'Family friendly' firms rewarded

By DITA DE BONI

How can business arrest the ebb of experienced female marketing staff?

We've heard about the brain-drain ad nauseam: bright young things seduced by larger paypackets, expansive horizons, better opportunities.

We know also that as corporations merge and consolidate regionally, less marketing work is done locally and more is done out of Asia-Pacific centres such as Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore.

But it is not only foreign lands that swipe the cream of the industry. Each year, a chunk of seasoned late twenties and thirty-somethings leave to experience the wonders of motherhood, some never to return.

That heavily affects the marketing sector, which is overwhelmingly populated by females.

A study in Marketing magazine 13 months ago showed marketing assistants, services managers and product/brand managers were more likely to be women. The present ratio is around 70:30 in their favour.

Non family-friendly companies risk losing years of marketing expertise to the lure of booties and bassinets.

And yet there are some fairly simple ways to keep reproductive employees in the loop.

IT companies, long credited with flexible work arrangements, are particularly attractive for the female marketer.

Some say not enough women marketers take advantage of the IT working climate, despite the fact that women are prominent in the local marketing departments of Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun and Oracle, and many of them are mothers.

Bridget Reeves, business productivity marketing manager for Microsoft New Zealand, says companies like hers aim to make it easy for women to stay involved in their jobs while allowing for family.

Ms Reeves, who has a 14-month-old child and another due in May, is furnished with a slew of nifty gizmos - including a hand-held PC which doubles as a dictaphone - that allow her to take her work home.

But the technology is just one facet of making life easier for the working mum. Maternity leave, for example, is one provision companies such as Microsoft try to take an imaginative approach to, says Ms Reeves.

She is free to take her leave however she sees fit. Last time, she came in for meetings and, in one case, the baby slept in the marketing cupboard while her mum bargained in the boardroom.

"I am always just a phone call away," she says. "And it's worth it for Microsoft. Imagine how long it would be for them to get a new person up and running, instead of just coming to a compromise with me so that I can continue? Both sides need to be flexible."

At 35, Ms Reeves is the average age for a Microsoft worker, but brings to the role a working background that has been almost completely focused on IT sales and marketing, unlike some of her cohorts.

She says while it has not been her experience that women are inherently better at marketing than men, many women have a panache for communications, which is an integral part of the job.

"Women end up more in the sales and marketing roles in the IT world because of learned behaviours. We've taken that route because of our strength in English and history at school, for example."

In-depth technical knowledge is not the most important for the IT marketer, she says. But ultimately "the objective of the marketer is not dissimilar to that of the sales person in the organisation."

"It's a question of how intimate you are with the [customer]. At the end of the day, we all have targets we have to reach."

Flexibility can draw marketing mums to IT, but are they particularly valuable to IT? Ms Reeves' background includes sales, which she believes has been a huge help in launching products and pitching to users.

But a common problem with placing women marketers in the IT sector, says one recruiter, can be their lack of experience at the sales coalface.

Geoff Shaw, of APC Marketing, says marketing in the IT industry can include far more pitch and business development work, which benefits from a strong exposure to sales work - something some women, who have taken a "softer" career route, can lack.

Also, while flexi-time can be on offer in the IT sector, the industry's fast pace and constantly moving goalposts could, he says, make it harder for women who are not in the office all the time.

"The question is, 'What needs to be done?'

"For some managers it is hard not to have the marketing person there all the time. Flexible arrangements require a shift in thinking within the organisation."

Mr Shaw says that to integrate family-friendliness into an organisation's culture requires better internal disciplines, including having clear expectations of the performance required.

"What is happening in some cases, it seems, is that women who work part-time are finding they're working the same amount of time as they would have with a full-time job. Their objectives are the same."

In other words, technology has both allowed women to go home and it has chained them to their desks.

That is not just the case for IT companies.

For all this, Auckland University senior marketing lecturer Margo Buchanan-Oliver says there are not enough women in the sector's marketing enclaves, and questions the need for sales experience in all marketing positions.

Dr Buchanan-Oliver teaches the importance of marketing to IT, as well as the importance of IT to marketing, and says women are good at "synthetic knowledge" - a mixture of subjects including psychology, sociology and even politics - that meld together to make a good marketer.

"Graduates coming through now should have an understanding of IT and marketing and that [area] is one of the gaps in the industry that women have not yet fully exploited."

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Bridget Reeves says women in IT should look for companies that offer a family-friendly environment and research the HR policies of prospective hirers before they start.