I spotted an interesting comment on the blog of Alterian today. This is the company who bought the CMS company who bought the CMS company I worked for over a number of years.

It’s written by Bob Barker, who I’ve never met, but seems to be gaining some momentum on Alterian’s blog that looks like it has the potential to become a useful and interesting resource. The post is called ‘Is marketing just for girls?‘ and calls for marketing representation (which is often female dominated) to be elevated to board level so that crucial decisions (in this case marketing technology) are made effectively to counter the challenges of recession.

This reminds me of articles I’ve read in recent years about the importance of having women at board level for the health and success of organisations anyway. Apparently, statistics show that organisations with heavily male dominated management teams are far more likely to fail than those with strong female representation. This has become all too apparent with the massive and fundamental failure of our financial organisations worldwide – an industry notorious for its ‘old boys networks’ and male domination.

There are also some parallels here to the telecoms industry boom and bust during the late 90s which was again a very male dominated industry. The industry was rife with ‘irrational exhuberance’ and company balance sheets were being inflated often through fraudulent and questionable accountancy practices. I worked in the industry during the fallout years that followed and it was a period when women executives rose to board level very rapidly and were instrumental in sorting out the mess and rescuing some of these big organisations from high profile bankruptcy.

All this makes me grateful I have two daughters as I believe their prospects in the workplace will be somewhat better than mens during this coming decade. However, the prospect of ever growing legions of men losing a sense of purpose in their lives has the potential for massive social disruption so I hope that women are prepared to take pity on us for the sake of stability and not push things too far the other way.

I also have a piece of advice for Bob and that is to encourage his own management team to promote a woman or two to their board as it currently looks very unhealthily male dominated, as indeed was the board of the company it acquired. Personally, I think for a company who’s lifeblood is selling to marketing departments that are female dominated it would make a lot of sense to really understand ‘what women want’.