Sally Garratt - Women Managing for the Millennium

‘My girls’ public school had few expectations for its pupils and after leaving I became a nurse. I wanted to live in London and to be self-supporting after all the financial sacrifices my parents had made to pay my school fees, but I couldn’t stand the rigid hierarchy at the hospital where I worked and felt totally unstretched intellectually. I realized that I should have read medicine, not nursing, but financially it was not possible to give up work to take the necessary A levels, nor did I have the confidence to make the switch. After qualifying, I became a staff nurse at Guy’s, but at the back of my mind was always the niggling thought – “Is the rest of my life going to be like this?”

‘I decided to give myself a year away from hospitals to see what was happening in the outside world and thought again about studying medicine. I have always regretted not doing it. With the misguided idea that becoming a secretary would be a clear route into management, I enrolled for a six-week typing course and invented my own shorthand. I boldly put myself forward as a medical secretary and went to work in a hospital where I was tucked away in a back office with only the occasional consultant for company. This was not at all exciting – there wasn’t even the patient contact that I had so enjoyed as a nurse. So, making yet another mistake, I joined a firm of accountants because I thought it would be fun in the City. It was very jolly there, but my boss fell in love with me and, as I wasn’t interested and three years of accountants was ample, I left to help set up a private medical screening facility. It was the first of its kind and I soon realized that I actually possessed some entrepreneurial talents and obviously enjoyed starting new projects. However, once it was up and running successfully, I thought, “Where do we go from here? All this experience, no clear career path, no way to use the experience, so what should I do next?”

‘I was twenty-seven, had spent ten years in London and was bored, footloose and fancy free. I had the urge to go abroad again (as the daughter of a naval officer, I travelled a great deal), so I stuck a pin in a map and hit Hong Kong. I had no job planned, nowhere to live and not much money, but six weeks later I was on a plane. Hong Kong is a sink-or-swim place and there is nothing so motivating as having no money. The most useful thing that happened was being introduced to a residential club for business-women, the Helena May, where a group of us shared experiences, jobs, contacts and so on. I nursed for a short while, but felt even more exploited than I had done in the UK, so was soon looking for something else. Through the Helena May network, I went to a cocktail party and met a businessman who ran training courses and who had been badly let down by one of his tutors – who should have been running a programme in China, but had been taken ill. After talking for a while, he asked if I would like to take the tutor’s place – “Can you be on the 8.30 flight tomorrow morning?” Having agreed, I found myself in what felt like the middle of nowhere with sixty hand-picked Chinese executives who were there to learn about Western management methods. It was exciting, frustrating and I loved it. I developed a great love of China, in spite of developing malnutrition, surviving banquets of three-snake casserole and sea cucumber, and went on to learn Mandarin at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Later, I was headhunted to set up the Asian arm of an American computer company and my boss delegated everything so I ran the whole show.

‘Between contracts working in China and return trips to Hong Kong for much needed R&R, I went to a tea party and met my husband. We were married in England while still living in Hong Kong – so don’t ever complain about organizing a big wedding, unless you’ve arranged it from a distance of 8000 miles! I was thirty-three and keen to stay in Hong Kong, but my husband wanted to come home. I had been away for five or six years and felt very out of touch – the sort of things I had been doing were not to be found in the UK. My first mistake was to work with a bunch of cowboys who were establishing a rehabilitation centre. When I realized what they were up to, the matron and I left on the same day.

‘When I later became founding director of a medical charity, the entrepreneurial side of me enjoyed that very much, but the experience was marred by the macho power games always going on. There was only one woman on the board, and there were many conflicts of interests. It is a myth that charity trustees are driven only by altruism. Aware of a crying need for specialists who understand the voluntary sector, two colleagues and I set up a consultancy which offers advice to charities on strategic planning, marketing, trustee selection, training and forth. I did this for three years and am still actively involved, but I missed the hands-on operational side of work and decided to return to being a charity director. In 1995 I was recruited to head up the British Vascular Foundation. Raising funds, launching appeals and so forth – all these involve my skills as a businesswoman and marketing professional.’

Lack of career guidance and career goals

What goals? All too often, at the beginning of their working lives, women have not set themselves clear goals; or, in the case of many women over the past three decades, ‘did not recognize I was setting out on a career’. Although the situation has improved over the last ten years, I still hear many women talking about their schools and the expectations (or lack of them) for the female pupils. The family environment and the school careers advice often reinforced the idea that some kind of professional training (nursing, secretarial, teaching), or perhaps university, would be followed by marriage, homemaking and motherhood as sure as night follows day. What was rare was the chance to look beyond that scenario and consider the different options, including following a life-long career, of not necessarily getting married, of possibly not having children, of changing track if the first choice didn’t work out, or of pursuing several different types of employment.

The paradox here is that in the 1960s and 1970s, when this attitude was still prevalent, there were plenty of jobs for everyone. As Beverley points out, ‘One of the most significant changes from when I was at school and the present day is that we knew we could get a job. That doesn’t happen now.’

Theresa went to ‘a wonderful girls’ school where everyone assumed you would all do very well – which usually meant working for a few years, marrying and having children. If you were outrageously clever, you might carry on doing something as long as the children didn’t suffer. I knew of only one woman who went out to work. She was something in the Treasury and this was much derided. It probably meant that the children didn’t have puddings during the week!’ Theresa also talks about the conflicting assumptions made by the school and the outside world. ‘Until I was sixteen I was under the delusion that you set your sights on Cambridge or somewhere like that, but I was told that Cambridge was not the sort of place that girls went to. It was full of boys and not right for girls. That was the prevailing wisdom and before I heard that it had never crossed my mind that boys and girls were treated differently’.

Julia was privately educated in the 1970s at a school which assumed that women would have a career, and university was both expected and encouraged. Paradoxically, it was Oxford which let her down. She found the University and the Career advisers to be of virtually no help in offering her guidance about what she should do after her degree.

Alison, on the other hand, also privately educated, fared differently again. She found that her school had few expectations for its pupils beyond working as a secretary, teacher or nurse and waiting for Mr Right to come along.