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New Zealand's corporate world has been feeling smug about gender equality for several years - and with good reason.
The country has been led from the top by women. We have the Prime Minister and, until last year, had a female Governor-General. Our biggest listed company and one of our biggest banks also had women at the helm.
But the imminent departure of Telecom's Theresa Gattung and Westpac's Ann Sherry - capped off this week by news that Restaurant Brands boss Vicki Salmon has quit - highlights an ominous lack of depth when it comes to female senior executives.
An international survey, the Grant Thornton International Business Report, showed that New Zealand had slipped from fourth equal to 10th in the past three years in the percentage of business managers who are female.
In 2004 that percentage was 31, but by this year it had slipped to 24.
One big impediment to securing senior business roles or directorships was getting the experience, said Jane Diplock, head of the Securities Commission.
"Women have to make some fairly difficult choices between putting themselves forward to senior management and the sort of rigours that senior management require, or focusing on the family."
Companies, she said, needed to "help people structure things so they can have it all. Maybe not all at the same time, but they can have it all".
She is concerned that a lot of companies measure things the wrong way.
"If you really want to get people focused on the bottom line, if you put a lot of training into both your young men and women, and then you do not actually support them in their work-life balance, you're actually wasting that."
Carol Dallimore, general manager of executive recruitment firm OCG, said many women headed towards a top job but gave it up to have children.
"When we get to 30 we have a body clock and it says go and have babies," she says. "It has to be a very strong woman who can continue a corporate career and have a family. A lot of women decide their priorities are in a different place [and leave]."
Dallimore, who has worked in executive recruitment for more than 20 years, is not surprised at the lack of women in top positions or that there are so few coming up the ranks.
"We get a lot of women to a certain stage in their careers - who could go all the way - but after age 35 the number of them left in fulltime corporate roles diminishes considerably," she said. "That's life - and until men can have the babies that's the way it will be. It's just too hard to run a top company and have children. "You have to be a pretty tough cookie to survive in the corporate world and have a 'normal' family."
Dallimore said she once had a top corporate sales role but gave it up to have children. You can't say 'I'll have six months off' from an essential position and expect an employer to hold the job open - it seriously disadvantages the company.
"It would be hard, for example, to run a major company and have children, and go to after-school activities. Some women even find it hard to hold on to a husband when they are in top jobs."
But Brad Jackson, professor of leadership at Auckland University, said the impression that women weren't tough enough to crack the glass ceiling was ill-founded.
A 1999 Auckland University survey of New Zealand leaders showed that there was a significant, but not marked, difference in the leadership style of male and female business leaders. Generally, both sexes used the "top-down" approach to management.
However, there was a "huge difference" in the way the public expected women leaders to behave: a more collaborative, transformative approach.
"What's more interesting for me is what makes good or bad leadership ... The most important thing is that you make sure the potential talent pool is as wide as it possibly can be."
- Additional reporting NZPA
