Not a sugar daddy or godfather. A sponsor

The double standard costing women contracts, capital and opportunity.

A man starts a bank. Builds an oil company. Wins a government contract the size of a state budget.

We assume he knows people. He has relationships, he understands the system, he has cultivated investors and got himself into the right rooms over twenty years. We might admire him, we might even wonder how he did it. But we understand that serious business is built on serious relationships.

Now let a woman arrive at the same place.

Who is behind her?

And very quickly it becomes a different question. Who is she sleeping with?

There it is, one of the oldest and most effective ways of diminishing a woman’s economic achievement. Reduce the business to a relationship, reduce the relationship to sex, and reduce the woman to somebody who could not possibly have built what she built without surrendering something of herself.

Nobody asks who helped him in quite the same way. His relationships are called a network. Hers are called something else.

Naming is cheaper than competing

A fortnight ago I wrote about economic sponsorship, about the difference between telling a woman she is doing well and telling her where the business is. Several women wrote back who understood exactly what I meant and knew what they needed, an introduction to a buyer, a company put forward for a contract, a place in a consortium. Then came the hesitation, said carefully. It is not that simple. Not for a woman. Because of what people will say.

One of them took it further. The easiest way to chase a woman out of the lane of big things, she said, is to call her a name.

I have not been able to put that down, because of what it reveals. The accusation does not have to be true to be effective. It only has to make her hesitate, or make the person who might have backed her hesitate. It costs nothing, requires no evidence, and cannot be rebutted, because nobody has ever devised a procedure for disproving an insinuation. It also works faster than any formal barrier, because the woman withdraws herself. She reads the room and stops walking towards it.

That is not harmless gossip. It is a barrier to entry, and it is the cheapest one anybody has ever built.

It is deployed by both men and women, and it often lands harder coming from women, partly because men put it there to begin with. A wife quietly taught to be wary of the women her husband does business with becomes, without intending anything of the kind, part of the machinery. I say that carefully, because nobody’s marriage deserves to be treated as collateral. The point is not to dismiss anyone’s boundaries, but to stop reading a woman’s commercial proximity to a man as evidence of an intimate one.

Then consider who is most exposed. The single woman, the divorced woman, the widow, each read as available and therefore as explicable by a market that has already decided her success requires explaining. Marriage does not protect her either. It only changes the accusation, and now she is using the marriage as cover.

There is no marital status from which a woman can do large business in this country without a story being available about how she got there.

So she starts regulating her own ambition in anticipation of somebody else’s interpretation. Do not call him too often. Do not meet him alone. Do not appear too familiar. Do not ask for too much. Do not give people something to say.

Now try building a bank under those rules, or raising serious capital, or competing for major infrastructure.

A businesswoman should not have to establish her sexual innocence before her professional competence can be taken seriously.

A thing with no clean name attracts a dirty one.

Every word we have fails in the same direction

Look at the vocabulary we actually have. Sugar daddy. Godfather. Godmother. Matriarch. And the quietest one of all, my daughter, which in certain rooms is not affection but jurisdiction. I have written here before that being called somebody’s daughter is not always the compliment it appears to be.

Godfather, as we use it in our politics, says the backing came with a standing claim on the person backed, which is a different charge from sugar daddy. But every one of them is a kinship word, and that is the tell. Family language carries dependence, obligation and discretion. You do not negotiate with family. You are given, and what you are given can be taken back, and the giving is remembered. A woman described in those terms has not entered a transaction. She has entered a household.

Now look at the words available to men for the same economic behaviour. Partner. Backer. Investor. Client. Counterparty. Words between principals. A man can take an introduction, secure an endorsement, join a consortium and raise financing without once being called somebody’s son.

What I am actually describing

We taught women to find mentors, then taught corporate women to find sponsors, and both of those are now well understood. What the woman building an enterprise of her own never got is the same thing in commercial form, with a common language, an etiquette, and a settled sense that it is an ordinary professional relationship rather than a favour to be explained later.

A mentor may help a woman become a better entrepreneur. An economic sponsor helps her enterprise reach opportunities worthy of what it can already do. Someone who knows her work and will put their own reputation behind it. It does not sound like encouragement, which is exactly why it is so often missed. I heard about a mandate, your company should compete. Speak to this person before anybody else does. Use my name. I think you are pricing too small, go back and ask again. You can handle something that size. I will vouch for your work.

Not let me mentor you. Not coffee. Not I am rooting for you.

Men have built businesses through relationships like these for as long as there have been businesses. We call it business.

None of this means bypassing a process or awarding anything without merit. Sponsorship opens the door. Competence still has to win the work.

The contract nobody will ever count

But competence that never reaches the room never gets the chance to compete, and that is where the cost begins.

Think of a woman who has spent fifteen years building a credible business, with the systems, the people and the record to deliver a contract ten times larger than any she has won. Somebody with influence knows what she can do, knows the buyer, and knows the mandate is coming. He could make one introduction and let her compete.

The introduction is never made. Perhaps she was afraid to ask. Perhaps he was reluctant to offer. Perhaps somebody had already started talking. The company is never considered, and the contract goes to a firm that was in the room because somebody put it there.

Nothing appears in any record. No tender was lost, because none was entered. Nobody was turned down, because nobody applied. We count the businesses women own, we measure the financing gap, we talk endlessly about the barriers to scaling, and nobody has ever counted the opportunities that never reached a woman because the relationship that would have carried them was made too expensive to pursue.

By my reckoning that is the fourth number missing from this series in two months.

The answer is not to retreat

There is a tempting response to this, and I have heard it from women I respect. Women should simply sponsor women and avoid powerful men altogether.

Women sponsoring women is essential, and I have built a substantial part of my working life around it. The same woman pointed out that we are still not used to seeing women back one another, which is true. But as a complete strategy it is too small, and it makes us smaller. The largest procurement budgets on this continent, the biggest balance sheets and most of the long commercial relationships remain disproportionately controlled by men. We will not build the next generation of substantial women-owned enterprises by withdrawing from those relationships to protect our reputations.

So it has to run in all four directions. Men sponsoring women. Women sponsoring women. Women sponsoring men. And men sponsoring men, which has gone on for generations without anybody feeling the need to explain it. The question is not the gender of the sponsor but whether the relationship is legitimate and has economic consequence.

It also has to be ordinary rather than secret. Daylight will not kill a whisper outright, and not every commercial relationship can or should be announced. But the sponsor willing to say, where it is appropriate to say it, I put her company forward and she won the work on merit, has ended the conversation before it begins. And before repeating a story about how a woman secured a major opportunity, the rest of us might ask whether we would tell it about a man.

What actually stops us

I asked a fortnight ago whether we are doing this. The more honest question is what stops us, and the answer is the fear of how it will look, running both ways at once. The fear of being seen to seek it, and the fear of being seen to give it.

Naming that fear does not remove the double standard. The risk is real and I will not stand here and call it imaginary. But it may stop us organising our entire economic ambition around it.

So here is the question I am sitting with.

Not who you have helped. What you have not done because of what somebody might say. Whose name you decided not to mention. Whose call you did not return in case it was misread. Whose door you have been too careful to knock on.

Count those honestly and you have the real measure of what this costs. We cannot control every story people choose to tell about an ambitious woman. We can refuse to let those stories decide the size of the business she dares to build.

Not a godfather. Not a sugar daddy.

A sponsor. And a woman who remains a principal, building an enterprise that is hers to own.