Women's Day - Building Gender Balanced Business

March 9th, 2009

Happy Women’s Day ladies… and gentlemen.

I was invited to speak at the European Commission last Friday for International Women’s Day. I spoke to a large room full of women and a handful of brave men. I was also invited to speak in an awful lot of places this week and last. The flurry of events and activities around this particular day, mostly involving women, leaves me with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it is nice that people focus on the topic. On the other hand, it’s only for one day. And it’s mostly women doing the focusing.

On the one hand, it is nice to focus on women, and women always love getting together for a good chat. On the other, we are becoming awfully familiar with this theme. And the way out of most of the issues we face will be in partnership with men. Or not at all.

Women as Victims?

A lot of this week’s focus and media attention around women’s issues focuses on economic issues – usually bad ones. That there is a pay gap. That women’s jobs are more vulnerable than men’s in the current recession.

On the other, it is not a pay gap we face, it is a promotion gap. If you aggregate salaries in all these studies, you find that predominantly male and full-time executives high salaries skew the salary averages of armies of female assistants and part-timers. Focusing on the wrong problem does not help to craft the right solution.

Similarly, everyone talks of a ‘glass ceiling’, implying that women progress up through the ranks until a certain level of seniority and then are blocked. In actual fact, in most of the companies I’ve ever worked with, the truth is that the percentage of women begins to drop at every grade level as you go up, almost from the first one. That is why I coined the term ‘gender asbestos’ instead. The issue is in the walls and cultures of the business world, that has as yet to adapt itself to the incredible opportunities that women and better gender balance has to offer.

Yet, in 2009, the first signs that the tide may be turning this way are beginning to emerge from the midst of this mess.

Women as Opportunity?

So, this International Women’s Day, remember this:

• women represent 60% of university graduates in Europe and North America (and 52% in China, 70% in the United Arab Emirates)
• a majority of the jobs lost in both the US and Britain in this recession have been lost by men, not women
• that of the 8 million jobs created in Europe since the year 2000, 75% of them have been filled by women
• that 2009 may also be the year that women become the majority of the American labour force for the first time

In this economic context would you rather be in health care and services or in automotive manufacturing and investment banking? Cherchez la femme.

The 21st century belongs to women, and we better make that truth as appealing to men as we can. If you figure out how, drop me a line.

We could start by replacing International Women’s Day with International Gender Dialogue Day. This is what I suggested to the Commission last week. It’s only once the organisations and leaders that currently run the world become aware that gender balance is good for both women and men that we will we start making some sustainable progress.

So here, before anyone else, let me invite you to raise your glass with your favourite colleague or partner of the other gender, and have a dialogue in honour of Global Gender Day. That will probably do both of you a world of good.