When it comes to women in the highest echelons of industry, the Netherlands scores pathetically at the international level. And that became clear once again recently, with the annual Dutch Female Board Index published by Mijntje Lückerath, Professor of Corporate Governance at Tilburg University. While last year only 7.1% of executive board members in this country were women, at present that number is a dismal 6.2%. Organisational advisor Nicole Edelenbos of EdelenbosHessels is convinced that this will only change when young, ambitious women get offered the right support much earlier in their careers. ‘Many women just don’t see enough tempting prospects.’
Nicole Edelenbos is the initiator behind the Future Female Leaders Program, which recently started its second session. It is a custom-built programme developed especially for young female talent at the start of their careers, who have the ambition and the potential to make it to the top of a for-profit or non-profit organisation.
Edelenbos has been engaged with the subject of ‘women in the boardroom’ for quite some time, and in the past ten years has organised a number of events on the topic. But when she started her new agency EdelenbosHessels, which focuses on organisation and people, she decided to take a different tack.
‘What I noticed was that organising event after event just wasn’t making enough progress happen,’ she says. ‘So I spent a year analysing why so many young women start dialling back their ambitions, even very early in their careers, sometimes even walking away from a career even though they had unmistakable qualities. My conclusion was: if you’re a woman who wants to make it to the top in the man-oriented culture that business is, you have to get empowered on your career path as early as possible. But most companies only start investing in women with coaching and leadership programmes once they’ve finally “proven” themselves, which usually happens at around age 40. And that’s simply too late, because by that time a huge group of talented women have just given up.’