The age of ignoring women in business is over. If firms want to thrive post-lockdown, they’ll put them on top

Companies with more women in senior positions tend to perform better than others, according to research from gender diversity business, The Pipeline. If business leaders seriously want to maximise their chances during and after the huge economic dislocation caused by the coronavirus lockdown, there is no excuse – they have to take inclusion seriously.

There is now a wealth of evidence that having more women at the top of companies makes them more profitable, better at judging risk and better at customer insight.

Our “Women Count 2019” study found that FTSE350 companies with 25 per cent or more women on their executive committees achieved a 16 per cent net profit margin while those with no women achieved just 6 per cent.

The International Monetary Fund found that adding one more woman to senior management or a corporate board delivers anything from a 3 per cent to an 8 per cent higher return on assets.

Yet businesses are in danger of overlooking this dimension in their response to the coronavirus crisis. We surveyed 30 large firms last week and asked them to name their top priorities for the coming year in the wake of the pandemic. A range of issues were listed, from preserving cash and reducing headcount, to the health and safety of employees, the re-evaluation of home working and virtual connectivity. In all of these conversations, diversity and inclusion and their impact on high-performing teams were never mentioned. Before Covid-19 wreaked havoc in every home and business, they were seen as a “nice to have”, rather than a means by which firms could rebuild.

It is commonplace to hear it said that the world will never be the same again. We sincerely hope that we all, individually, as well as at a government and corporate level, learn lessons that will make us different and better for this awful experience. But history teaches us that the forces of the status quo are likely to win out, as those who liked things just the way they were will want to go back to something comforting and familiar. So, it is up to the rest of us to do all we can to ensure that doesn’t happen and to forge a better, safer and more effective world.

Businesses will establish reputations for years to come by the way they are seen to have responded to this crisis. They need to put their customers and people first as well as their social responsibility – a new balance, recognising a wider role in society, realising investing in the long term is more economically beneficial to us all.

When we are at the peak of the biggest challenges, men and women work together as do all social classes and ethnicities. We can see this in the Second World War when men and women worked side by side at Bletchley Park on code-breaking, one of the most complex of all analytical problems. We saw it too when the US was losing out to the Soviet Union in the space race, a proxy battle in the cold war: Nasa had no option but to involve African American female mathematicians in order to win.

But what we learn from collaboration in wartime is lost when we return to peace and the socially conservative norms and leadership models of our youth. When business as usual resumes, women consistently lose out in head-to-head contests with men. This is a disaster at any time, but now more than ever we need the characteristics women have in abundance, including emotional intelligence, understanding of customers and clients, risk analysis and judgement, and the ability to harness and recognise the talents of all.

We do not need to repeat these old forms of behaviour, we can, if we choose, learn from history rather than repeat it. The recovery will be faster and stronger if there are women in senior leadership roles and leadership teams are as diverse as possible.

Businesses can make this happen by ensuring that leaders and managers make every voice count – especially those we don’t normally hear from. They need to set targets for gender balance at senior levels and ensure that downsizing does not lead to fewer women; and they need to understand that women at all levels have fewer sponsors and are not equal in the fight for senior positions.

How we all react to this existential crisis will determine our world for years to come. For corporations, there is of course risk. The risk of survival, the risk of falling back into ineffective practices. But there is also opportunity.

Opportunity to forge better businesses and to be more responsive to staff, customers and to the wider communities that nurture them. A key test will be how they respond to the challenge of diversifying their leaderships. It’s in all our interests, and especially their own, that they do the right thing.

Lorna Fitzsimons and Margaret McDonagh are co-founders of The Pipeline, which supports women in executive and board roles; Professor Cary Cooper is professor of Organisation Psychology and Health at Manchester Business School, president of the CIPD and chairman of The Pipeline’s advisory board.