Tailored car insurance for women; special gymnasiums for women; and now, business education programmes for women — ‘because we’re worth it” — (with a nod to L’Oreal Paris cosmetics).
Women are becoming targets for business education programmes as universities latch on to this niche market, in which only 13,1% of directors of companies are women.
The University of the Free State’s management school is in its second year of offering a course that creates leadership and personal capacity in women, which counts as 60 credits towards a bachelor’s degree in management leadership.
According to Danie Jacobs, head of the university’s centre for business dynamics, the course runs over seven months for two days a month, based at real companies. About 20 to 30 women managers attend the course, which ‘is a transfer of skills and competencies”. He says the university wants corporate South Africa to be women-friendly because the brain drain in South Africa entails people leaving the country, people leaving the public sector for the private sector, and women opting out of the corporate world.
The programme — which is being run at 11 venues at companies including Sasol, Eskom, Vodacom and First National Bank — teaches women about the art of leading, the uniqueness of women, IT skills, and the power base of leadership. Women keep diaries in which they self-reflect, and there is action learning based on real issues at work, says Jacobs. ‘We want to make sure women have the right skills and competencies to make it in the corporate world,” which should focus on the retention of staff, he explains.
Companies pay at least R25 000 per participant for the course and at the end the women deliver a presentation to executive management on what the company should do to better accommodate women in the workplace. According to Jacobs, launching a career often goes with starting a family. ‘You don’t want a dysfunctional family which could lead to a dysfunctional society.” To assist women who return to the workplace soon after giving birth, some companies unbundle projects and hire women on a project basis, allowing them to contribute partially to a pension fund. In other cases, companies allow women to work a 24-hour week in which deadlines must be met.
A First National Bank middle manager who attended the course last year says she found the self-reflection aspect useful. ‘I won’t say the course is better than others I’ve been on, but [it is] different. You need to be comfortable to speak about issues” — and the environment allowed for this. She says it was useful doing work-related practical exercises.
Wits Business School will soon introduce the women’s management advancement programme (Womap), spread over 40 weeks and costing R55 000. Programme coordinator Clara Priester says the core course involves the principles of accounting and finance, human resources management, economics, operations management, marketing and strategic management.
Participants may choose electives which include strategic golf, project management and the art and science of negotiation. The life and work skills enhancement section includes emotional IQ and managing your personal brand. Participants each have a coach and the course has been developed with input from women executives in the public and private sectors.
‘The course has tough standards but will enable women to navigate from middle management to senior management,” says Priester, who stresses that bringing women together from different sectors will allow for networking opportunities. ‘The contacts they make will be invaluable. We want women to feel comfortable in themselves so that they can raise families and have a work- life balance.”
The University of Stellenbosch’s Executive Development Ltd unit is holding a business women’s academy for a week in October, at R11 900, in association with Hers-SA, an association formed to address the critical shortage of women in senior positions in higher education.
The academy will target women about to move into senior management as well as women in senior management. There has been much interest, according to the university’s Heilet Bertrand.
The course will cover issues such as labour economics, integrated people strategies, leveraging IT and business process engineering. There is also room to network and top speakers are on the programme.
The question must be asked: Should women who want to compete in the business world not attend mainstream management courses rather than segregated survival courses that imply they are inferior? According to Bertrand, ‘for years the workplace has been male-dominated. If there are boys’ clubs, why can’t we offer networking opportunities for women? In athletics, women compete against each other and men compete against each other.”
She says women and men learn differently. ‘Women tend to shoot each other down when one excels — and this needs to change. Men go out for a beer to celebrate as they’re happy for their colleague (who excels).”
She says women need to learn to come together ‘and encourage one another”.
For Priester, the sceptics have a myopic view. ‘We haven’t been equal. This is a platform to get an equal footing. If there had been equal opportunities in the past we wouldn’t need a course like this now,” she says, stressing that women have been marginalised in the workplace.
But do the women get a real education on how to control their tempers when their hormones are raging? Do they get taught how to cope with the art of producing breast milk in a day packed with meetings? Jacobs says, ‘We focus on optimising the unique, innate skills and characteristics of women in multitasking and intuition. We teach them how to keep emotions out [of a situation].”
Priester says women will have to learn how to manage life in the workplace — an example is coping with the sleep deprivation that can come with having a baby — and also real work issues such as dealing with a difficult boss.
Bertrand says, depending on the input they get from the course, it could be adapted in the future.
As more companies and universities jump on the bandwagon and make money from women’s insecurities, they should address the needs of the market by teaching them about real workplace challenges — such as how to be assertive; how to deal with racism, sexism, sexual harassment; and balancing work-life with being a new mother.
What is clear is that, if women are requesting these costly courses, real-life issues — and not just a focus on coordinating make-up with their wardrobes — should be addressed.