Supporting the next level of female CEOs – four starters for ten

For every man I approach and who agrees to be on one of our panels, I probably have conversations with three or four women, securing one of them as a speaker. I’m passionate about the Flexible Space Association being as representative as possible in our line ups, but it’s not always a straightforward task to be able to represent everyone as things stand.

It’s a complex issue, and there’s a lot that contributes towards people’s reluctance to get involved. But we’re committed to supporting the next generation to help them find their voice and also helping them to progress as far as they can in the industry. Especially as our own analysis shows that just one of the 15 CEOs running the largest flexible workspaces in the UK is a woman – versus 14 men.

As an organisation that represents all aspects of flexible workspace management and the dedicated teams that play a part in them, we’re focusing our new initiative on mid-level female roles. We know there are many more women in these kind of positions. They’re also the kind of roles in which you might consider your future journey and potentially rising through the ranks to an executive-level position.

Our first step is hosting Women in Flex – an event tailored towards women at these levels. Earlier this month (see image), we had a room of women in these positions and expert panels sharing their experiences, the first hosted by Zoe Ellis-Moore of Spaces to Places and made up of Lisa Richardson, people, policy and productivity director at NewFlex; Polly Bryan, head of operations at Orega and Gemma Meale, director of people and culture at Huckletree. The second was hosted by Lucy Watts of The Instant Group and the panel was Alexandra Livesey, COO at Clockwise; Jane Erasmus, sales and marketing director at UBC and Sam Mardon, director of The Space and head of client experience at Landmark. Both were open panel discussions giving support and inspiration, and discussing the challenges some of these women might face in getting to the next level.

It’s good to have an honest discussion in a supportive environment, and our brilliant panels shared some excellent advice. From discussions and experience, here are my four starters for ten on what we need to do to redress the balance in the senior ranks:

1. Consider our working model – some women would thrive if senior positions offered more flexibility. Not all women have families, but those that do spend an average of 7.7 hours more than men on unpaid childcare each week. The good news is that the trend for working part-time in senior level and business critical jobs is on the rise across the country –750,000 people are now able to do this according to Timewise. However, we haven’t seen this reflected in our industry. We need to think more creatively about the most senior roles and how these can be adapted away from the nine to five to suit everyone’s modern lives, as many other industries have done successfully.
2. Rethinking traditional career paths – with the abundance of women in mid-level management roles – is there a clear path from there through to CEO? Do we need to rethink this journey? We also need to illuminate this pathway, to make it clear there are steps to take and which ones those are.
3. Be open and keep sharing – do we have an open culture in the industry? We need to keep sharing our successes but also our failures, and allowing everyone to learn from them. Otherwise we risk not moving forward and modernising as an industry.
4. Modelling success – the first step to becoming a CEO is really seeing yourself in that CEO role. It’s hard to visualise this if there are very few role models who look like you. We need to keep celebrating and sharing success stories of females in the role and keep linking these to business successes.

It’s important to say that it’s not just the flexible space sector that’s facing discrepancies in the senior ranks – the wider property industry still lags behind many others and in some instances, it’s actually gone backwards in the last few years from a female perspective: the number of women in senior positions in property has actually fallen since 2019 – only 20% of senior level professionals. There’s work to be done across the board and I’m hoping that our initiative is just the first step to making a positive, practical change.