The longstanding underrepresentation of women at executive level is widespread, but particularly frustrating in those sectors that supposedly hold liberal values, such as the cultural and creative industries (CCIs).
However, in 2018, after a series of high-profile appointments of women to Artistic Director and Chief Executive roles in UK arts organisations, I looked more closely and received a pleasant surprise: publicly subsidised arts organisations (PSAOs) across the UK had, collectively, appointed equal numbers of women and men at executive level.
These PSAOs all receive regular subsidies from one of the four government-funded UK arts councils, and as of 2018 totalled 1,118, with annual turnovers ranging from <£100k to c.£117m, and employee headcount from <5 to c.700. Based on Arts Councils’ data, following a peak in 2015 of 58.5 per cent executive-level women in Scotland’s PSAOs, by 2018 women made up 51 per cent of executives in England, 48.7 per cent in Wales and 67 per cent in Northern Ireland PSAOs.
Meanwhile, other sectors were still resolutely stuck with significantly fewer women than men at executive level – for example, women made up only 10.9 per cent of executives in FTSE100 corporations, and 28 per cent across UK charities. I therefore wanted to try and map out what other sectors could learn from this apparent success story within the arts.
Existing literature on executive appointments indicated that a reliance on networking and closed appointment processes were key factors in keeping women out of executive level positions, despite increased legal protections against sex discrimination. Most research to date had found that men tend to network with – and benefit from career support from – men (Ibarra’s ‘homophilous’ networking that she was already highlighting in her 2010 piece with Carter & Silva, ‘Why men still get more promotions than women’). Bushell, Hoque and Dean’s ‘The Network Trap: Why women struggle to make it into the boardroom’ identified the particular disadvantage to women of appointment processes that rely on these homophilous networks, by using headhunters within unadvertised appointment processes that replicate their client networks.
Following 63 semistructured interviews with men and women executives, chairpersons and headhunters across UK PSAOs, alongside quantitative research into workforce demographics and advertised salaries, I found that the arts sector networked differently, appointed its executives differently, and structured its working practices differently from the literature’s findings to date.
“I’m gay and I’ve never known that to be a problem in the arts. It’s probably one of the reasons why I am less inclined to build personal relationships and networks with men, actually, because I think if you go to school gay you know girls tend to be more mature and kind.” (Executive man)
Women and men in PSAOs tend to form non-homophilous professional gender networks rather than homophilous gender groups as seen in other sectors. Non-homophilous networks appear to form partly due to low-cost networking activities available to most workers from early career onwards, an acceptance and openness towards sexuality, including male homosexuality, a cross-sector leadership programme (Clore), and an executive workforce primarily educated in the state sector and therefore without networking behaviours baked in from single-sex private school onwards.
“It is less acceptable just to appoint people into jobs without advertising them […] the money has got scarcer, the processes have got tighter, so it can’t just be done in this slightly old boys’ network-y kind of way anymore, it doesn’t work.” (Executive woman)
PSAOs do use networks to circulate information as widely as possible about executive vacancies, but do so within openly advertised, formal appointment processes, and rarely use headhunters other than to source administrative resource, process guidance and to genuinely widen the applicant pool. Soft pressure from funders has encouraged more formal appointment processes but has not included the gender quotas sometimes touted as the solution to gender inequality in other sectors.
“If I needed to dash home because I was going to be at an evening event at the gallery, I could get home in 15 minutes and do a bedtime story and get back for the event.” (Executive woman)
Flexible working, including job shares, are seen across the sector at executive level. However, in some parts of the sector – notably theatre – the equal numbers of men and women at executive level often follow gendered division of roles, with men taking the public, creative lead and women taking the operational lead in support of the creative strategy. At the same time, the sector has always been relatively low paid, with average executive advertised starting salaries staying stagnant at the bottom of the range, and the mean average advertised starting salary rising from c.£36,600 to only c.£46,600 in the ten years leading up to gender parity.
“They’d be pissed off that I was female, but they were doubly pissed off that I was Black and female.” (Chairwoman)
The sector seems to have reached gender parity largely by more White women being appointed than other minoritised groups. While there may be more working-class executives than assumed, they have had to navigate middle-class norms to find their way into the sector, let alone executive positions. Meanwhile, Black, Asian and/or working-class and other minoritised women still encounter covert and overt barriers to executive roles that White, middle-class women now seldom face. These barriers are not entirely insurmountable at an individual level, as evidenced by multiple women interviewed in this study, but the overall analysis of workforce demographics paint a picture of lingering White, middle-class privilege.
Since non-homophilous networking in the arts seems to have been in place for some time, without women reaching executive level in equal numbers to men, widening networks alone does not seem to hold the key to unlocking gender parity. What seems to have changed is a move towards more formal, open appointment processes – partly prompted by funder scrutiny – and the adoption of workplace structures that increasingly adapt to executives’ caring responsibilities, in the form of flexible hours and shared executive level positions.
This seemingly perfect storm of non-homophilous networking, formal recruitment and selection methods and flexible working patterns has now settled into gender parity. The storm, however, is not damage-free. Low and stagnant salaries cannot be ignored, with men often – but not always – landing the highest-paid advertised executive roles each year and women often the lowest. Nor should the gender parity be heralded as a success without acknowledging that White, middle-class women seem to be benefitting from this move towards gender parity ahead of other women. The UK’s publicly subsidised arts organisations may well have plenty to teach other sectors, but until they expand their own networks even further in terms of race and class, they have other lessons to learn.
Mary Ann le Lean Director, Year One Consulting (PhD from Warwick Business School, Industrial Relations Research Unit)
Image credit Hufton+Crow-VIEW via Alamy