A billion reasons to get up in the morning

By Fiona Czerniawska

Occasionally, very occasionally if I'm honest, a piece of thought leadership comes along that stops me in my tracks. Booz's Empowering the Third Billion, Women and the World of Work in 2012 did just that.

I'll cut to the chase: what you're about to read is not an appraisal of the quality of Booz's report, good though it is. Nor am I an objective witness on the subject any more than my half of the entire human race would be. In fact this is what gets me out of bed in the morning: it's the cause to which I clock in before the rest of the world stirs, and from which I clock out, spent but happy to be so, in the still, small hours of night. It is, to put it plainly, the only authority to which I ever truly answer.

Nevertheless, Booz's report makes fascinating reading. Its central conclusion - that empowering women to realise their potential in the workplace not only benefits those women but society as a whole - may have been the anecdote of the enlightened for some time but gains potency by being quantified. And seeing how countries measure up against each other is equally instructive.

But there's an irony here, and it's one that I doubt will be lost on Booz itself, because the light of female empowerment often glows more faintly in the consulting industry than it does elsewhere. I have lost count of the number of times I have addressed the leaders of the world's biggest consulting firms and seen a room full (and I mean full) of men staring back at me. Were I to find the face of Don Draper amongst them, pulling on a Lucky Strike and gripping a fistful of whisky, I'd scarcely raise an eyebrow. It's one of many reasons that I'm so proud of the company I founded with Joy Burnford five years ago. We may only be small but 80% of us are women. Were the rest of the world to follow our lead we'd be looking for a firm to congratulate for writing a piece about male empowerment.

Our contention is also the root of one of our competitive advantages and it's this: there are a large number of brilliant, talented women who have out-evolved consulting firms, whether because of the (understandable) difficulties of balancing the demands of consulting assignments with those of childcare, because of a (less understandable) lack of flexibility in HR policy or because of (indefensible) institutional sexism.

Set against that our aim is to be the most progressive employer of women within the consulting industry, starting by putting flexible working practices at the heart of everything we do. We've already attracted some incredibly bright minds into our organisation on the back of doing just that, and we know that it's one of the reasons we punch far above our weight intellectually. It gives us access to people who could (and perhaps even should) be stars in the world's most admired consulting firms and cements the unique nature of the platform from which we analyse the industry. As we continue to grow we want to hear from more of them.

We can't employ the next billion on our own but if we could, and if they could dazzle us with their brilliant minds in the way our current employees do every day, we would. This really matters to us. It really matters to me.