One fine Dame: meet a career campaigner and champion for women Julia Cleverdon - Women's Agenda

One fine Dame: meet a career campaigner and champion for women Julia Cleverdon

There were many reasons I was looking forward to a conversation with Dame Julia Cleverdon. She is being hosted in Australia this week by Prince’s Charities Australia, the coordinating presence for His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales’ Australian charitable endeavours. 

According to The Times she is one of the 50 most influential women in Britain. She studied at Cambridge, where she obtained a first in History, in 1972. Her first job was with the Industrial Society in South Africa where she worked alongside 96,000 men, during apartheid.

She has championed and campaigned for women’s success at work throughout her entire career. She developed the first all-female leadership course at The Industrial Society, which led to the founding of the Pepperell Department in 1978. She was the founder of Cosmopolitan’s ‘Change your Life on Saturday’ courses, which influenced hundreds of women in the eighties and was the architect of Opportunity 2000 (Opportunity Now) with Baroness Howe in 1991.

For 16 years she served as the Chief Executive of Business in the Community, one of the Prince’s Charities of Charles, Prince of Wales. She is now Special adviser to Prince Charles’ charities. In 2014 she was appointed chair of the National Literacy Trust and also chairs the Read on. Get on campaign.

She was appointed CBE in 1996 and CVO in the New Year Honours list in 2002 and a DCVO in the Queen’s Honours list in 2008. She holds an Honorary LLD from the University of Warwick, and honorary degrees from Harper Adams University College (for her support of rural communities), the University of Central Lancashire (for her support of Burnley), Aston University, the University of Exeter and Middlesex University.

She has two adults daughters; one of whom is the youngest female Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, and one is an accident and emergency nurse who has just returned from a secondment to Sierra Leone treating Ebola.

Every single one of these not insignificant achievements paled into comparison upon actually conversing with Dame Julia. She is warm and engaging which I suppose is to be expected. Less expected, however, was how frank and very very funny she is. Here are some snippets from my interview. 

1. No women allowed in the boardroom? Ridiculous On her first visit to Australia in 1983 Dame Julia was accompanying her late husband John Garnett who was the director of The Industrial Society. He was giving a talk at an insurance company in Melbourne. “I asked if I could come along and listen to him give the talk,” she explains. He asked and was told she couldn’t come. “They said no because no woman had ever been in the fourth floor boardroom. I said don’t be ridiculous. I was sure there was a kitchen on the fourth floor and I bet women have been there.” She went in via the kitchen, got a cup and then stood in the boardroom and listened. “Gosh I was cross.” 

2. Patron Saint of Working Women On that same visit to Melbourne in 1983 Dame Julia hosted a course with Cosmopolitan called “Change your life on Saturday”. In 1979 Cosmopolitan had run a story about a three-day developmental training course – The Pepperell Development Course – aimed at encouraging women to develop their potential and achieve greater results at work. The price tag of £200 meant it remained inaccessible to many women. Cosmo linked up with Julia Cleverdon, who ran the Pepperell Course, and offered readers a one-day programme for just £25. She did the same on her visit to Melbourne. Dame Cleverdon’s remembers the headline The Age ran: Julia Cleverdon Patron Saint of Australian Working Women.

3. The problem isn’t women, it’s business In the mid-70s Julia began wondering why so few women were engaged in business. She had attended a girls’ school whose motto was ‘Onward and Upwards’ which influenced her attitudes. She then worked in two very large, very male dominated workplaces; in one she worked with 60,000 men and in the next she worked with 96,000 men. “To me it seemed surprising that there were so few women using their qualifications and talents in business,” she says. “At that point I believed the problem was in our heads – that we tended to emphasise our weaknesses rather than strengths. I thought it was our fault, that we weren’t applying for jobs.” Time taught her that it wasn’t women that were the problem; business was.

4. Opportunity 2000. Make that Opportunity Now. In 1991 a campaign to advance women in the workplace was born. It was called Opportunity 2000 and Julia Cleverdon was one of its architects. It was founded with 61 members and support from the then Prime Minister Rt Hon John Major MP with the objective of uniting “employers who were committed to addressing these challenges, to share success stories, better research the causes behind the barriers, and inspire a more ambitious speed of progress towards change”. Its name was changed to Opportunity Now when it became clear the challenge was to be alive and well beyond the year 2000. “What we have discovered through Opportunity Now is that unless you get the agility into you workforce and unless you really take trouble in the way you design jobs and recruitment process – you won’t get women returning,” Cleverdon says. “Women won’t go into corporate jungle warfare without ropes.” Which is a pretty neat explanation of workplaces that do not offer flexibility nor recognise the lives of their employees.  

5. What a difference a woman makes Carolyn McCall is the CEO of Easyjet and a longtime colleague and friend of Cleverdon’s, having headed Opportunity Now for 5 years. On an Easyjet flight soon after McCall had taken over Cleverdon approached an air steward and asked what her influence had been. “She said ‘It was transformational.’ The Air Stewards had been saying for years they need to talk about balancing their domestic responsibilities with shifts and yet no one had listened,” she says. In McCall’s first 3 months she held a meeting with air stewards and asked: how do we keep the planes flying and your lives running? Having certainty around shifts was their answer. “They said ‘We can do the Sunday flight to Madrid if it’s always the Sunday night flight to Madrid’ because we can organise our family and childcare arrangements around that.” It set in motion a process whereby the stewards could nominate which shifts they could do and schedule be set from there. Until then, shift patterns had changed frequently making it difficult for the stewards. “No man had ever gone and asked them,” Cleverdon says.

6. Where exactly are your sourcing your talent?  There has been some improvement in the representation of women in non-executive roles but the executive pipeline is the area Cleverdon says business need to focus on “like mad”. She isn’t supportive of quotas “the lash-back isn’t worth it” and prefers targets with teeth. “Real leadership is required and senior business people need to be held to account. “I’m sorry there were no women on that shortlist? Who was on the selection panel? Really? There wasn’t a single woman?” She says clarity is required about where talent will come from if they’re not taking it from 50% of population.

 “I’ve run businesses – you have to have a pretty broad collection of talents as the triangle moves to the pipeline. If you have 20 women to start with it’s not hard to put 5 into a jump ahead category above that. But if you only have 5 women to start with, even if you put one up, it will take time to get more women executives through.”

7. The Australian male She recalls an Australian woman once telling her that taking the bins out was the only domestic task Australian men were absolutely expected to undertake. “It’s the only bloody thing men do in Australia and I’m not conceding an inch,” Cleverdon recounts. “There is a big argument that men want flexibility and opportunities to be involved in childrearing – and whilst that is certainly true in some households, I am not sure that the Australian male culture is quite as developed as that.” 

8. 43 years on: Are we there yet? Julia Cleverdon has spent four decades actively campaigning for greater representation of women at work. In some ways progress is hard to deny. “I remember a sign that was up in the car factory front yard in 1973.  ‘No blacks, no women, no redheads and no Irish need bother to apply’,” she says. In 2015 Julia says there is greater recognition that we can’t run Britain without the talents of women. “There are more women working – though the pace is glacially slowly – we are seeing more women with power and influence. If you took a snapshot of pin striped trouser legs in 1973 and now – it’s better. Certainly not where it needs to be.” And, yes, Cleverdon concedes this is frustrating. “If you think I was 22 when I started working and I will be 65 on Sunday. Bloody hell. 43 years making the same flaming points? I mean really.”

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