development and human resources and the things that have caught his - and his guests' - eyes.