Reality tv?

After hearing Dame Eliza Manningham Buller speak at the Women in Property dinner and impressed by the fact that 44% of staff at MI5 is female, I investigated further and found some food for thought.

Employment in MI5 offers particularly good social security benefits. Women who have been in MI5 for at least a year are entitled to six months maternity leave on full pay. As well as a further six months - half on statutory maternity pay, half on additional unpaid maternity leave - women in MI5 can have another year on unpaid special leave, making two years in total. Fathers get two weeks paternity leave on full pay.

Yet whilst the number of applicants in general to MI5 has risen in the past two years, as well as the numbers employed, the number of women applicants has fallen from a half to one third and the number of women employed has fallen from more than 50% to 44%.

In an effort to stop this downward trend, a female oriented advertising campaign in gyms and sports clubs was run, as well as national media advertising and links from the BBC Spooks website to the recruitment department at MI5… which may explain the turnoff.

Despite a particularly grisly episode of the popular espionage series resulting in some 11,500 applications to join the service, some MI5 officials believe that Spooks may have contributed to the significant fall in the number of women applying to join the agency. Certainly Dame Eliza has publicly expressed concern about the violent and macho culture depicted in the the programme. "We want to attract more females but the Spooks programme may be having a bad effect because of the way some of the female characters have been killed off," an intelligence source has said.

After hearing all the reasons why we need more women role models in tv drama and the media at the annual conference of the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET, one can’t help thinking of the old proverb "Be careful what you wish."

Mind you, working in the construction and property sectors where women represent just 10% of the workforce, concern about a fall from 50% to 44% is a problem some of us wouldn’t mind having.

Flight of fancy

Heard the best joke of the year, at the UK Resource Centre for Women’s 4th Annual Conference, in Church House, Central London. Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark recounted hearing a female pilot welcoming passengers on board her flight from Scotland the evening before. The next announcement came from the co-pilot - also a woman.

Kirsty asked the senior stewardess if she could go into the cockpit and meet them. "I’m sure they’d be delighted to speak to you," came the response, "but in this team, we don’t call it the cockpit."

The theme of the conference was Raising the Profile of Women Scientists and Engineers within the Media.

More information: http://www.ukrc4setwomen.org/html/news-and-events/ukrc-conferences/2008-conference

Shaken not stirred - meeting the real M

Only a handful of us arriving at the RIBA for the Annual Dinner of the South East branch of Women in Property knew who the guest speaker for the evening was – and when we found out, the reason for secrecy became clear. Dame Eliza Manningham Buller, who retired as Director General of MI5 in 2005, took the stage to describe her extraordinary career in the Secret Service, which began after a chance meeting at a drinks party when she was working as an English teacher after graduating from Oxford.

An expert in counter-terrorism, she was involved in the Lockerbie investigation, served as MI5's liaison officer in Washington and became director of counter-terrorism in Ireland, spearheading the fight against the Provisional IRA.

One of her achievements as Director General at MI5 was to open up the traditional covert recruitment network that had led to her own career path. Dame Eliza established a website and recruited agents through newspaper advertisements. Staff numbers increased from 1,800 to nearly 3,500, but despite the pace set by such great change at a time of high national security, she developed a reputation for taking time to recognise personally achievements by individuals and the pressures of the job. She fostered a number of programmes around staff recruitment, training and development to ensure that all officers have the opportunity to flourish.

She also took a higher personal profile than her predecessors – although declaring on retirement that she would not write her memoirs. She allowed terror risk assessments to be made public for the first time., revealing that five major conspiracies had been thwarted since the July 2005 bombs in London, and that there were investigations into some 200 networks involving 1,600 people and as many as thirty specific plots.

Responding to the inevitable question about the accuracy of tv programmes, she said that real life espionage is hard work governed by the need to work within rules, not like Spooks, "where everything is solved by half a dozen people who break endless laws to achieve these results in one episode."

Her dedication to serving her country is transparent, as is her talent as a leader and motivator. It was a privilege and pleasure not only to hear, but also share a table with a woman demonstrating such a rare combination of intellect, professionalism and warmth.

More information about Women in Property and in particular a follow-up event to Dame Eliza Manningham Buller’s speech go to: http://www.wipnet.org/branches/southeast/events.php

Another top woman at the International Construction Superconference

The impressive line-up of women speakers taking part in the 4th International Construction Superconference in London in May 2006 had a further boost this week with the announcement that Ambassador Donna Hrinak of Steel Hector Davis is joining the panel for the innovative business session The Changing Face of International Construction. Ambassador Hrinak brings many years of diplomatic experience in the Americas, including Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and a particular knowledge of government relations, contracts and procurement.

Ambassador Hrinak will join Nadia Riffat, Head of Planning at the Municipality of Tripoli, Birgitte Brinch Madsen, who is Director of the Danish firm COWIconsult’s new energy division in China and Faith Wainwright, director of Arup in London.

Business session chair Sandi Rhys Jones of ICONdirect says, "I am delighted to have the opportunity of bringing together such a powerful group of women to debate the challenges and risks of the global market place in construction and development. It promises to be a fascinating business session."

Particular thanks go to conference sponsors Women in Business International.
Read about our panellists Ambassador Donna Hrinak Birgitte Brinch Madsen Faith Wainwright Sandi Rhys Jones

Read more about the International Construction Superconference here.