A study of the promotion to partner process in a professional services firm: How women are disadvantaged

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2008 British Academy of Management.Increasing numbers of women are attracted to careers in the professional services. However, when their progress is considered to partner positions, it is found that they are not advancing to the levels anticipated. When the literature in relation to the partnership promotion process is explored, we find explanatory models are rare, and rarer yet is work that considers the impact of sex bias on the process. The article adds to the limited work available by presenting findings from a behavioural process perspective through an empirical study with male and female management consultants in a professional services firm which indicates that the promotion to partner process is indeed sex biased. Two areas of disadvantage for women are identified: the presence of a self-managed career advancement process necessitating a proactive approach to demonstrating individual contribution; and the need to ‘fit’ a prevailing model of success within the firm which is a masculine model and is more problematic for women. The article calls for a differentiated treatment of the glass ceiling phenomenon, capable of capturing disadvantage accruing from societally based factors and sector-based factors. The implications of the findings for future research and professional service firms are discussed

Standard Chartered Bank: Women on Corporate Boards in India 2010

This first Standard Chartered Bank: Women on Corporate Boards in India 2010 report looks at the representation of women on the boards of India's leading companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE-100) . It ranks the companies in terms of the gender diversity of their boards, with those with the highest percentage of women on their boards appearing at the top. The report also examines the general topic of gender diversity on the boards of the BSE-100 by presenting the findings of interviews with 18 female directors of BSE-100 companies

On Validating Closed-Loop Behaviour from Noisy Frequency-Response Measurements

It is shown how noisy closed-loop frequency-response measurements can be used to obtain pointwise in frequency bounds on the possible difference between the actual closed-loop system and the closed-loop comprising a nominal model of the plant and the stabilising controller. To this end, Vinnicombe's gap metric framework for robustness analysis plays a central role. Indeed, an optimisation problem and corresponding algorithm are proposed for estimating the chordal distance between the frequency responses of the nominal plant model and a plant that is consistent with the closed-loop data and a priori information, when projected onto the Riemann sphere

City Love

Simon Vinnicombe, ‘City Love’, (UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), ISBN 9781472528810

Understanding the discrete genetic toggle switch phenomena using a discrete 'nullcline' construct inspired by the Markov chain tree theorem

Nullclines provide a convenient way of characterising and understanding the behaviour of low dimensional nonlinear deterministic systems, but are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, a poor predictor of the behaviour of discrete state stochastic systems in the low numbers regime. Such models are appropriate in many biological systems. In this paper we propose a graphical discrete `nullcline-like' construction, inspired by the Markov chain tree theorem, and investigate its application to the original genetic toggle switch, which is a feedback interconnection of two mutually repressing genes. When the feedback gain (the `cooperativity') is sufficiently large, the deterministic system exhibits bistability, which shows itself as a bimodal stationary distribution in the discrete stochastic system for sufficiently large numbers. However, at small numbers a third mode appears corresponding to roughly equal numbers of each molecule. Without cooperativity, on the other hand (i.e. low feedback gain), the deterministic system has just one stable equilibrium. Nevertheless, the stochastic system can still exhibit bimodality. In this paper, we illustrate that the discrete `nullclines' proposed can, without the need to calculate the steady state distribution, provide an efficient graphical way of predicting the shape of the stationary probability distribution in different parameter regimes, thus allowing for greater insights in the observed behaviours

Measuring Distance between Systems under Bounded Power Excitation

This work suggests a way of measuring distance between two linear systems under a given bounded power excitation. The measure introduced can be used to bound from above and below the difference in closed-loop behavior of two plants with the same controller for a specified reference or disturbance spectrum. Given an unknown, single input real plant and its identified model, an upper bound on the distance between the plant and its model as expressed by this measure can be obtained from time domain data