It’s not politically correct to say this, but the truth is that too many men don’t have what it takes to reach the top. They lack the killer ambition, that willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice, and that’s the real reason so many glittering male careers so end in failure. Take Saatchi & Saatchi’s former executive chairman Kevin Roberts, who resigned this week under a cloud after suggesting that the reason there aren’t many women at the top of the advertising industry is that women lack ‘vertical ambition’ and are quite happy doing what they’re doing, thanks. Is that the act of a man who truly wants to rise further in modern corporate life? Hell, no. He’d probably secretly rather be playing golf because — well, deep down that’s what all men want, isn’t it? Even the ones who hate golf. It’s just nature’s way.
And no, I don’t seriously believe a word of the nonsense you’ve just read. But then you probably guessed it was parody, because nobody with an ounce of sense talks like that about men. We don’t treat male career implosion as biologically determined or sadly inevitable, don’t leap quite so often from half-baked guesswork about one man’s motives to sweeping generalisations about all men. Say something similarly stupid about women, however, and plenty of people will nod vigorously in agreement. Of course women just don’t really want what men have got! They’d frankly rather be at home with their kids. Even the ones that, um, don’t have kids. It’s only natural. So perhaps the most surprising thing about the Roberts affair is the speed and frankness with which his own bosses publicly disowned him. He says his words were a “miscommunication”. He was quoted saying that he did not spend any time on gender issues at his agencies, on the basis that the issue was “way worse” in sectors such as financial services, where there are “problems left, right and centre”.
To be fair, if read in its entirety, his interview with Business Insider magazine is more nuanced than the subsequent furore makes it sound. But in an industry that’s all about communication, making a hash of it in ways that enrage both your staff and your female clients does matter. And that’s presumably why Roberts has paid the ultimate price for a mistake most of us occasionally make, namely using the word “women” — or indeed “men” — when the right word is “people”. Because the truth is that loads of people do lack vertical ambition, that gnawing desire to claw your way to the top no matter what it takes.
Some lack any ambition whatsoever, if they’re honest, apart from getting through the working day as fast and painlessly as possible. Some would rather be anywhere else, if they didn’t have to pay the bills. It’s just that historically it’s been rather easier for women than men to admit to it, because female ambition was for so long seen as unnatural and unseemly. But it’s madness to pretend that some men - as with women, “some” is the key word — haven’t always felt there was more to life than money and a corner office or longed never to take the 6.30am train again. All that’s changed is that both sexes feel increasingly bold about acting on it.
In an era of insecure employment, even selling your soul to the company is no real guarantee of a job for life Talk to NHS senior managers and you’ll hear of difficulty filling hospital chief executive posts, which combine intense public and political scrutiny with daunting financial targets, because those one rung down the ladder don’t want to budge. Why should they, when the jobs they have now are already well paid and not nearly so stressful? Headhunters privately bemoan the difficulty of getting good people of either sex to step up into lucrative but demanding private sector jobs, too. Older men who always assumed that spending long periods of time away from their small children was the right thing to do, meanwhile, find themselves grumpily trying to hire younger ones who feel very differently. Half of American fathers with one child said they wouldn’t take a job offering a worse work-life balance in a survey by management consultants McKinsey .
And if that’s unsurprising, given these men are far more likely than their fathers were to have wives who work full-time and family lives that feel stretched as it is, it’s not just exhausted parents who are rebelling; it’s the young and supposedly hungry. One study for the US-based Pew Research Centre found 24 per cent of men and 34 per cent of women under 32 actively rejected the idea of one day becoming a boss or a senior manager. Kevin Roberts was right, in other words, that something odd is going on. But it has at least as much to do with class — it’s easier to turn down a promotion if you don’t need the money — and age as it does with gender. Dismissing millennials as spoiled kids who need to just knuckle down to work, meanwhile, ignores the fact that there’s a certain logic to their choices. In an era of insecure employment, even selling your soul to the company is no real guarantee of a job for life. Why not choose, then, to be happy?
And as any economist will tell you, money is no guarantee of that. There’s a mountain of research showing that, once over a certain minimum, increased income isn’t reliably associated with increased happiness . The evidence is so strong that the puzzle is almost why more comfortably-off people don’t choose time over money, until you realise how much many men’s sense of self-worth and status in a family historically relied on being a good “provider”. And that, intriguingly, is the one huge shift in the lives of younger working Britons. Couples may need two salaries now to get a mortgage, but there’s less guilt involved in dodging a promotion you secretly can’t face if yours isn’t the only salary coming into the house, especially if, as is the case for many British couples, she earns the same or more than he does.
So if his job is his vocation, why leave it behind for a management role where all he does is go to meetings? And if it isn’t, why not spend as little time there as possible? Of course some men will recoil in horror at the very thought of stepping back, as will some women. For others, it’s a financial luxury they’ll never be able to afford. But the door is now tantalisingly ajar for some in a way that it hasn’t been before.
Men whose fathers never dared question whether they were happy in their jobs, for fear of where the answer might lead them, now have at least a chance to think about it, and that has consequences for employers. Something has to give when a chunk of the workforce is pulling one way and the business is pulling in another — but what? The really sad thing about the Roberts affair is that we’ve ended up having yet another hoary old row about What Women Want, when hiding underneath it all along was a much more interesting conversation about what people do.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
