The Fall of Sex - Building Gender Balanced Business

“In many poor countries the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy.”

Violence against women

Bob Herbert, a New York Times editorialist, writes: “Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are…We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.”

Personal attack in press on UK Minister for Women

Back in the UK, government minister Harriet Harman, who has been working for years on issues of better gender balance, gets publicly lambasted with schoolyard sexism: “So,” wondered Rod Liddle in the Spectator, “Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober?”

Social dysfunction

Why so much aggression, around the world? Bob Herbert points to the underlying cause. “One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls.”

Frank Rich, another New York Times editorialist, has written potently and repeatedly this summer about turmoil on the way.

We’ve seen it in acrimonious town hall debates, the investiture of Justice Sotomayor and the frustrated flailings of a self-marginalizing Republican Party. “Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can’t adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white (and male) counterparts do.”

“We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem…”

The need to include men

While we recognise that female empowerment is one of the 21st century’s key levers to progress, we also believe that men must be included in this human enlightenment. Or they will work to keep (or bring) us down. This is just as true in the boardrooms of the Fortune or FTSE 100 as it is in the shantytowns of the developing world.

It is also true in the Church. “The truth is,” writes former President Jimmy Carter in an extraordinary editorial in The Observer in July, “that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.”

The end of macho

Foreign Policy magazine added to the summer’s debate with an article entitled “The End of Macho.” “The era of male dominance is coming to an end. Seriously. For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe.”

The rather inflammatory and, we hope, rather exaggerated article by Reihan Salam ends with a conclusion that we agree with. “This is not to say that women and men will fight each other across armed barricades. The conflict will take a subtler form, and the main battlefield will be hearts and minds. But make no mistake: The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent.”

US President Obama sees the dangers ahead, and tries to draw everyone together. “I am convinced,” he said in his Cairo speech in June, “that our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons. Our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity, men and women, to reach their full potential.”

“The era of male dominance is coming to an end. Seriously. For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one.”

New century tipping point

I think we will look back on these early years of the century and recognise the tipping point. When “women’s issues” became global economic issues. When women became the majority of the labour force in countries like the US and Australia for the first time. When economic crises destroyed our trust in some form of capitalist meritocracy, run almost exclusively by men. When more men started to write about gender issues, more forcefully and urgently for the first time.

Make men full partners

And there lies the promise of this summer. Most of the quotes above come from men, not women. They are in the mainstream press, not in the women’s magazines. That is, indeed, a new revolution. When men join women – in business, politics and at home – in pursuit of a more meritocratic and balanced sharing of economic and political power, there lies hope. Ladies, if we know what’s good for us, we’ll make them full partners in our progress.