Retail needs more women in top jobs

It is a long time since the legendary female entrepreneurs Laura Ashley and Anita Roddick blazed their brilliant retail trail - one along which Jacqueline Gold continues to shine her inextinguishable torch - but it’s being rekindled, at last, by a new regiment of women in the retail sector.

In Management Today’s latest list of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, the top 30 positions include five retailers, and three are women. Natalie Massenet of Net-a-Porter and Chrissie Rucker of The White Company have both moved from successful careers in fashion journalism to turn punditry into practice par excellence. And Carly Read, who owns jewellery business Icon Live with co-founder Valerie Scott, is poised to lead this best-kept secret of the British retail sector to further success overseas.

Yet, alack, it’s a different (or rather the same old) story for high street Plc. The top 30 retail companies listed in the FTSE All-Share index comprise 245 directors on their plc boards. Of these, just 35 (one in seven) are women and the majority (78%) hold non-executive positions.

It’s hard to refute the inevitable accusation that tokenism and sexism still underpin the bedrock of many a board structure. When one notes the average age of this top 30’s chairmen is 62, and all but one are white European males (despite our liberalised, diversity-embracing society, their sexual orientation stays securely under wraps), such structures are surely set in stone.

There are some outstanding exceptions, of course: Angela Ahrendts (Burberry) and Kate Swann (WHSmith) are both highly esteemed chief executives, as is M&S executive director Kate Bostock; and as for Lucy Neville-Rolfe, to hell with women bishops, Tesco has its very own woman cardinal on board.

But is it not a shame that, within even wider diversification, female entrepreneurial talent is being denied the chance to infuse more of our corporations? At least the private equity community, despite being similarly male-

centric, has had the vision to appoint many female chief executives in their retail portfolios - sometimes to great effect, as Nicky Dulieu (Hobbs), Angela Spindler (Original Factory Shop) and Sue Tennant (TJ Hughes) among others, go to prove.

Other female executive directors have also helped their private equity investors realise top returns, Catriona Marshall and Sally Hopson being two key members of the Pets at Home team that KKR has just bought at such a premium.

It has long been the case that the clichéd glass ceiling has seemed weaker in the US than its toughened glass counterpart in the UK. There is only one Fortune 500 retail company with no woman on its board of directors and over a dozen whose boards are more than 25% female. Furthermore, such household names as Ann Taylor, Avon, BJ’s, HSN, Rite Aid and TJX all have female chief executives.

So what can be done? Perhaps some of the UK’s leading headhunters, who specialise in the retail sector, should be invited to reply.

For it is rather ironic that Anna Mann (who’s just backed Dalton Philips for the Morrisons job) Fran Minogue and Sue Shipley, for example, should all, after all, be women.