This is The Century For Women Workers - Building Gender Balanced Business

BY AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX

This may be China’s century in geopolitical terms, as some believe the current financial crisis marks the moment when power passes from Washington to Beijing.

But this may also be the century for women, certainly in terms of the workplace.

Women suited to 21st century business
Christopher Flett, the author of What Men Don’t Tell Women About Business – Opening Up the Heavily Guarded Alpha Male Playbook writes of a new model of business, driven by technology and inter-connectedness.

In this world, it is tougher to keep customers loyal. He says, “The new model, which I will henceforth refer to as the new paradigm is based on integrity, authenticity, and relationships. The integrity part means doing what is right, authenticity means delivering what is promised, and the relationship means knowing the person or people you are doing business with. This is how women have been doing business for the last 50 years, but the Alpha Males have chastised them for it because they felt women spent too much time caring.”

Not anymore, he continues. “Women are now in a position to lead because theirs is the only model that works in the new global business environment.”

There are other indications of the changing shift beyond what we already know about women as talent, leaders and consumers.

Women could become the majority of the workers
In some developed economies, women may soon begin to outnumber men in the workforce for the first time. In the US and Australia, where this trend seems most likely, more men have lost their jobs than women in part because men tend to dominate in the blue-collar industries such as construction and manufacturing that have been hardest hit by the recession.

In January, the New York Times reported that women in the workforce had already passed the 49% mark and were set to go past the 50% milestone. The Financial Times reported in April that men had lost 80% of the 5.1 million jobs gone since the start of the recession. Many women were protected in the more insulated sectors such as education and healthcare. In March 2009, women in part-time and full-time jobs exceeded men in full-time jobs in Australia, another first.

However, this trend could reverse if countries such as the US and the UK have to make deep cuts to their public services to pay back their massive debts. Then jobs in such sectors could be under greater threat.

Also, this trend has not been all one way. Jobs by women fell at a much greater rate than those held by men in the last quarter of 2008 in the UK, according to the Financial Times. In part, the paper suggested, this might have been connected to the fact that women were employed in “softer” sectors such as retail and catering, where there was less government support against the effects of the recession.

Nonetheless, the trend in the US and Australia mark an important and possibly historic shift of women in the workforce.

Women as majority of the talent
Even more compelling is some new data on the projected number of women graduates in the near future. By 2015, just six years away, more than 60% of the graduates will be women in ten OECD nations, according to a recent OECD report, Higher Education to 2030. And in the UK and Sweden, the figures surpass 70%. In 2020, the figures exceed 70% in four nations: Hungary (73%), Italy (70%), UK (72%), and Sweden (76%).

In a recent interview with WOMEN-omics, Piyush Gupta of South East Asia Pacific, Citibank, recalls the moment when he and others at the bank realised that they were missing out on a largely untapped well of talent – the women. “It hits you like a bludgeon”, he recalls. Moreover, Gupta noted, women were not only graduating in larger numbers, they were also often coming at the top of the class. Imagine what things will be like when seven out of ten graduates are women in many nations across the world. Already, there are some countries in Asia (Thailand and Malaysia, for example), where men might have to have their own diversity committees – a sign of the future perhaps.

In this new world, business managers will need to become very good at attracting and retaining the best female talent. Some innovators are already starting on this journey, changing their companies and cultures to become more “gender bilingual”. They put the gender issue at the top of their priority list. The rest still have it as a “nice-to-have”, which leaves them…well,seriously behind the curve.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, one of Europe’s leading gender consultancies. Based in Paris, she works with progressive companies to develop more inclusive leadership styles, promote more gender-balanced management teams, and review processes and policies to better respond to women – both as employees and consumers.

She is the co-author of the bestselling Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution (Wiley & Sons, 2008). She is also the Founder and Honorary President of the European Professional Women’s Network, a certified executive coach and spent five years as a Visiting Coach at INSEAD. She has spoken on leadership and growth opportunities across Europe and has had articles, reviews, and interviews published in publications ranging from the Harvard Business Review and the International Herald Tribune to the Financial Times in the UK, Le Temps in Geneva, Le Monde and ELLE in France and the National in Abu Dhabi. Canadian, French and Swiss, Avivah has a BA from the University of Toronto, an MBA from INSEAD and has completed the Women’s Leadership Program at Harvard. ELLE Magazine recently recognized her as one of the TOP 40 Women Leading Change.