As we celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, Oxford Capital’s Lucia Gunn takes a look at the benefits of IWD from a venture capital perspective.
From the perspective of Venture Capital, the businesses of the future will be selling to a diverse set of consumers, so logically we need a diverse set of founders and investment managers to ensure all viewpoints are catered for and understood.
More broadly, any business should want to recruit from the widest pool of talent possible, so encouraging more women to consider a career in financial services can only enhance that pool and bring new ideas and challenges, whilst providing them with the opportunity to access well paid, highly skilled roles.
The traditional white male boys club culture of financial services organisations in the recent past was very off putting to people with other social identities, it was hard to fit in and succeed if you were different, and the long working hours culture was not compatible with family life. Moving towards a more inclusive culture can only be beneficial as it expands the pool of talent available to recruit from and enables those skilled individuals to thrive and grow, bringing diversity of thought and experience.
Offering family friendly policies means retaining the talent you have trained and keeping that knowledge and experience; part time, flexible working can be highly productive and should be encouraged. The cost of recruiting and training new staff, and the risk of it not working out, is significant so firms should prioritise retention where they can.
The classic white collar 9-5 office based working pattern developed out of patriarchal assumptions of the nuclear family, a man could go out to work and be at the office all day because his wife was available to care for the children and the home.
This became so embedded in our culture that it was unquestioned that turning up to the office five days a week for a minimum of eight hours was necessary to be productive.
Although many enlightened companies have been practicing flexible, remote or hybrid working for years, it took the pandemic and the forced move to home working to prove beyond doubt that it was possible for office workers to work flexible hours, remotely and still be as, if not more productive.
Of course the benefits of home working aren’t available to all career paths and roles, but in financial services many roles can be adequately performed from home with the assistance of a VPN, a headset and a good laptop. This is game changing for increasing diversity in the industry, women still take on the majority of the burden of child care and need more flexibility to balance work and home life; part time, remote and hybrid working makes this much more attainable. Avoiding hours commuting makes the balance easier to strike, as does being able to pop out to collect a child from school or being able to put on a load of washing while doing the day job. Changing attitudes also enable men, who felt they couldn’t work flexibly, to take on more of the responsibilities at home and reduce the traditional burden on women.
We have fully embraced hybrid working at Oxford Capital, the team are welcome to be in the office everyday if they work better there (or just one or two days a week if that’s easier for them to work flexibly), but we also have staff based in Sheffield and Middlesborough who visit very occasionally. This has broadened the available talent pool and means when people move location, they don’t necessarily have to move job. There is still a huge amount that the government needs to do to tackle exorbitant childcare costs to ensure women can comfortably return to work and continue building their careers.
