KEY POINTS:
Answer this: Which list reflects countries with the higher percentage of women executives?
A: United States, Britain, Canada.B: Brazil, Philippines, Botswana.
If you chose list A, you'd be dead wrong. Not one of those countries even made it into the top 10 of 32 countries polled, whereas each one in list B did, a survey by international business consultants Grant Thorton shows.
In fact, the old boys of Europe - such as Germany, Italy and The Netherlands - landed at the bottom of the heap, ranking only slightly above the biggest loser, Japan, where just 7 per cent of executive ranks were filled by women, even though half the workforce is female.
It doesn't make sense. Canada and Britain represent open, rich, developed societies with highly educated women who take their civil rights as a given.
If these nations aren't pumping out power women, who is?
The surprise winner is the Philippines, where a whopping 97 per cent of businesses have women executives and where 50 per cent of senior managers are women, compared with 24 per cent in New Zealand.
What's in their water? Is the Filipino power elite starting to hand the torch to this new generation of highly educated working daughters? Or are the high rankings of Brazil and Botswana testament that developing countries are learning from the mistakes of tradition-entrenched Europe and are now doing a better job utilising the newer half of their executive workforce?
There are briefcases of material to digest on this topic, but one less palatable point that most of the highest-rated countries have in common is that they have extreme socio-economic inequities, meaning there is a big enough population of poor people willing to work at low wages, so even the middle class can afford cleaners and nannies. Translation: these working women have a wife.
Unsuspecting Kiwi working women may not have heard of this concept. People are actually paid to do things that you've always done after you've come home from a long day at the office. Really.
When I asked a woman at the Ministry of Women's Affairs if she had statistics on how many of us have a cook, a driver, a cleaner and a nanny, the poor woman laughed so loudly that she snorted into the phone. I believe I can interpret that number as statistically small.
The last check in New Zealand, in 1999, showed that 60 per cent of men's work is paid, but 70 per cent of women's work is unpaid.
Not a problem if there is an agreed trade-off between doing important societal duties such as raising children or raising pay cheques.
It gets considerably less pretty when both partners are working full time, yet she - compared with him - is putting in an extra two hours a day at home on unpaid work.
Suddenly that adds up to two entire extra working days tacked on to her fulltime work week - time that does zilch for the executive potential of her CV.
More crucially, are her unpaid work commitments at home early in her career, especially with children, keeping her from bagging the executive chair in the long term? Forget the glass ceiling, nobody's talking about the sticky floor that's also draining the working achievements of women.
We're not exactly a poster child for female potential. Although women make up 59 per cent of university graduates, only a paltry 16.9 per cent get tapped to be professors, 17.2 per cent to join top legal partnerships and 24.2 per cent to become judges. And a pathetic 7.13 per cent of women sit on corporate boards.
Even if we just quietly set aside the argument that elite men promote their own from familiar power networks, let's just go back a step. Shouldn't we be teaching our most ambitious young women to be having a drink with a new client rather than cleaning the pizza cheese off the bottom of the oven?
Because that's how her male partner is getting ahead.
For potential women leaders in their field, isn't part of this equation about conscious choice and not just economics? If you want to see your daughter in Helen's job some day, teach her that committing disproportionate time to unpaid work relative to her male partner carries a real long-term personal cost.
In the name of crucial national research, I'd like to ask our Prime Minister this: Who changes the empty toilet rolls in your house? If it's Peter, then this country owes him an Iron Cross for allowing you to realise your career potential. But if it's been you all these years, we need to talk.
Forget policy to bolster future Girl Power, instead send a package to every man in this fine land with a note that reads: "Boys, it's called oven cleaner."
