Ladies, Get Over the Barriers & Bias Stuff - Building Gender Balanced Business

We are delighted to see that the research organisation on professional women, Catalyst, has discovered men. After 40 years of lobbying for women’s professional advancement, the American non-profit (run mostly by women) has discovered, along with other pro-women campaigning organisations, that men may be partners to progress.

Their recent report boasts a promising title: Engaging Men in Gender Initiatives. I couldn’t agree more. It echoes my writing in Why Women Mean Business when they say that, “why have too many gender initiatives missed the mark? One reason is that too many gender initiatives focus on changing women.” Absolutely. We have long argued that we have to stop fixing the women, and start fixing the cultures and mindsets that have not adapted to 21st century labour force and market realities.

Long experience of promoting gender balance
We also agree that in their “exclusive focus on women, rather than engaging men, many companies have unwittingly alienated them.” That is why our company, 20-first, has for years been running ‘gender balancing’ initiatives with the Executive Committee and leadership teams, focusing entirely on change management principles, rather than Women’s Leadership programmes bent on making women behave a bit more like their male colleagues.

But then Catalyst falls into the all too-common trap of focusing on bias and barriers. Catalyst has spent years focusing on the bias and barriers blocking women’s advancement, now it is focusing on the bias and barriers to men’s involvement! So, it has invested research in discovering that the main barriers are apathy (74%), fear (74%) and real and perceived ignorance (51%). Now there is some good news that I’m sure the gentlemen will be delighted to hear.

No need to condescend to men
Then, we move to condescension. “More than having an awareness of gender bias, men must have a strong commitment to the ideal of fairness – a strong personal conviction that bias is wrong and that the ideal of equality is one for which they should stand up.” Most men I’ve met in companies have a strong personal commitment to fairness. It is incredibly insulting to suggest that this may not be the case. They are doing exactly what we’ve asked them to do for a century or more. They are treating everyone equally and the same. Half the problem we face moving forward is getting companies to recognize, value and adapt to women’s differences. For that, we mostly need men to be convinced that there is some business benefit in doing so. They weren’t hired to right social injustices.

Then, the report focuses almost exclusively on men as champions and supporters of gender initiatives. The way men are helpers and supporters of moms when they change a diaper.

Enough, Already

Ladies, please. It’s time to move into the 21st century. We’re not talking about men helping us with the diapers and the gender initiatives.

Gender is a strategic business issue.
Any CEO worthy of his seat should be aware that women are now the majority of the educated talent pool in the developed world, and the majority of the market. Leaders need to be accountable to their shareholders for their ability to create a gender balance in their companies right to the top, a now-proven (thanks to Catalyst!) link to bottom line profitability.

Note, for example, how under-represented women still are at senior levels in the top US banks (Banks Need To Do Better). I would argue it is a business imperative following the financial crisis that the banks improve the gender balance of their leadership teams in the near future.

We should be measuring, tracking and ranking companies on their gender balance, not (as is currently common) on tick-the-box women’s programmes like the feel-good but largely ineffective mentoring, training and coaching stuff that we’ve been doing for the past two decades (as a recent Bain & Co. report has shown).

It’s time for metrics and manager accountability
It’s time, not to get the guy’s support, but to make leaders accountable. Let’s get some metrics. How many women on the Executive Committee, at the level below and the level below that? That’s tomorrow’s pipeline for the top, and most companies are pretty barren of gender balance. That’s not good for their business. Investors, shareholders and potential employees deserve clear data. Companies have become increasingly good at hiding the gender reality of their leadership teams (check out any corporate website. The photos went first, now the first names of leaders are on their way out too).

Let’s not simply step from the erroneous presumption of decades of fix-the-women strategies to timidly asking for some support. That is such a female sort of thing to do…

The best performing companies and leaders have learned how to sustainably attract, retain and promote both men and women in a gender ‘bilingual’ way. Many companies have not yet achieved anything like satisfying results. This is in part because the arguments used to date, the name, the shame and the focus on negatives is hardly a rallying cry for enrolling business people.

Talk the language of opportunity, sustainability, profitability
There is a ‘blue ocean’ of opportunity in harnessing the benefits of better gender balance. Let’s not drown them in the language of victimhood and accusation.

Drop the talk of bias and barriers. Try opportunity, sustainability, profitability. I’ve tried, it works. In fact, in my experience, the men are often more willing change agents on gender than their female colleagues. So let’s make them more than allies. Let’s invite them to lead the charge on gender. We can simply be the judges of their performance…