The Peter principle has it that men are promoted beyond their competence. Now the Paula principle says the opposite happens for women. So who is to blame for slow progress towards more women directorships?
Back in 1969, a book called The Peter Principle was published, and became something of a classic in management texts. It may have influenced the odd change in the way businesses operated but, more memorably, it made readers laugh: its central premise being that employees are eventually promoted to jobs at which they prove incompetent.
So the excellent salesman, whose naturally charming patter compensated for his administrative weaknesses and won over thousands of customers, proves a disastrous sales manager who can't understand why his team of less enchanting but harder-working colleagues don't pull off his trick. Worse, he remains in that job, blocking anyone better qualified from doing it properly.
Now a chap called Tom Schuller is writing a book with a modern twist. It is called the Paula Principle and it argues that most women get promoted to a level below their competence. Far from rising to a position their talents don't deserve, they languish below what they could easily manage.
The Paula Principle is a clever joke – only with a rather serious point. It is 45 years since the Ford sewing machinists' strike forced changes that led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act ending discrimination in pay between men and women, yet in 2013 there is still clear discrimination over who gets the top jobs.
Last week Lord Davies – whose 2011 review on female representation in the boardroom set a target of a quarter of board posts being filled by women by 2015 – was forced on to the defensive after evidence showed that progress towards a more equitable gender balance has slowed.
For the past six months the percentage of female directors appointed to FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 boards has slipped to 26% and 29% respectively, according the latest report from the Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders. This is a long way short of the 33% required to reach Davies's target. It is also a marked slowdown on rates seen for the preceding six months – 44% and 36% for FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies respectively. Women now hold 17.3% of FTSE 100 directorships, but just 5.8% of executive roles, and 21.8% of non-executive posts.
The deceleration in progress may, of course, be a statistical quirk, and certainly business secretary Vince Cable was careful not to use too much alarming language when reviewing the figures. But it seems complacent simply to assume this is a one-off.
When the Davies inquiry launched there was much low-hanging fruit. The worry now is that the easy early gains have been made, and further progress will be much harder to achieve – especially in terms of getting more women into executive roles.
That is illustrated by Cranfield's statistics, which suggest that there are simply not enough women in the pipeline with the necessary experience to get to the top. Its research shows the percentage of women sitting on executive committees – the management level one layer below the board – has dropped from 18.1% to 15.3% since 2009. There are probably several reasons for that, including issues such as flexible working and childcare, but it appears that outright discrimination still hampers those who overcome the restrictions. The figures also show that just 48% of female executive directors are internally promoted – compared with 62% for men. This results in ambitious, capable women feeling forced to leave their current company or accept the Paula Principle.
Davies, Cable, CBI president Roger Carr and equalities minister Maria Miller all spoke on these issues last week, and they all seemed to agree that more needs to be done. But none of them expressed a clear vision of exactly what, which is worrying if this slowdown proves more than a blip.
It leaves Britain's ambitious businesswomen hoping that those leading the drive for more female directorships have a Plan B, and do not prove to be operating a notch or two above their competence level.
Miserly bailout deal could end in tragedy – and not just for Cyprus
Even by the eurozone's standards regarding its struggling members, the deal Cyprus's politicians will now be forced to sell to a wary public looks especially miserly.
Of the €23bn total cost of the bailout (€6bn more than was agreed less than a month ago, by the way), Cyprus is expected to find €13bn from its own resources. That means as well as the privatisations, public sector layoffs and tax rises that have become familiar from the Greek case, Cyprus will have to sell off a large chunk of its gold reserves, and depositors in the collapsed Laiki bank with more than €100,000 in savings are likely to find themselves completely wiped out. There are even rumours the bank may not open on Monday morning.
Yet, also in a familiar pattern, the calculations on which the rescue is based are still too optimistic: the country is expected to bounce back within a couple of years, despite a collapsed banking industry. Tourism, the country's other main business, will hardly have been enhanced by coverage of shuttered banks and riots.
In Dublin this weekend, eurozone finance ministers promised Cyprus "structural funds," to help rebuild its economy. But with the banking bust exacerbated by the bungled bailout, it's not clear what exactly they are planning to rebuild.
And despite euro-politicians' repeated insistence that the island should not be seen as a "template" for future rescues, the raid on bank balances will mean any renewed whiff of crisis in Spain or Italy will send investors fleeing to the safer haven of Germany – or out of the eurozone altogether. The collateral damage to the whole eurozone banking system may prove far costlier than the bailout.
Meanwhile hotel and restaurant-owners may be looking longingly across at the Turkish-occupied half of their island, which can offer a cheap lira and no chance of being stopped at the border and forced to hand over your holiday money. Pressure to leave the euro can only intensify.
Let us applaud HBOS's Crosby – for having a conscience
There has been an absence of morality, and of a reckoning, in the aftermath of the British banking crash – until recent weeks. The report into HBOS by the parliamentary commission on banking standards has provided the catharsis, adding empirical clarity to a public anger that has raged without a focal point since 2008.
The subsequent statement by former chief executive Sir James Crosby is also one of the first genuine acts of atonement to emerge from that era. He was not legally obliged to ask for the retraction of his knighthood, or give up 30% of his pension, but the moral imperative held sway. Unlike Fred Goodwin at Royal Bank of Scotland, it did not take months of political pressure to make him succumb. If the banking industry is to regain public and political trust, it needs to mimic Crosby and find a moral conscience.
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