You Heard It Here - Building Gender Balanced Business

“[C]ompanies like Archer Daniels Midland, PepsiCo and Kraft Foods all have women CEOs, as the former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, is running for governor in California. The Secretary of state is a woman, as are this year’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine, chemistry and economics.”

“Today, high-performance companies are creating an environment of diversity.”

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“The promotion of equality between girls and boys from birth: that must be the priority.”

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“Women are risk-aware, men are risk takers…Women are willing to ask stupid questions. We want to understand. We won’t take risks we don’t understand, so we ask: what is sub-prime? Who’ll pay these loans back?”

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“For Sodexo, diversity is more than a moral obligation or a societal goal: it is an economic imperative. Diversity is a source of competitive advantage and a key element of our long-term growth strategy. Diversity is engrained in all aspects of our business – our work environment, our markets and our communities – because it allows us to differentiate, to innovate and to grow.”

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“The Indian IT-BPO industry has set a high standard in gender inclusivity. Women are a key and vital part of our workforce, and their participation in the workforce is seen as a critical enabling factor for continued growth of the industry.”

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“Having a mixed gender board is invariably better than a single gender board. It’s more civilised, a little more courteous. It encourages people to air different opinions from their gender perspectives. If half the people you’re serving are women and you have no women on the board to offer a view, that’s a very distorted picture you risk creating.”

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“It is clear that the IT industry is still something of a dinosaur when it comes to attracting women to choose technology as a career. This needs to change if we’re truly going to attract the highest calibre of potential employees.”

“In these challenging economic times, companies should refresh their talent strategy including women advancement programs to play offense rather than defense.”

“Securing and maintaining the recruitment, retention and development of women in mid-management roles now is the only way a pipeline of women in senior executive roles can be maintained in the recovery.”

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“While we work on the problem, have some sympathy for your guy friends in finance. It isn’t easy getting mocked about how you’ve been making a mess of things with your flighty, out-of-control hormones.”

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“It appears that the glass ceiling effect on women’s advancement may reflect not only general negative stereotypes about the competencies of women, but also weight bias that results in the application of stricter appearance standards to women.”

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“No matter where we look, whether in New York or Asia Pacific, from engineering to pharmaceuticals, we find achievement through inclusion of women.”

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“There is probably not a productivity penalty to shortening hours in the U.S., and there may even be a benefit.”

Quoted by Sharon Meers, an author of Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All

“Although many companies have made it a priority to promote and appoint female employees at a senior level, the statistics show there has been little progress at a senior management level for women.”

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“Women tend to have a lot more humility about saying ‘help’. When a business is struggling, women are more receptive to the idea of getting mentors and outside help.”

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“Every mum knows you have to be organised and efficient to run a home — so it’s great to see companies acknowledging this too. Many of the skills you need to be a mum are easily transferred to the workplace.”

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“If we create economic opportunities for women, provide them decent jobs and a chance to combine work and family, our countries will be rich and achieve high standards of living, render top-quality medical services and education and ensure a clean and safe environment.”

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“Whether in biology, business or academia, a diversity of behaviors and skills is important for the health of a group, especially a group that is tackling highly complex problems in a fast changing environment.”

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“We’ve found that women respond better to women bankers… Women bring something different to business, and you need to leverage both genders. It’s a substantive business issue. It is not about being kind to women. It is about ensuring the success of our business in the future.”

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“Research shows that gender empowerment almost always has a positive impact on performance. Competitiveness can be achieved more readily by companies that recognize the talent of the entire workforce.”

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“I think that men are able to self-promote themselves naturally. Women can’t wait for somebody to just find out about our hard work and willingness to grow just by chance.”

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“When a son is young, he is given due exposure to business. But a daughter is always kept away. This needs to change.”

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“Women listen to what people actually say, they test for understanding and they look for the collaborative solution. You also get a lot of discussion on the emotional side. What is the mood in the company on this? How do people respond to this in terms of feelings and motivations?”

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“This recession must not be used as an excuse to send women back to the kitchen. Women are now looking to the government to send out a strong signal to businesses that it will not compromise on women’s rights.”

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“It’s often when business is in a crisis and it’s trying to recruit somebody new and then men maybe think, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I want to touch that,’ and this can often be an opportunity for a woman to come in and make a difference.”

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“Feminisation of management seems to protect against financial crisis. Is the female managerial style different and could it positively influence companies’ performances?”

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“We need policies to solve all the problems we face as women in business. As women, we also need representation not only in parliament, but also at board level. Women are very influential and they can be trusted to do that at board level.”

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“We’re barely able to pay our mortgage. My wife’s stressed and tired, so I try and have a good dinner waiting when she gets home. I guess that’s what a good wife would do. I guess I’d make a good wife.”

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“As our customers continue to become more diverse, it’s important that organizationally we look like them.” More…

“Women don’t rule the world because enough of them aren’t in a position to do so.”

“Men want women to learn the rules of the game. Women don’t think it’s a game.”

“Maybe if you have only women in a company, they won’t take enough risk. If you have only men, maybe they will take too much risk.”

“Clearly, something needs to change. You can argue that the men have made a right mess of it, and now the ladies should have a go.”

“The latest official employment statistics [in the UK] show that the number of women in full-time work fell by 53,000 in the last quarter, compared with a fall of 36,000 for men. It means women are losing full-time jobs at twice the rate of men, because men significantly outnumber women in the workplace…In a sign of how seriously the issue is being taken, [UK Prime Minister Gordon] Brown has agreed to dedicate a session of the G20 meeting of the world’s economic powers to the impact of the recession on women. It will be the first time the G20 has held formal talks about the role of women in the economy.”
Isabel Oakeshott, deputy political editor, Sunday Times, January 25, 2009

“…the biggest tensions seem to arise after the insertion of that dividing line between the words work and life. The search for an elusive balance between the two can be as tiring as work itself. Work is life, as the late Studs Terkel said. We should rub out that firm black line that separates our lives and our careers. It creates a false choice, an either/or situation that can rarely be successfully resolved.”
Financial Times

“As he steps fully into power as the 44th President of the United States, Obama and this administration must follow the lead of the more than 60 countries who rank ahead of us in women’s leadership, and honor dreams of those women, and so many more, who want their daughters’ futures to look as bright as their sons’. What a legacy that would leave for Sasha and Malia—and for all our nation’s children.”
The Huffington Post