Book review: Why Women Mean Business - Building Gender Balanced Business

Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution (Wiley, 2008) by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland.

REVIEW BY MORICE MENDOZA

This book aims to convince senior managers that they can reap enormous competitive advantage from focusing on women both as a source of talent and leadership and as a market for their products and services.

MALE MANAGERS HOLD THE KEYS TO UNLOCK FEMALE TALENT

As the authors say, many male managers hold the keys which can unlock the economic potential represented by women. However, after a century of female emancipation and their integration into the workforce (in developed economies in particular), what can this book really add that is new?

They do add something new and it comes from a fresh perspective. They refer a number of times to the recent best selling business book, Blue Ocean Strategy by INSEAD Professors Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. In that book, the authors argue that companies can discover completely fresh and uncontested market spaces if they think out of the box.

IT IS A BUSINESS ISSUE NOT A WOMEN’S ISSUE

In a similar fashion, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland provide a fresh way of looking at the “women’s issue”, which they prefer to label a business issue. First, they provide hard evidence that there is enormous, untapped potential waiting to be unlocked by the smart manager. This relates to talent and markets. In the first category, women still fall off in large numbers at higher levels within corporations even though they increasingly represent the “majority” of educated talent.

The authors suggest that this is not simply about a “glass ceiling”. It is more subtle than that. Women have different career cycles to men, for instance, and are likely to start wanting to balance family and work when they reach their mid-to-late-30s, a time when many men start to fly into the high-potential track. Rather than accept this as the norm, managers should adapt their organisations so that they enable women to manage this transition and remain in the fast track, rather than opt out.

In another example, women have been proven to be less willing to sell themselves, preferring to focus on their jobs, so they don’t vie for better pay or higher seniority with the same gusto as their male colleagues. The result is that some talented women resign out of disappointment and look elsewhere to fulfil their ambitions. Some progressive CEOs get around this problem by not allowing women to automatically resign. They encourage them to voice the reasons for their discontent and try to get them to change their minds.

The other major issue is the lack of women reaching top levels of management through to the board. Again, this requires a commitment from the CEO downwards to create an organisational culture that encourages women in an equal fashion to men.

THE NEED FOR CULTURAL CHANGE TO EVEN THINGS OUT

The authors are not asking for businesses to favour women in the sense of positive discrimination or quotas. They are asking for businesses to recognise this as a business issue and refashion the way they manage people so as to give women as much chance to raise to the top as men (they suggest that up until now men have had the workplace norms stacked in their favour, so they have had de facto positive discrimination).

Interestingly, this requires managers to offload any notion of sameness encouraged by the language of equality and suggest that they should embrace the differences between the genders. Here the authors enter controversial territory as many men and women don’t accept there are significant differences. But the authors suggest that the value of having a gender balanced board, for example, is because women (when they feel allowed to) bring very different attributes. They are more concerned about governance issues, for example (a very good thing in the light of the mess made by male-dominated boards in the financial sector during the last five years or so).

The other important element they bring is that they can help boards and executive committees and other business heads understand how to market their products and services to women. The proportion of women now responsible for the buying decisions of high-priced products such as cars and computers is staggeringly high. This has been known for some time. But the authors argue that companies still fail to understand the female mindset and therefore launch less than effective marketing campaigns. Having more women in positions of influence will help them improve.

Interestingly, one country where women seem to have great influence is the Philippines, which the authors describe as a matriarchy. They are less impressed with Germany (for encouraging women to stay at home) and the United States (for not introducing state support for parental leave). France comes out well in that the State has provided a lot of help for women to juggle work and life. The authors point out that in the US, all the work of making change has been left to the private sector and in France; it has been left to the State. But they suggest that France is in a better position. If the private sector starts to do more to attract and retain women, it has a state infrastructure to underpin it. The authors cite the evidence to show that birth rates are more likely to rise if women are given the support they need to both work and have children. In other words, they want to work and if forced to make a choice between the two, will opt for a career over a family.

CALL TO ACTION

The book is a call to action to managers in the private sector as well as policy-makers. It suggests that economies could get a huge boost to their GDP if they unleash this force. They argue that businesses will become better performers with a more “gender bilingual” culture that advances women equally to men.

It is the men who need to be persuaded. The authors divide this group into the Progressive, the Patient and the Plodding. One thing they don’t tackle, however, is the growing angst amongst some men about their position in the gender stakes. Witness the rise of books such as Guy Garcia’s The Decline of Men (Harper, 2008). Many of them feel that they are being left out. Less suited to the service-oriented workforce, often less educated, they are increasingly falling off the greasy pole mid-way in their careers.

PROGRESSIVE LEADERS CARLOS GHOSN AND NIALL FITZGERALD

Wittenberg-Cox and Maitland point out that some progressive business leaders were persuaded of the need for change by dint of personal experience. Big beasts in the corporate jungle such as Carlos Ghosn, President and CEO of Renault and Nissan and Niall FitzGerald, KBE, Deputy Chairman of Thomson Reuters realised that they would not want any obstacles facing their daughters in the workplace. This helped to bring them around to the need for radical action to feminise their organisations.

Equally, though, many business leaders have sons. And they may be very worried today that in the brave new world – where women are rightly becoming ever more equal – their sons will not fare as well. The authors talk about men as if they are one thing. The reality is that they are really talking to alpha-males who have used their very sharp elbows to reach the top of their organisations. They may not mind changing the rules of the game (no old boy’s clubs, less reliance on men’s informal circles, for example) considering they have already made it. But the alpha-males coming up through the middle ranks may not be so sanguine. They, after all, stand to benefit from a macho, long-hours culture. It is very hard to persuade this group, but it is they who must be so persuaded.

Other men, the beta-males and beyond, may be doing reasonably well. But some of them will not be able to out-compete highly qualified, multi-tasking women. They also won’t want change.

MAKING THE CASE FOR CHANGE

So, as the authors rightly argue, change must be brought about by convincing the top male business leaders that it is their number one priority from a strategic point of view and that it requires a profound cultural change to make it happen. They have to be convinced of this just at the time that women seem to be advancing beyond many men and at a time when the world economy is seemingly grinding to a halt.

This makes the book even more relevant. Companies need new ways to boost productivity and creativity. Including women more successfully in their ventures will help them enormously. This book helps to make the case. It also offers plenty of tips on how to implement the necessary changes to really make a difference. The rest is up to the (male) managers out there to seize the opportunity. When they see that the likes of Ghosn and FitzGerald are out there leading the way, they may start to recognise the importance of this issue.