Re-Branding "Women" - Building Gender Balanced Business

I was not expecting to spend International Women’s Day sharing a panel with a transsexual in Milan. It was a bit Fellini-esque. She (who had been a he) was arguing (on national television) that working women had become tough and unattractive, which is why the transsexual was drawing the attraction of men. In Italy, I guess this makes great TV. …

At first this struck me as an unfortunate spoofing of a still-useful day. But over the course of the week, where I went from the RETHINK HER conference in Barcelona, to the launch of the Italian version of my first book, “WHY Women Mean Business” at Il Sole 24 Ore to a major conference on global Gender Equality at the OECD in Paris via a couple of client assignments, I was mulling her/his argument.

In essence, I agree. While I trust that the example is a bit extreme, the argument is really saying much the same thing that I wrote in my last blog. We want to ensure that the progress of women is not perceived to be at the expense of men – because that won’t do women any good at all, anywhere. We need to re-brand the concept and messaging of gender equality– if not the objective. While we must stay vigilant on a number of fronts, it is time to focus the marketing and communication on the opportunities that gender balance offers everyone.

We need men to want to push us into power. In this, I suggest (politically incorrectly) that seduction may be a more useful strategy than castigation.

The extraordinary revolution that women have (peacefully) wrought in the 20th century heralds a tectonic, fundamental shift in … everything: gender roles, economies, countries, societies. It is transformational and totally global. It’s just that nobody really knows it, or wants to acknowledge it, let alone celebrate it. And where gender is an issue, it is almost always cast as a problem, with both men and women suffering and complaining about the changes (or lack of changes) afoot.

Most (male) managers and leaders still think of ”women” (if they think about them at all) as an ethical subset of good diversity management. Treat women fairly and then get on with serious business or political issues. Despite the growing mountains of research showing that women are a key lever to national and corporate competitiveness, the gender issue is usually framed as an ”equality” issue – a ”wrong” that must be righted, a minority less oppressed than most, or in the non-OECD world captured in the excellent new Gender Atlas, a ”cultural” issue of interest only to meddling foreigners. Yet as Stephan Klasen, Professor of Economics at the University of Göttingen, illustrated, the impact on economic performance of women’s standing – and particularly women’s education – is a major single predictor.

Women themselves are largely caught in a parallel 20th century mindset, nourished by endless metaphors of victimhood – pay gaps, inequality, discrimination, stereotypes, etc. The gender experts I met at the OECD were struggling in an oppressive, unchanging world. Yet today women represent the majority of the educated talent pool, and the majority of consumer decision-making in most of the developed and emerging world. They lead countries, companies, state departments, defense ministries and finance ministries. Women hold an unprecedented – and largely unrecognized – amount of power in their hands, minds and purses. They just don’t know it.

Last week in India, they voted for a 33% quota for female seats in Parliament. In Brazil, President Lula just named a woman as his successor as head of the Party and therefore as Presidential candidate. In Chile, President Michelle Bachelet has just finished her four-year term. For the US, Secretary of State Clinton circles the globe, while in Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel is at the heart of the EU’s future.

At the Barcelona conference, a largely male audience was avid to learn how to adapt marketing and communications to women’s language and preferences. In the client companies where I intervened last week, facilitating gender debates with the Executive Committees, not all the men are convinced of the strategic benefit of improving gender balance. But the leaders are. The smart guys, like the smart countries and companies, ‘get it.’ They are busy building competitive advantage for this century.