What started as an idea for a female networking day has developed into a longer-term programme that is opening up more senior opportunities for women working at Cinven’s portfolio companies, writes Anastasya Molodykh-McFarlane, a senior principal at Cinven.

Private equity strives for outperformance. This can be through empowering growth and increasing market share, achieving efficiencies to increase margins, research and development into innovation – or importantly… promoting gender parity.

Companies with higher female representation in their executive teams perform better. Research by McKinsey & Company found those in the top quartile outperform by 39%. Clearly, female inclusion is a powerful lever.

My own experience in diversity has had ups and downs. While I have found that firms are generally much more aware of diversity shortfalls in recruitment today vs when I was interviewing ~11 years ago– retention and promotion are still a work in progress. And that’s despite a truly active push from the PE industry to retain women. This got me thinking.

Support for senior women

At Cinven, our portfolio companies (portcos) employ circa 190,000 people and Cinven strives to constantly support value creation. With McKinsey’s research in mind, I wanted to see what more Cinven could do to help women at portcos succeed which would, in turn, help its investments outperform. And so, ASCEND – which stands for “Accelerating Success, Championing Excellence, Nurturing Diversity” – was born.

ASCEND came together with the support of a fantastic group of women and men across Cinven, including Allegra Day – our environmental, social and governance Director – and our co-Managing Partners. We are now a 10-person committee that aims to celebrate and develop senior women at our portcos.

We chose to launch on International Women’s Day 2024, and welcomed ~100 women to the event in London. All had been nominated by their CEO. The content focused on better equipping senior women to excel in their day-to-day jobs as well as strategies to accelerate their career progression. Networking is great, but supporting people with skills and knowledge that they can build on, that’s what will make a difference.

Coaching consultancy Adaapta conducted a pre-event survey of work experiences. It then examined the responses and used them to develop a session on emotional intelligence, ensuring it was relevant to our attendees’ needs.

Another highlight was a talk from Mary Ann Sieghart, author and journalist, about The Authority Gap – her book that examines why women are taken less seriously than men and what we can do about it. Research has shown that female US Supreme Court judges were interrupted four times more than their male colleagues. While we aren’t all judges, we’ve all had similar experiences. Knowing how to respond effectively is a huge advantage.

The support of my male colleagues was unconditional – and hugely welcome. Our three co-managing partners attended the event, along with a number of senior partners. But ASCEND 2024 was built on female camaraderie and mutual respect for all the participants in the room – attributes that were identified and applauded in the overwhelmingly positive feedback.

A catalyst for change

ASCEND participants remain very engaged in the network and the Cinven ASCEND committee is growing. We’re developing a programme to maintain the connections and build on the network we have created in response to the feedback we received.

A third of ASCEND attendees suggested peer-to-peer mentoring, while others requested online skills sessions with third-party specialist providers. The first skills session – on high-impact communication to get your points across – was extremely well attended and we have many more to come.

We’re also encouraging our network to make sure their companies have an inclusion and diversity group. If one doesn’t already exist, we’re helping with resources to set one up, and we’re also planning our next event in London in 2025.

I firmly believe that women should have a chance to shine and grow within organisations and we hope that ASCEND is a catalyst for that within our portcos.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge my colleagues Allegra Day, Balazs Lam, Caroline Rawes, Eleanor Mountain, Ignacio Alday, Jennifer Lyon, Marco Strizzi, Natalie Kotwal and Skye Wood for making ASCEND possible.