Jasmine Whitbread, CEO, Save the Children - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Gender balance and diversity in general should be seen as mission-critical to business and organisational success
• Men and women should feel free to bring their best strengths to the organisation and not be hampered by gender stereotypes
• The 21st century organisation will develop a flexible working culture, and one that encourages men and women to be the best they can be
• Quotas for more women on the board is likely to lead to a negative backlash against women. But something needs to trigger action at the top
• Making the case that gender balance and diversity is mission critical is the best way to bring about that change
• Save the Children has begun its own change programme by offering work flexibility to all of its directors, men and women
• Save the Children also decided to recruit women-only candidates for its trustees board to fill some of the posts. The result was it found a great source of high-calibre women to choose from
• Gender balance at the top of Save the Children:
  37.5%: Executive directors (three women, five men)
  42%: Trustees (five women, seven men)

“When I started out in business, I was completely blind to all these issues. I was very fortunate in that I had been brought up as a person first and foremost and I really wasn’t aware of being a woman in business.”

Then something happened to change everything. Whitbread rose to the top of Thomson Financial, an arm of the information provider Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), and had made it to the top team. An epiphany occurred during a regular management away-day. “I was on the top team and reported to the chief executive. We were on an away-day and one of my colleagues referred to the fact that I was the only woman at the table. Honestly, it had never crossed my mind. It was scales falling from my eyes.”

Shortly after this, her boss hired the executive coach, Dr Randall White to work with him and his top team. Dr White also happened to be the author of Breaking the Glass Ceiling, which meant he had developed insights around the issue of gender in management. “He had that interesting angle on the whole male and female thing,” recalls Whitbread. “And he started to get me intrigued about what’s actually going on here.”

“I was on the top team and reported to the chief executive. We were on an away-day and one of my colleagues referred to the fact that I was the only woman at the table. Honestly, it had never crossed my mind. It was scales falling from my eyes.”

But Whitbread never believed and probably never will that men and women are different per se. “I’ve always rejected strongly the notion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I think we’re all just people.” She is a strong believer in diversity though and has made great efforts to ensure her executive team and trustees are from a diverse set of backgrounds.

As far as gender is concerned, Whitbread would like to see organisations shedding some of the old gender stereotypes and allowing men to be free to be themselves as much as women. There are alpha-women, she says, just as much as alpha-men. The point is to have a culture which encourages men and women to bring their strengths to the organisation. In her view, a man who has strong social and collaborative skills, for example, should feel able to use them without fear of being seen as weak.

“Alpha-women can obviously play the alpha-game and are very successful. But they can also play the other side without being seen as weak or pathetic,” says Whitbread. Such women will be seen as charming. They will be admired for finding the time to pick up their children from school. But this license is not always given to men. “If you’re an alpha-male, then it is not always seen as having a strength to show a softer side. It is seen as a sign of weakness.”

“Alpha-women can obviously play the alpha-game and are very successful. But they can also play the other side without being seen as weak or pathetic.”

Whitbread followed her personal passion to make a difference in the world when she took a job at Oxfam as regional director of its programmes in West Africa in 1999. Six years later, she took over as chief executive at Save the Children, a highly respected British charity that had been founded in 1919 by two sisters, Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton, both of whom were concerned about the plight of children affected by war.

Today, the charity engages in campaigning and advocacy work across the world and helps provide immediate relief during emergencies. In the year April 2007 to March 2008, it raised £161 million to carry out its charitable work. One of its mission’s is to tackle the high rate of infant mortality in the poorest parts of the world, which in many cases can be averted with the right medicines and help.

Bringing her skills as a private sector director to a charity, Whitbread aims to transform the charity so it can perform to its highest potential. She wants to be able to engage as many people as possible in wider society, many of whom, she believes, would want to help if they were made aware of the work the charity does and the difference they can make. She aims to quadruple the effectiveness of the charity’s work in addressing the suffering of the world’s poorest children. Part of this will come from unleashing the energy and support of people who have so far not been engaged in the charity’s work.

The desire to have a diverse executive team and board of trustees is at the heart of this mission, as the wider their understanding of society, the more likely they will be able to engage as many people as possible.

It is in this sphere too that Whitbread feels she is “doing her bit” for the woman’s cause. Firstly, she is actively engaged in creating what she regards as a twenty-first century organisational culture which allows male directors to have as much work flexibility as women. Part of this was a way to attract the best people. She cannot offer high-flying salaries, common in the private sector, but she can offer work flexibility. So, for example, Adrian Lovett, her director of campaigns and communications works from home on Wednesdays, so that he can drop off and pick up his children from school and David Mepham, her director of policy, takes off every Friday after 11.00am to take care of his children.

This policy of flexibility encourages men to contribute more to their family and in so doing helps their partners too. “It’s that kind of flexibility which I think sets a different tone in an organisation. The other added benefit is that in both cases of the male directors working more flexibly, their spouses have developed good careers of their own.” One of them has become the headmistress of a school. Flexibility extends to the female directors as well. So, for example, Tanya Steele, director of supporter relations and fundraising at Save the Children works a four-day week.

“It’s that kind of flexibility which I think sets a different tone in an organisation. The other added benefit is that in both cases of the male directors working more flexibly, their spouses have developed good careers of their own.”

We started out the interview talking about the recent financial crash and I suggested that testosterone-driven males encouraged the greed and excessive-risk taking that led to the debacle. Whitbread’s answer is telling and encapsulates her view that this is not about men and women. It is about the need to change the organisational culture. “I think it is actually about men needing to change as much as women and us, as a society, getting rid of social constructs of so-called male or female behaviour.”

Whitbread recognises that there is a need to promote the advancement of women and improve the gender balance. She does not agree with quotas because they are likely, in her view, to cause a huge backlash against women, the very thing they are intended to avoid. However, she accepts, given the slow pace of progress on gender balance, that something needs to “trigger” change from the top.

At Save the Children she has offered flexible working at the highest levels, which also happens to be the best way to change the culture of an organisation. She has also made sure that they recruited more women to the board of trustees. This was difficult because most of the candidates were males. On the suggestion of one “brave” trustee, they decided to stop looking at male and female candidates and focused only on the women applicants. This changed everything. “Suddenly, all the men went away because we said we don’t want to look at those candidates and we were then looking at a really good calibre of women.”

“I think it is actually about men needing to change as much as women and us, as a society, getting rid of social constructs of so-called male or female behaviour.”

But that is well and good at Save the Children where they now have a high representation of women amongst their executive directors and trustees. How can this be triggered in other organisations? “You have helped to focus my thoughts on this,” says Whitbread. The answer, she believes, is to demonstrate that gender balance is “mission critical”.

It is not enough to say there are business benefits. “We need more stories of companies that went under because they lacked diverse perspectives in their board and more stories of companies that survived and thrived because they did have diverse perspectives on the senior team.” But she admits that entrenched attitudes and belief are hard to change. Nonetheless, it is clear that she believes managers can be persuaded to change as long as the argument for it is kept up and focuses on the mission critical aspect.