Surveys may lament the dearth of female directors but many women step off the corporate ladder deliberately. And who can blame them when boardroom life is so uncompromising?

So here we are, at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st millennium, and women are still being denied their place in the corporate sun. There was a sense of weary inevitability to the most recent Female FTSE report from Cranfield School of Management, which, for the past 11 years, has chronicled the paltry number of women on FTSE-100 boards.

According to last year's report, things are not only bad; they're getting worse. The number of companies with female directors dropped from 16 to 15 in 2009 while the total with multiple women directors fell from 39 to 37 and the share of companies without female directors rose to one in four.

This situation exists despite the growing number of exhortations and initiatives designed to improve women's representation at the top of companies. It's hard to escape the conclusion that perhaps women themselves simply don't want to sacrifice the rest of their lives in order to notch their names on the boardroom table.

I read a comment recently from Saira Khan, a former star of The Apprentice, about the "chronic lack of female role models in business who normal women can relate to and be inspired by". But what's remotely normal about women—or men for that matter—leaving the house at 6.15am and returning at 11pm, five days a week, as one senior businesswoman I recently interviewed admitted to doing?

So I take issue with the heading on the press release accompanying the Cranfield report, which proclaimed: "Corporate Britain is failing women." If corporate Britain is failing anyone, it is neglecting itself. Companies with male-dominated boards may well be less successful than those with higher female representation, though proving a causal link is difficult. But for all the talk of glass ceilings, sticky floors, labyrinths—management structures where women are destined to get lost—and glass cliffs, the term coined by the University of Exeter to describe the practice of promoting females to risky jobs in the hope that they will fail, most women deliberately step off the corporate career ladder, rather than being pushed.

And they do so not just to fulfil their oft-quoted caring responsibilities, but also to enjoy and have control over other aspects of their lives. Who in their right mind would choose to work 12 or more hours a day, every day, when there are so many other interesting and exciting things to do?
Some women are determined to reach the top, whatever the cost, and if that's what they want, then fine. But the idea that all of us aspire to such narrow heights is ludicrous. Most women I know don't even want to work full-time, let alone be at the top of their tree—and that is no reflection on their intelligence, education, passion for or commitment
to their jobs.

Working part-time and being at the forefront of your field aren't incompatible, but most organisational structures, processes and attitudes are designed in such a way as to perpetuate the myth. Until senior board roles are made more attractive for "normal" women—rather than for those who have to behave like men in order to progress-the kind of target quotas that are now enshrined in law in countries such as Norway and Spain, and which the UK hopes to introduce voluntarily this year, will simply amount to whistling in the wind.

There is much speculation as to whether the global financial crisis might have been averted had less of a testosterone-fuelled culture prevailed in banks. Sir David Walker's conclusion that there are still too few suitable women candidates for bank directorships has been widely pilloried as reactionary. But in a sense Walker is right. The problem is, there are also too few suitable male candidates for the kind of organisations such big, complex, short-term-focused institutions have become.

How many people running top companies are the sorts of people we really need there? The shortage of female directors and the overweening
ambition of many male directors is not the problem itself, but a symptom of a much bigger question-the nature of the modern corporation. That's what needs fixing.