Same Old, Same Old - Building Gender Balanced Business

September 22 2008

Just back from three days at the WIN COnference, with some 600 other women and … maybe 3 men. While the financial world was melting all around us, one couldn’t help wondering if the male dominated financial world wouldn’t have benefited from a little more gender balance.

But judging from what the big, experienced companies who were there presenting what they are doing on gender, we are not likely to get there any time soon.

First, the dirth of men in these women’s conferences underlines better than anything how much the issue of gender has been sidelined as a women’s issue, of little relevance to the guys who still run most of these companies. The women who are there are still too often fighting old battles. The biggest revolution in the area of diversity has been to change the accepted lingo to Diversity & Inclusion. But for all the well-meaning effort, these programmes are unlikely to make much progress on gender balance. Especially when all the women on the Corporate Panel were desperate to reassure the audience that diversity was about “much more than gender…”

But who ever heard of a company telling its managers to be “inclusive” of the Chinese? In the 21st century, global companies know that they better train their best to learn everything they can about China and the Chinese. It’s not inclusion they are after, it’s in-depth understanding.

In the 21st century, companies that want to survive and prosper need to get beyond the political correctness of D&I in regards to gender. They better train their best to learn everything they can about women and how to manage and market to them. It’s not inclusion they should be after, it’s in-depth understanding.

And judging from the charming young man (one of the three) who stood up in a stereotypically self-marketing sort of way to assure us that luckily his own organisation (American Express) didn’t have any of these gender limitations anymore, and then proceeded to berate the audience for not being inclusive of the men present, ‘understanding’ will also require a little bit of work.

When will we have a conference on gender that includes both men and women? The Chinese have an expression for it… yin and yang.