City dynamo and mother of nine... Helen Morrissey on her campaign for equality in the workplace

Today Helena Morrissey launches a campaign for equality at work. She tells Lucy Tobin about leaning in and househusbands
City Dynamo launches a campaign for equality at work
PIC: MATT WRITTLE
18 April 2013

Striding into a beige-carpeted corporate meeting room, Helena Morrissey stands out. She’s whippet-thin, pin-sharp in a smart sheath dress, arms glittering with a diamond white watch and chunky silver bracelet. Then again, there aren’t all that many female bosses at the helm of London's financial firms, and Morrissey runs the £50 billion funds and 400 people who make up Newton Asset Management.

But Morrissey is used to standing out. In finance, she’s conspicuous for combining her career with bringing up nine children. At the school gate she’s one of very few high-fliers with a husband running the domestic front at their home in Notting Hill.

She seems, though, to thrive on it. On top of what most would already think a full schedule, three years ago Morrissey set up the 30% Club to boost gender equality in boardrooms. Her “evening and weekend work” is chairing the Lib-Dems’ inquiry into the culture of the party after the Lord Rennard sexual harassment complaints.

Today she takes on another job, as chair of Opportunity Now, the gender equality campaign from Business in the Community, in her latest attempt to transform corporate culture. “I’m trying to jealously guard my time,” she says — but she is also a woman of action.

“I much prefer doing things and being hands-on than telling people what to do.” This week Morrissey met up with another female power player, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. The American was in town to promote her feminist book, Lean In, and the Chancellor hosted an event for her at Downing Street.

“Sheryl was talking about how men become more popular as they get more successful, but for women the opposite is true,” says Morrissey. “But while she was talking about it, everyone in the room started looking at George Osborne. He got redder and redder, and everyone was laughing until Sheryl said something about politics being extenuating circumstances.”

Morrissey, though, seems to have escaped scorn on her way up the ladder. She even tweets without being taunted by trolls. And it takes her a while to think of a single time when her own popularity dipped. “When I founded the 30% Club, I got hate mail from chairmen who thought I was calling for quotas — when I was very clear I wasn’t, I don’t believe in them — men who didn’t like what I was doing. I went home some nights and thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

The answer was because she too believes in Sandberg’s idea of “leaning in”. “When women come to me and say, ‘It’s really tough, the culture is difficult, I want to quit’, I say — unless it’s really unbearable — hang on in there and get a seat at the table and change the culture, change the company.”

Morrissey’s own buzzword seems to be “change”. Where others muse or moan about equal pay — women working in the City still earn 21 per cent less than their male counterparts — Morrissey has a solution. “Why can’t we have a pay audit?” She praises firms that work out where women and men, plus staff of different ages and ethnicity, fall in terms of pay grade, as Opportunity Now member firms do. “It’s not straightforward — fewer women in senior jobs, for example, means there won’t be as many on higher pay — but it’s a start and the very fact that the information is being compiled makes people think much harder about pay and recruitment.”

That was the aim, too, of the Davies Report, which in 2011 set out a target of 25 per cent of FTSE 100 board members being female. Yet last week, Cranfield School of Management reported that progress is slowing: in the first half of the financial year, 44 per cent of board appointments at FTSE 100 firms went to women, but that slowed to 26 per cent in the following six months.

“Lacklustre and disappointing,” is Morrissey’s verdict. “I worry that sometimes we need to preach more to the unconverted — at the [Cranfield] event last week I looked around the room and thought, ‘I know everyone here’. The danger is, if you talk to people who are already on your side, you end up thinking you’re making faster progress than you are.

“Chairmen and business leadership get the issue but a lot of middle managers think the ‘women issue’ is just political correctness. We need to highlight the business case for diversity: a larger range of people make a more representative board. I am anxious that semantics are overtaking the issue — amid all the debate about ‘Are you a feminist?’, people are missing the point that the fact is a stronger team is made up of more different types of people and that needs to be recognised in business.”

Morrissey laments the fact that Margaret Thatcher, whose legacy is inescapable this week, was the only woman in her Cabinet. “She was an extraordinary woman. But it was disappointing that her role didn’t lead to a broadening out, with more women in the Cabinet and other senior roles.” Morrissey, meanwhile, could populate half a Cabinet with her children alone. Six girls, three boys, aged four to 21, adding to that terrifying figure of an 11-strong family. “People always ask ‘Are you Catholic, or were the last ones shock triplets?’ But they were all single pregnancies and I just love having a large family. I was one of two, but with my kids it’s like they have their own gang. I hope they one day have this support network together, to look after each other.”

Morrissey’s husband Richard, a former financial journalist who quit his job after child number four, is a practising Buddhist (you might have to be in a family of 11) and artist who works from home. “We realised it was unworkable with us both out at work. I’m sure it is possible to have two big jobs and a large family, but we wanted one parent at home, it’s a happier way for everyone.

“There’s more than one way to live a life: mine may not be conventional or normal but I like it.”

Morrissey wakes at 5am to work on emails before organising the kids’ breakfasts and taking the Circle line to the office for eight. “My BlackBerry means I can dip in and out of work and home all day and on the weekend. It’s not compartmentalised. Not everyone would like that but it works for me.”

The family have a big board on the wall saying where they all are and when. Morrissey usually has dinner at home with the children, then works afterwards. So do her children covet the busy City lifestyle or have they been put off? Morrissey half-smiles, and it sounds like the latter. “My eldest son is studying Arabic at Oxford, and thinking about being a human rights lawyer; my eldest daughter is a singer-songwriter, she left school at 17. With such a big range, I hope one of them might fancy the corporate world. But who knows?”

A few years ago Morrissey asked her middle son what he wanted to do when he grew up. “He looked at me rather surprised and said, ‘I want to stay at home, like Dad’,” she says. But the family’s lifestyle isn’t much replicated among the children’s friends. “In my 17 years of bringing up kids I’d have hoped it would have evolved more than it has. It’s still almost as unusual in my youngest’s class to have mother at work and father at home as it was for my eldest.”

Morrissey didn’t set out to be a campaigner for women at work. The daughter of teachers, she went from a state secondary to study philosophy at Cambridge, then landed her first job at Schroders Investment Management. “That was the only time I suffered from discrimination for being a woman.” The one female on a team with 16 bond fund traders, she found “it was a very hierarchical, patriarchal environment, and when I got back from maternity leave from my first child I was passed over for promotion”.

“I thought. ‘Is it me, have I done something wrong?’” When she found out her new baby was the cause, she quit and joined Newton Investment Management. “It never occurred to me to start flying the flag for women. Early in my career I thought the issue would solve itself over time.” Seven years later, aged 35, Morrissey was given the top job at Newton. “Then when I started running the company, we had so many goals and measurable targets I thought gender should be part of it too.”

The 30% Club, where chairmen including Sir Roger Carr of Centrica and Sir Win Bischoff of Lloyds Banking Group are among those encouraging companies to employ that percentage of female directors, up from 12 per cent at launch in 2010, stemmed from that. “It hit a zeitgeist. I was pushing on a more open door.

“There’s always a reason not to do something, and it’s not easy to try to bring about change. But slowly and collaboratively I think we are having an impact.”

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