Provocative question, I know. But after reading the book Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a woman write Shakespeare? I am absolutely convinced. The evidence is overwhelming. The book is great, very entertaining and thought provoking. According to the book, the most likely author of the sonnets and plays attributed to William Shakespeare is Mary Sydney, the Countess of Pembroke.
Fascinating stuff to kill time with while you wait for calls from recruiters - and while we wait for the next Harry Potter book to be released - July 21st is the official date, why so late?
Yesterday we held the Women in Business Conference at the London Business School. What an experience! It was very high profile and I met and listened to some very impressive women:
1) Vivienne Cox, Executive Vice President and CEO, Gas, Power & Renewables and Integrated Supply & Trading, BP
Vivienne is one of the top people at BP and also an excellent speaker and a very nice person. She spent some time talking about renewable energy, but the most interesting parts were her advice to succeed (and I think that goes for men and women alike). Her advice was: "find something that only you can do and know what only you can do". This is useful for two things:
- If you ever want to work flexible hours, go home early or in any way appear to put in less time than others (e.g. when you have children), she said it is crucial that you are still the best person to do that job. So you have to know what you excel at and make sure you leverage this skill on your job. That way, you are in a much more favourable negotiating position than if you are easily replaceable
- If you're a boss, you may find yourself in the position of having 1,000 things on your to do list and you may get overwhelmed by all the work. So knowing what only you can do also means that you know which things others can also do by exclusion. So her advice was if you are overwhelmed, only do the things that only you can do and delegate the rest. Also sound advice
2) Dorothee Blessing, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs IBD
Many who saw her agreed that Dorothee was the jewel of this conference. Finally, an example of a very smart and ambitious women who loves her job, has a big family (three children) and is an extremely good and helpful person. Her answers to the questions from the audience were very insightful and she listened very closely and thought very hard to give just the right answer to that person.
She shared some wisdom of hers that I will never forget. Lots of us were wondering "how is it possible?" to work fulltime in investment banking, travel around the world and have three children? Her answer was that the main problem is not about being a women. She said the most important thing is to know what you want in your life. This gives you determination and also makes you do only the things you love. In her case, she said she always knew she wanted a big family, no matter what. She then joined Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and simply loved the job, so she also wanted to continue in that job. She said if you know exactly what you want and love your job, you will find a way to make things work.
The conclusion to this is that maybe many women who say they can't handle job and family or they need to withdraw from work because it doesn't work never loved their job in the first place? Maybe we just use children as an excuse to leave a place we didn't want to be in anyway? I'm not claiming it is going to be easy and Dorothee wasn't. I just found it very insightful that instead of agonizing over how hard it is to be a woman, we would do well investing this time in figuring out what exactly we want and which job we would really love, and then I completely agree with her that you will find a way to make it work, because in that case it is worthwile.
I am very thankful this busy MD flew in from Frankfurt to share this with us. She has changed the way I think within an hour, and how often can you say that about people? This leaves me now with the task of figuring out my dream job again - ouch!
3) Networking
There was also plenty of time to network in between and after the session. Apart from having more time to talk to my lovely female classmates (they are all so nice, so this is always great, even if I do it every day :-) ), I met an Irish alumna who is now CEO of her software startup, and funnily enough also a MiF alumna from Hamburg who is now a freelance consultant in Hamburg. I also met again a Goldman Sachs recruiter I had met already at a dinner two weeks ago, and it was a pleasure to talk to her again, and then I got the chance to talk for the first time to our excellent Finance professor, Francesca Cornelli. She is one of these rare persons simply everybody has to like. She is also an excellent teacher, the pace is fast but I enjoy the class very much. I came with some previous finance knowledge but we go much further than the basics I had in every lecture. We are in the 3rd week now and already dealing with calculating forward rates, it's great
The weeks ahead are going to be BUSY. It's not so much the workload from school (though there are five assignment piled up), but more the fact that every evening there are events, so if you want to take advantage of them you only have the weekend to do any work. The events for the coming days:
- Indian Diwali party on campus, including dinner, fireworks and Bollywood dancing
- Lehman Brothers Women's Workshop in their Canary Wharf offices
- Scholarship drinks reception with the Dean and the corporate sponsors of the school
- Lunch with the MD of HR of Deutsche Bank in their offices in the City
- Undergraduate recruiting at London School of Economics, Oxford and Cambridge - since I have time I am helping out my company to recruit smart German undergrads for our German office. Some of them might be lured by opportunities in London so we have to work hard to lure them back to Germany. I think I am well suited for this because I studied in the UK and actually applied to the London office out of undergrad, but somehow the German office found out and convinced me to forget about London and come to Germany
Apart from that - still working on figuring out the right path in my life. Yesterday I decided to take a day off from this. If you look at it from an outsider's perspective, all this talk about "should I do Consulting or Investment Banking?" probably sounds completely stupid. There are so many people in London who are designers, art dealers, architects, journalists and so on, and to them I assume it all sounds the same. What I'm doing now is I'm talking a lot to other McKinsey people and then to lots of other people, often with finance background. Among the McKinsey people (we are 8 in our MBA class) I think as good as 100% want to go back and think this is the best thing to do. Of the other people I talk to, many also think it makes sense to stay a couple of years longer. It's funny how fast things can change. I'll keep my mind open for a few more months and go to all the networking and informational events, so far they have been very helpful in giving me an idea of where I would enjoy working and where I most likely wouldn't.
I have been wanting to write this post in a long time. I still haven't reached a conclusive answer but there's one issue I'm thinking about a lot. It's about diversity initiatives of big employers, in particular women's initiatives. The truth is, I'm still not sure if they are such a good thing (though on the surface they obviously bring advantages to women working in those companies).
What got me thinking was a comment made by a senior colleague I've worked a lot with over the last years. Before becoming a management consultant, he worked for Hewlett Packard for many years. One day he was commenting how HP used to be a great company but that now it had lost much of its attractiveness. Then he went on to say that it was when more and more women reached the top levels of HP when things really started to go down. I was startled by the remark because he is a very fair and reasonable person who has enjoyed working with me and has respected and supported me very much over the last couple of years. So I concluded that his observation might have been correct, I think he just got the causal relationship wrong. Maybe things were starting to go down at exactly that time, but I believe the decline of males in the company was not the cause but the effect of the decline.
I have found a lot of evidence for this hypothesis. Doesn't it surprise you that investment banks and management consultancies are launching all these women's initiatives these days? Doesn't it surprise you that when things went badly in 2001/2002, these same companies fired women in droves, and now they somehow want to have a lot of women working for them? Obviously, they say they want "the best talent" and therefore can't focus only on 50% of the "talent pool". Though this makes sense, I think it is also a symptom of the declining attractiveness of an employer - for some reason, the top students aren't applying as much anymore, so they need to go fishing for applicants in additional "pools". For example, have you ever heard of any private equity firms launching "women's initiatives"? No? Isn't it interesting? They have not even got half of the female share of i-banks and consultancies, but they don't feel the need. The industry is booming but somehow they can hire more than enough people fishing only from 50% of the talent pool, because many guys who would have wanted to work in i-banks and consultancies in the old days want to workfor PE or VC firms nowadays.
This is one thing I observed at the admits weekend: lots of guys I talked to want to go to "Private Equity or Venture Capital". One fellow admit from India even joked at dinner "if I hear the word Private Equity one more time today, I'm leaving!!". Equally, my husband commented the next day that all the female partners he talked to during the partners' club event proudly declared "my husband wants to work in PE" and "my boyfriend wants to work in PE". So, interestingly, most of the guys now want to work in PE (=more money than IB/MC), while the women are happy and grateful that for some mysterious reason, the i-banks and management consultancies are hosting women's events and handing out scholarships.
So that is what I think about the whole issue. I think women should control their enthusiasm about these developments. We should think harder about what they mean. In the most likely case, they mean that there are more attractive and better paid jobs out there now, and that guys have higher aspirations/ higher self confidence and go for the most attractive jobs. At the same time guys start looking for other jobs to take, women are grateful to get the chance to work in very tough jobs that were previously associated with high prestige but have already peaked.
I know this post may be provocative or disappointing to some, but I think it helps to be realistic about what's going on in the job market. Also, I'm hoping to hear other people's thoughts on this issue, since as I said I haven't made up my mind yet about what to think about these developments.
Provocative question, I know. But after reading the book Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a woman write Shakespeare? I am absolutely convinced. The evidence is overwhelming. The book is great, very entertaining and thought provoking. According to the book, the most likely author of the sonnets and plays attributed to William Shakespeare is Mary Sydney, the Countess of Pembroke.
