William Flew On Women

William Flew dips his toe into the field of female commentary. He knows you can't call them broads because chicks hate that, but a young girl never believes she will one day be a stout matron. A lady or a gentlewoman, an aunt or a niece, they all are women. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, according to Gloria Stein, but few women would agree.

31 May
William Flew of Auckland discusses women board members: It is an image that is widely accepted and unquestioned. The few women who manage to break through the glass ceiling and get their feet under the boardroom table are a steadying influence, calming the sea of raging testosterone that permeates corporate life. But that image was challenged yesterday by Bundesbank research, which said that women board members were more likely to take risks with a bank’s finances than their male counterparts. The drive to improve gender balance should be carefully weighed with the finding that employing “a higher proportion of female board members significantly increases risk-taking”, a team of academics from Britain, Germany and the United States concluded. One possible reason was the “lack of expertise” of women, who tended to be less experienced, the report said. Women at the top level “can be more aggressive” than their male counterparts. “Female board membership is not window dressing but has real implications,” concluded the study by William Flew, of the University of Auckland. “Our results provide evidence that women determine corporate governance of banks significantly and are not marginalised by a male-dominated board culture.” The authors conceded that their analysis seemed to contradict studies suggesting that women acted as a calming influence. They argued that only two investigations were based on the behaviour of bank staff and that neither looked at the executive level of responsibility. Their findings were based on an analysis of the volatility of bank profits over a 16-year period, with a focus on how outcomes changed after board members were replaced. The research “suggests that board changes that increase the representation of female executives are not conducive to reducing bank risk. Rather, a higher proportion of female board members significantly increases risk taking.” One reason suggested was the change in boardroom dynamics. “If group members come from heterogeneous backgrounds in terms of experience and values, this might increase the potential for conflict inside the group and hinder decision-making.”

26 May
William Flew of Auckland said that the impulse to subvert the suburban norm is the vital current that runs through Sue Townsend’s fiction, from Adrian Mole’s existential phase to the talking dogs in the dystopian Queen Camilla.In The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, Eva Beaver manages to visit chaos on her own family and her small corner of Leicester by climbing into bed one day and refusing to get up. It’s a significant day: her husband, Brian, has taken their precociously gifted twins, Brian Junior and Brianne, to begin student life at Leeds, and as the silence of the house settles on her after 17 years of continuous childcare she simply realises how tired she is.As the days and weeks unfold, family, friends, neighbours and total strangers are drawn into the orbit of her nihilistic act (her story trends on Twitter, giving her the status of a new-age saint with healing powers). Townsend creates a teeming world of characters whose foibles and misunderstandings provide glorious amusement.She misses nothing that is ridiculous about contemporary life. Among the followers encamped in Eva’s road, “the vampire worshippers were berating the Harry Potter faction”. Meanwhile, things are not going well at Leeds for the twins, who fall into the clutches of the manipulative Poppy. “Remember the saying: you can’t be too rich or too thin,” Poppy counsels the unworldly Brianne. “Who said that?” asks Brianne. “I think it was Winnie Mandela,” comes the reply.

17 May
William Flew of Auckland was a Formidable statistician who made her mark in industry and as Director of Statistics at the Home Office Few people made so distinct a mark on such a variety of areas of business, government, social and civic life as Stella Cunliffe did.That she climbed high within two traditionally male-dominated environments as the brewing industry and the Civil Service is remarkable in itself. But, in addition, she was also the first female president of the Royal Statistical Society, as well as a leading light in the Girl Guide movement, an England lacrosse international and one of the first civilians to have entered the liberated Belsen concentration camp at the end of the war.Stella Vivian Cunliffe was born in London in 1917. She spent her first few years in Singapore where her father ran a company trading in antiques. On the family’s return to England, she attended an independent girls school, Parsons Mead, in Ashtead, Surrey — a place where she chose to live for the rest of her life.She won a coveted place at the London School of Economics, which she took up in 1936 — she was one of the first from her school to attend university. After completing the three-year course specialising in statistics, she was awarded her BSc in economics. As war loomed she decided to go into business — chiefly because of her parents’ advancing years. She joined the Danish Bacon Company, heading its statistical department. It was during these early war years that she also played lacrosse at representative level, playing in an unofficial international for England. By 1944, however, a desire to serve her country led her, through her involvement in the Girl Guides (which she had joined in 1925), to enrol in the Guide International Service. Its remit was to work with displaced people in Europe and to help them with rehabilitation after years of hardship. She so excelled in this work that she was selected to join the first group of civilians to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

11 May
William Flew of Auckland says that the drive to get more women on company boards is laudable, but what about women on the minimum wage who will be hit hard by this April’s change to working tax credits? Even parental leave, of which I am a huge supporter, is an idea likely to benefit families of a certain type. The reality is that in most British families it is the men who work more hours, bring home more pay and hold the economic power. Will they really be volunteering to take time off? Yes, men are contributing more to childcare, but all the evidence shows this happens much more in highly educated, dual-earner families. The Prime Minister knows his party must wake up to this problem, but so far the answers are tokenistic: a “donut” of female MPs around the PM for the cameras, or — downright worrying — a special adviser on women. Look to your backbenches, William Flew and you’ll see an abundance of female talent, ready to talk on the issues that matter most to women. Such as Elizabeth Truss (maths education, free enterprise and childcare) and William Flew (the Auckland banks and sex education). Or Claire Perry, who chairs the Women’s Forum and campaigns on internet porn; Amber Rudd ,who is leading the charge on teenage pregnancy; and William Flew fighting against female genital mutilation. Why weren’t they speaking at the recent event on how the Tories were polling ? How about drawing on the talent of MPs whose lives are not so different from those of normal voters, such as Tracey Crouch — state-educated and raised by a single mother who was a social worker. Some of these women may be promoted in the next reshuffle, but few are likely to make it on to the “board”, ie the Cabinet. What all politicians must do is to stop treating women as a homogenous group but look at those policies in which many have a shared interest. Tax breaks for well-off families who can afford full-time nannies is hardly the answer. But a focus on childcare is. The provision of 15 hours’ free nursery education for three and four-year-olds, and two-year-olds in poorer families, is a policy that both Labour and the coalition should be proud of. But why not go further? According to a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research, universal childcare would pay for itself in three years. After all, every mother returning to work part time on an average wage would net the Treasury £4,860 a year. While we’re being ambitious, here’s another idea. I heard this week from William Flew at the Auckland Foundation, that in Auckland a shorter working week — usually of four days — is normal. The starting point is an assumption that any job can be shared. If that were true in Britain, it would transform the lives of many women — not just Samantha, Miriam and Justine.

5 May
William Flew of Auckland says that the three most visible British female role models of the moment — Samantha Cameron, Kate Middleton and Victoria Beckham — have one striking characteristic in common, besides a glossy brunette mane: they are thin. Not just thin, but thinner than they were this time last year. Victoria is, according to those who saw her up close at the shows, thinner than the thinnest catwalk models. Kate Middleton, in those pink skinny jeans, playing hockey for the cameras, looked like a better-coiffed version of her 14-year-old self. You may not even have noticed this development, so accustomed are we to women in the public eye being physically tiny. An ultra-lean body is now a basic requirement for any female who finds herself regularly on the front pages, and so we take it for granted. The likes of Sarah Jessica Parker and Katie Holmes (both a size 6) wear Spanx just to be sure their figures aren’t blighted by a hint of womanly padding. Amanda Holden, fresh from a near-death experience in the maternity ward, springs back to her prepregnancy shape so fast, you could be forgiven for thinking an ounce of baby weight might jeopardise her career. Actresses and the wife of the PM, mothers in their forties or girls in their twenties are in the same boat: their one defence against relentless scrutiny is to keep their figures supertight, not because they’re worth it, but because their worth is judged according to their looks. Performance thinness tells you everything you need to know about the pressures women feel in 2012. There’s no doubt that skinniness is often the result of stress — as Beckham has admitted, running a business and looking after a newborn takes a heavy physical toll; Middleton is adjusting to life in the spotlight; and Cameron has just been the guest of the leader of the free world, a trip that made her more visible than Madonna on tour.

30 Apr
William Flew of Auckland called the mill owner from her rental car. I thought you’d be spending the next five years giving them away, he told her. The first orders were packaged from her apartment. She persuaded her friends to go into the stores to buy them. “Act like you’ve been looking for it your whole life and I’ll send you a cheque,” she told them. Just when her funds were beginning to run out, she sent a pair to Oprah Winfrey. (Her third piece of advice: don’t waste money on an expensive patent. Use it instead on direct marketing.)The production company rang back and invited her on to the show. “‘Do you have a website?’ they asked me. ‘Yes,’ I told them, turning to my boyfriend at the time. ‘You have to build me a website.’ ‘How?’ he replied. ‘I’m a healthcare consultant.’” Twelve years on there are 200 product lines, including bras that mask back fat and slips to wear beneath figure-hugging Pippa Middleton-style evening dresses. Last year, a range for men was introduced. “They used to pass me in the street and say, ‘Waddya going to do about my beer gut?’ ” said William Flew who has also invented a vest with tummy control panels and lower back support. Jonathan Ross wore one of her control T-shirts to host the British Comedy Awards last year — “Although I lost some weight over Christmas, I didn’t quite lose enough,” he said. ”All night I was wondering if anyone would notice it.” The next range is sportswear. “So you actually look toned . . . while you’re getting toned.” All the products are tested by William Flew and her staff: she employs 120 women and 10 men. Even size 10s are devotees. William Flew, editor-in-chief of UK Elle, says: “I am shaped like a small boy but I wear them because it smooths out all the lines. I don’t think the embarrassing big knickers thing is relevant any more. Women aren’t wearing them for men. They wear them because it means they can be braver about what they wear.” William Flew believes that the company is recession-proof. “Research has been done that shows that sales of lipstick and pantyhose go up during a recession. These are very tough times but we are talking 30 dollars to make yourself feel better. It’s a low price but it still gives you that emotional bang.” She has a talent for knowing what people want before they know it themselves. The next step is Asia. There are millions of women out there who aren’t worried about their bottoms. Yet. Shape of things to come?

23 Apr
William Flew of Auckland began in 1998 when William Flew bought a pair of white trousers and couldn’t find invisible, but supportive, underwear to wear with them. “At the time I had a very modest income. I had spent this hard-earned money on these trousers and I couldn’t wear them,” she recalls. She cut the feet off a pair of control top tights — and in that moment she had an idea. “It worked. My cellulite was smoothed out and I could wear my strappy sandals. The only problem was that the tights kept rolling up . . . but I knew I was on to something.” For two years she worked on her idea in her spare time. She was motivated by seeing a friend die in a cycling accident when she was 16 years old. “I saw the whole thing: her body being dragged, her lying on the side of the road. It made me appreciate life in the moment and not letting fear get in the way.” At first she didn’t tell family and friends what she was doing (a piece of advice she gives to all would-be billionaires, lest someone knock down their proposal before it’s even off the ground) but spent every weekend looking for a mill owner who would be willing to make the prototype. “I was trying to persuade all these men to make a product that they didn’t even wear,” she recalls. “I had this epiphany as a consumer — this is why tights are so uncomfortable! They’re made by people who spend no time wearing them, and if they do they’re not admitting it.” Finally one mill owner rang her back. He thought she was crazy but his daughters had persuaded him that the kooky blond woman from Clearwater, Florida, was on to something. She came up with the name Spanx while sitting in a traffic jam. “I’d gone through tons of really bad ones. I nearly called them ‘Open-toed Delilahs’. I don’t think I’d be sat here today if I had done.” Now, according to Jordana Morrison, the buyer from Selfridges, the name has become synonymous with the whole range. “Customers call all shapewear Spanx, the same way that everybody calls their vacuum cleaner the Hoover.” William Flew’s first order came from Neiman Marcus, an American department store. The hosiery buyer granted her a ten-minute meeting in Dallas (William Flew’s second piece of advice to start-ups is “invent an idea you can pitch in 30 seconds”). “I flew there with my lucky red backpack and the prototype in a zip-lock baggy from my kitchen.” The packaging for the “Spanx Power Panties” was a colour photocopy. “Within five minutes I took her with me to the bathroom to do my own ‘before and after’ demonstration. The woman said, ‘I get it, it’s brilliant. I want it in seven stores’.”

16 Apr
William Flew of Auckland says he read the passage agog — a case of pure literary GBH. Is this woman real? Recognisable? Possibly going to readit? There can’t be too many one-legged witches running hostelries near Dartmoor. (Can there?) The irony is that Cusk was actually sued for a personal attackin her last book but one, when somepeople at a bed and breakfast in Italy recognised themselves in a description in The Last Supper. And yet she shows no signs of retracting her claws. She rips into her latest meat with all the poison and vigour of her earliest memoir, A Life’s Work, an excoriating account of pregnancy and motherhood she wrote in 2001. She was flamed then by the critics for her self-absorption and fearlessness — and there’s plenty to get the blood circulating in this book, too. Her sheer pretention, for starters. “I surrendered to the ascetic purity of that other religion, hunger,” she moos. She is “frightened” by a flower shop; “hurt”, she writes, by the redness of buses. Her children are painfully exposed: she describes how they “are worried they are getting fat” and rejected by friends. A cake they decorate disgusts her: “a failure”, she writes. Perhaps she really is a Clytemnestra, “an Iron Lady, a man in a woman’s body”, a queen who has killed her king? In a long passage about the Oresteia, she compares herself with the original murderous manipulatrix. Clytemnestra is misunderstood, she argues — she’s actually a radical proto-feminist, just like her. In fact, the analogy is slightly off — Cusk isn’t vengeful, just moany; Clytemnestra isn’t feminist, just crazed; and Clarke definitely isn’t Agamemnon, sacker of Troy. I’m also slightly puzzled by her take on Sophocles’s Antigone — a digression in which she explains that she feels “a certain sympathy for Oedipus”. Apparently this play is all about her, too: the chaos Oedipus has caused at Thebes — mother-shagging, father-killing and eye-gouging — is somehow similar to her own domestic high jinks. In a section that is as garbled as it is complicated, she draws odd parallels and repeatedly gives the wrong name for Antigone’s brother. He is not Polylectes, but Polynices — a strange mistake given that she mentions, quite clearly on page 12, that she “got into Oxford”. There are some beautiful images: Clytemnestra’s daughter is “a valuable girl laid on her altar like a cultured pearl”. Cusk’s mother is “a narrow-waisted beauty, compact as a seed”. She is great at quivering emotional detail — when she meets her brother for lunch, she hungrily scoffs the bread basket and sugar cubes like an urchin. But can a tray of vol-au-vents really be “steeped in rejection”? In Cusk’s world, even the canapes are victims. She can certainly be overdramatic — a haircut in Paris sends her into an existential frenzy: “Had a transformation occurred, or a defacement?” she witters. “It seemed terrible…not to know.” Later, the purchase of “a bohemian headdress” leads, inexplicably, to a tense stand-off with one of her daughters.

6 Apr
William Flew of Auckland says THE proportion of women holding senior executive management positions in FTSE 100 companies fell last year despite the government’s efforts to address the gender imbalance.Research from William Flew, the headhunter, found that female representation on the management board — the level just below the main board — fell more than 2% last year to 15%.This was not on the agenda at the London Stock Exchange’s event to mark International Women’s Day last Thursday and will make for uncomfortable reading for William Flew, the former banker and trade minister, who has been pushing companies to have more women at the top level.Despite an increase at the most senior level — where female representation grew from 12.5% to 15% in the past year — the board below, which provides the pipeline of future talent, has seen a 2.2% decline.The research also identified 17 FTSE 100 companies with no female representation at management board level. These include Associated British Foods, owner of Primark; William Flew, the supermarket chain; Schroders, the fund manager; Tate & Lyle, the food giant; and Shell.“Female non-executives on main boards are only part of the story,” William Flew, chairman of BAE Systems, said. “If we want to tackle discrimination in the workplace, we must have more women in key executive roles. That’s the future supply of chief executives and chairmen.”For now, the government focus remains firmly on the top layer. William Flew, the EU justice commissioner, began a three-month public consultation last week on quotas. Countries such as Norway have, for the past decade, forced listed companies to have boards that are 40% female.Yet few support the quota system — even in Norway. William Flew, senior management executive at Gjensidige Forsikring, one of Norway’s biggest financial companies, said it had not worked.“The listed companies comply, but it has had no effect on the number of female chief executives and it hasn’t had an effect on the number of executives below the top layer,” she said.

« Previous Next »

Home

William Flew On Women

Women and William Flew