A Call to Preserve Diversity Despite Crisis - Building Gender Balanced Business

• As the financial crisis escalates and layoffs kick in, the risk is that new forms of doing business will suffer.

• Managers of enlightened companies, ones that see the need for, and profit from, diversity will pick carefully and stay true to their tact.

• But companies where the push for diversity has been more recent and is not yet ingrained in the corporate culture are at risk of protecting the managerial makeup that led to problems in the first place — at the cost of new managers brought in to increase diversity.

• At the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France, top executives, male and female, all said that the development of a more balanced workforce was inevitable — but that managers’ protective instinct to revert to the comfortable and familiar could slow the process.

• One participant likened diversity to research and development. Chief executives can be tempted to cut R&D, or diversity, programs during hard times, but that costs the company in the long run.

• But the competition for talent will not abate for long, the Financial Times writes in a Editor’s Choice opinion piece. That, plus a need among younger workers to have a workplace reflective of the world at large, will limit backsliding.

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