FAILING to value women in the workplace is not only unfair – it’s also costing businesses money.

That’s the conclusion Diana Parkes has reached after years of research into the cultures and behaviours that hold women back from achieving their full potential at work.

Most companies would, she says, invest money in upgrading their computers if they expected a return on it, but do not see equality the same way.

“Because this is something far more intangible and it’s influenced by our biases and expectations and so on, we get ‘It’s different in my organisation, ‘I’d know if there was a problem in my business’ and so on,” she says.

“If an organisation looked at the scale of the financial opportunity that this represents, they would be confirmed. Any other type of market opportunity, they would be after it and they would be investing ahead of the curve.”

The Bournemouth-based consultant runs Women’s Sat Nav to Success, which aims to help women achieve their potential at every stage of their career. Its clients are individuals, businesses, other organisations and networking groups.

The business, she says, was “born out of my personal crunch with the glass ceiling”. She had been near the top of two organisations but seen the top jobs go to less qualified men.

She began coaching women in “early leadership” positions and noticed common themes about the hurdles they were facing.

“Every single one of these people was saying the same thing. Since I’d been able to deliver big stuff in commercial organisations by cutting through the complexity to what mattered, what I wanted to do was try and do the same thing for women in the world of work – to say ‘What are the strategies that enable women to succeed?’

“I wanted to find the practical stuff that I could give to individual women, through whatever medium, to enable them to navigate this labyrinth to success, fulfilment, leadership.”

She embarked on a great deal of research, which told her that there was nothing innate that made women less likely to succeed. History and psychology were getting in women’s way, not the wiring of the brain.

Concerned that businesses would not respond to academic evidence, she undertook her own, real world research, interviewing, over three years, around 45 women who had made it to the top in a range of fields. She estimates her study “represents about 900 years’ worth of contemporary careers”.

“I was able to distil down to something like 20 strategies that were present in enabling those women to succeed and those became the ‘strategic enablers’ of success which formed the core of the model that I take to organisation and individuals,” she said.

When she delivers a workshop of between 90 minutes and half a day, it can make a huge difference, she says. “People will come back to me and say within weeks they’ve been promoted, they’ve got pay rises, they’ve got sponsorship.”

The big finding of her research has been about the “contribution to value gap”. That is the gulf between how much the respondents say they contribute and how much they say they feel valued.

At entry level in a career, that gap is around 18 per cent for men and 19 per cent for women. But by the time they reach management, the gap has shrunk to three per cent for men, while for women it has reached 27 per cent. In senior management, the gap stands at two per cent for men and 18 per cent for women.

All this reflects expectations about men and women’s capability, she says. “Social psychology has identified a very worrying gendered stereotype in the workplace, which is around a concept called brilliance, which means being able to handle the very difficult or the very complex, and this research says that from childhood all the way up, there is a strong association between men and brilliance and not women and brilliance.”

These expectations are often communicated through unconscious “micro-behaviours”. “Somebody forgets what you contributed last time or does not seek you out,” she adds.

“The data shows more women are pitching for major opportunities than men, but we also see that the consequences are less positive for women than for men.”

She will shortly publish a book explaining the 20 “strategic enablers” and walking people through the actions they might take.

For organisations, she says, the start is to not only commit to the issue, but back that up with resources.

“As a leadership team, agree that it’s important and put money to it. Just allocate a specific budget and then own it as a board,” she ads.

“The first step is you’ve got to own it, you’ve got to fund it. Otherwise, don’t bother.”

  • Diana Parkes's book Understand, Dare, Thrive: How to Have Your Best Career, From Today is due to be published on June 1.