Women in FM Leadership

Progressing Women in FM Leadership:
A Q&A with Valerie Miller, Chief Customer Officer, DMA Group

Walk into almost any bidders day, industry conference or senior leadership meeting in facilities management and you’ll notice the same thing: the room is still overwhelmingly male. Yet at entry level, women are well represented across the profession. So where is everyone going?

Our Chief Customer Officer, Valerie Miller, has spent more than 25 years in FM and has recently spoke about this at the IWFM Midlands & People Development Leadership Conference. We sat down with her to talk about what’s really holding back women in FM leadership, what the good news stories are hiding, and what organisations of every size, not just the giants, can actually do about it.

By the numbers: the progression gap at a glance

• 15% of senior leadership roles across the FM sector are held by women, despite women making up around a third of entry-level FM roles globally
• 57% of IWFM members at junior level are women. By senior level, that falls to 19%
• 39% of new IWFM members are women. Among long-term members, it’s 15%
• 7% of FTSE 350 board roles are now held by women, up from 9.5% in 2011
• 39% more likely to financially outperform: companies in the top quartile for executive gender diversity vs the bottom quartile (McKinsey, 2023)
• 8% of FTSE 350 CEOs are women, and just 15.4% of executive directors, against 49.5% of non-executive directors. Board parity is masking a real power gap (FTSE Women Leaders Review, 2025)

Those numbers tell a story, and it’s not the one the headlines suggest. We started there.

Q1: You’ve been in FM for more than 25 years. How did you get into the industry?

Like so many people in this profession, Valerie’s career began somewhere she never expected.

Valerie: “FM is one of those industries you fall into, nobody leaves school at 18 thinking, ‘I want a career in facilities management!’ I fell in back in 2000. I was looking for temporary work and was offered a role as a helpdesk operator, taking FM calls for a large management consultancy firm in the city. I knew nothing about FM; I actually wanted a job in marketing because it sounded far more exciting. It took me a very short time to realise I enjoyed the sector, the pay was good, and I was good at it.

“I worked hard and progressed from helpdesk operator all the way to Group Sales & Marketing Director, sitting on the management board of a £170m FM business. But I was one of only two women on that board, a seven-to-two ratio. And a quarter of a century later, when I walk into a bidders day and scan the room, it’s still wall-to-wall men, with a handful of women if you look carefully. You get used to that scan. But getting used to something is not the same as it being acceptable.”

Q2: You’ve said “FM is not short of women, it is failing to progress them.” That’s a strong statement. What’s behind it?

It’s a deliberate reframing of a problem the industry usually describes as an attraction issue.

Valerie: “For years we’ve talked about how to attract more women into FM, and that still matters. But the data tells us the bigger problem now sits further up the pipeline. Globally, women make up about a third of entry-level FM roles. By the time you reach senior leadership, that has dropped to 15%. The women are there. They’re coming in, they’re capable, and then something happens in that mid-career stretch that causes them to stop moving forward, even when they stay.

“So this isn’t a supply problem. It’s a progression problem. And if we keep framing it as ‘how do we get more women in?’, we let ourselves off the hook for what’s happening to the women who are already here.”

Q3: But the headlines suggest real progress. Women now hold 42.7% of FTSE 350 board roles, Mitie reports 42% women in senior leadership, Sodexo UK&I 45%. Isn’t it working?

There is genuine progress to acknowledge, but Valerie argues the good news stories are hiding how much work remains for women in FM leadership.

Valerie: “The progress is real, and I want to be fair about that. There are no all-male FTSE 350 boards left in the UK. Mitie, Sodexo and ISS are publishing real data and running genuine programmes, those numbers are the result of sustained investment, clear targets and leadership commitment, not PR exercises.

“But hold those numbers next to this one: across the FM sector as a whole, women hold only 15% of senior leadership roles. If Mitie is at 42% and Sodexo is at 45%, and the sector average is still 15%, the maths tells you something important, the rest of the market is significantly below 15%. The good news is real, but it’s concentrated in a very small corner of the sector. And that corner is hiding how much work remains everywhere else.

“You see the same pattern at board level, even in the FTSE 350. The headline board number, 42.7%, is real, but it’s overwhelmingly a non-executive story: those roles are now at near parity, 49.5%. Look at who’s actually running the business and it’s a different picture. Just 15.4% of executive directors are women, and only 8% of CEOs. Representation and power aren’t the same thing, and it’s the same lesson FM needs to learn.”

Q4: You call this “the tier one mirage.” What do you mean?

The organisations making headlines represent a fraction of the market.

Valerie: “The top five UK FM providers, Mitie, OCS, Sodexo, Compass and Serco, account for around 34% of the outsourced FM market. One third. The other two thirds sits with other large providers, regional specialists, SMEs, independent contractors and, critically, in-house FM teams that don’t appear in outsourced market data at all.

“For those business, DEI maturity and budgets vary considerably. They don’t have a Women in Leadership Academy. They have tight margins, a small HR function if they’re lucky, and real goodwill with no roadmap for what to do with it. When we celebrate the tier one success stories, and we should, we also have to be honest that they tell us very little about the experience of a woman working in a 12-person M&E contractor or an in-house estates team.”

Q5: You asked IWFM for their own membership data. What did it show?

The professional body’s figures make the mid-career stall strikingly visible.

Valerie: “At junior level, women are actually the majority in IWFM membership, 57%. By senior level, that has dropped to 19%. And new IWFM members are 39% women, while long-term members are just 15% women.

“What that tells me is that women are not simply leaving the profession. Many are still there, present and capable, but not progressing, quietly disengaging over time. Something happens in that mid-career stretch. That’s the part of the pipeline we need to be honest about.”

Q6: WiFM ran a Confidence Gap workshop at the IFM Summit in May, where you split employers and aspiring leaders into separate groups. What did you find?

When the two groups compared notes, the disconnect was immediate and consistent.

Valerie: “We did something simple: aspiring leaders at one set of tables, senior leaders and employers at another. Then we merged the groups and asked them to compare what they’d found. Employers described doing the right things, flexible working policies, mentoring schemes, stated commitments to diversity. The women described a very different experience: flexibility that felt like a career penalty, qualification requirements that filtered them out before progression conversations even started, and informal networks built on evenings and golf days that excluded them without anyone quite noticing.

“Five themes came back from the room, again and again. First, qualification gatekeeping, engineering and technical qualifications being used as filters for senior roles where they’re not actually required at leadership level. Review your job descriptions: if the role is leadership, hire for leadership. Second, the sponsorship gap. Most organisations have mentoring; very few have genuine sponsorship, someone who advocates for you when you’re not in the room, who says your name in conversations you’ll never hear. Mentoring gives advice. Sponsorship gives opportunity. Women need the latter.

“Third, flexibility as a career risk. Flexible working exists on paper almost everywhere, but requesting it often feels like a signal that you’re less serious, less ambitious, less available. That perception is the problem, and it’s a leadership issue, not a policy one. Fourth, the invisible informal network. Culture isn’t built in town halls and team meetings; it’s built in the conversations at the end of the day, on site visits, at dinners. If those spaces are consistently less accessible for women, you’re building a culture that advantages one group by default.

“And fifth, role models and visibility. Women need to see it’s possible, not the invincible executive who appears to have no commitments outside work, but the real person, with a full life, who still delivers at the highest level. That kind of visibility changes what seems achievable.”

Q7: Some will say this is about fairness, not performance. What does the evidence say?

For those who want the commercial case, the data is now hard to dismiss.

Valerie: “I know the counterargument, ‘we care about performance, not fairness.’ Fine. Let’s talk performance. McKinsey’s 2023 research across 1,265 companies in 23 countries found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 39% more likely to financially outperform companies in the bottom quartile. That gap was 15% in 2015, it has more than doubled.

“The Financial Conduct Authority reviewed the academic literature on gender-diverse boards and found 11 studies on the relationship between board gender diversity and governance outcomes, conduct, risk, fraud. All 11 reported positive outcomes. And MSCI found that companies with at least 30% female directors delivered 18.9% higher cumulative shareholder returns over five years.

“Diversity is not a soft metric. It’s associated with better financial performance, stronger governance, lower conduct risk and better decision-making. The evidence is now consistent enough that to dismiss it, you’d have to dismiss the kind of data you wouldn’t accept for any other business decision.”

Q8: Most organisations don’t have tier one resources. What can they actually do?

The most effective interventions Valerie has seen haven’t been programmes at all.

Valerie: “The tier one companies have resources; most organisations don’t. But the most effective interventions I’ve seen, in my own career and across the industry, have not been programmes. They’ve been decisions. A decision to say someone’s name in a room she isn’t in. A decision to redesign a role around a person rather than a job description. A decision to have an honest conversation about flexibility rather than pointing to a policy document. A decision to look at your last five promotions, count the women, and sit with the answer.

“These cost nothing. They scale across organisations of every size. They work in a 12-person M&E contractor as well as they work in a billion-pound integrated FM business.”

Q9: Progression is one half of the equation, attraction is the other. How do we get more women into FM in the first place?

It’s a question Valerie has been vocal about for years, and it starts long before the first job application.

Valerie: “There still needs to be far more understanding of the FM profession in schools and colleges. Students need to know that facilities management is a viable, varied and rewarding career, and whose job is it to tell them? It’s everyone’s job, but as an industry we must do more with our local schools and colleges through collaboration and partnership. At DMA we work with local schools and colleges, offering career talks and work experience, because that early exposure matters.

“It’s also about showing the breadth of the industry. Apprenticeships have historically focused on engineering, and engineering apprenticeships are a brilliant route, but FM offers so much more: contract management, supply chain, data and analytics, customer service, procurement, sales and marketing. And women already in the industry have a role to play here too. If we want the next generation of facilities managers, buyers and sales leaders to include more women, they need to see women achieving rewarding, successful careers in FM.”

Q10: What’s your advice to women working in FM right now?

Having made the journey from helpdesk to boardroom, Valerie has practical advice for women navigating that mid-career stretch.

Valerie: “First, invest in your professional recognition. If you have strong qualifications but haven’t yet converted them into FM-specific professional recognition, an IWFM qualification is a signal that speaks independently of your employer’s perception of you. The IWFM data shows women coming into membership with strong general academic credentials but lower uptake of professional grades, that gap is worth closing.

“Second, build your network deliberately, peers, mentors and, crucially, sponsors. Working with two inspirational women had the most profound impact on my own career; without their guidance I wouldn’t have had the self-belief to reach my potential. Having someone who inspires you is a game changer, and being that person for someone else is just as powerful. I recently mentored a young woman returning from maternity leave who was convinced she couldn’t cope with her job and her new family. A few coaching sessions later, she went back with the confidence to apply for, and secure, a promotion. That’s what visibility and support actually do.”

Q11: Finally, why should this matter to people who don’t see it as “their” issue?

For Valerie, the framing is everything.

Valerie: “The framing matters enormously. If this is positioned as something women need to fix, or something progressive organisations do as a values statement, it will stay on the margins. It is a workforce sustainability issue. FM is a £102 billion sector employing 1.2 million people, already facing a significant skills and talent shortage, an ageing workforce and increasing complexity in its roles. And we have a pipeline where half of the potential leadership talent is present, capable and going nowhere, trapped in the middle, invisible to the leadership conversation, disengaging over time. We cannot afford to keep doing that.

“The room has to change. Not because it’s the right thing to do, though it is, but because the alternative is a profession that is weaker, less capable and less sustainable than it needs to be.”

Does this reflect what you’re seeing in your own organisation? Valerie would love to hear your experience. Connect with her on LinkedIn to share your thoughts. And if you’re ready to be part of the push for real progression in FM, WiFM welcomes new voices: find out more about the network and get involved.