Seven Steps to Leading a Gender-Balanced Business. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox
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this book, you’ll see “Frontline Feedback” boxes, which feature real reactions to gender issues from leaders I’ve worked with. Many companies don’t feel comfortable openly discussing their ratio of men to women, or the challenges and rewards of becoming a gender-balanced organization. But industry-leading firms are quietly making progress in realizing this opportunity—and you can, too.
FRONTLINE FEEDBACK: “The way the topic has now been positioned helped the team see that it isn’t a problem or a fight for numbers/KPI results. It helped everyone see that this is a way of creating value for the company. It freed up peoples’ minds.”
Simplify the Business Case
Today 59 percent of global university graduates are female, according to the OECD.[1] Women’s educational empowerment, combined with a shift from manufacturing-dominated twentieth-century economies to services-dominated twenty-first-century economies has led to economic independence, rising incomes, and a narrowing gender gap in global labor forces.
Women also represent most of the consumer market. In fact, 80 percent of consumer goods purchasing decisions are in the hands of women. Increasingly, women make the majority of buying decisions in an ever-expanding range of sectors internationally. What’s more, women’s tastes and preferences are transforming sectors from computers and cars to finance and fuel. Companies ignore this shift in buying power at their peril, because their smart competitors are paying close attention to women’s growing influence on the market.
So why are so many companies still struggling to adapt?
To begin with, organizations are still run mostly by men, and most people don’t really understand why. Men usually point the finger at women. Women mostly point the finger at men. Companies, managers, and women all feel frustrated. Some sectors still think the whole gender issue is largely irrelevant to their current male-dominated customer realities. But the truth is, gender balance benefits every company. It’s time to get to the bottom of why such strong imbalances still persist and make the changes that will benefit men, women—and business as a whole.
FRONTLINE FEEDBACK: “We keep saying that we want to more clearly mirror our consumers in terms of nationality and gender. Yet all of the senior decision makers are men, even in the product areas most closely associated with women.”
What’s Your Gender Framework?
The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan famously said. When it comes to gender issues, context is everything. Here are two very different contextual frameworks that we see in companies. They yield entirely different outcomes. Which of the following statements does your company use to frame the gender issue?
Framework 1: Gender balance is a great business opportunity. It’s a strong, company-wide push personally led by the CEO who is convinced that better gender balance will improve business performance.
Framework 2: Gender diversity is an important diversity dimension, led by the firm’s most senior woman, who is focused on improving the number of women in leadership.
Since context is such a key ingredient to successful gender balancing, it is best to have it strategically debated—and decided—by the right people. The ones with the power to actually make change happen. How important is the issue for your business, sector, and stakeholders? Is it a strategic business priority, up there with some of the other key challenges the company faces? Or is it seen as a subset of diversity issues and delegated to HR or to a women’s network?
A company’s implementation strategy—including who is actually responsible and accountable for gender balancing—is a direct result of the initial framework. If your firm sees gender as a “women’s issue” led by women and positions it as a subset of diversity issues it’s unlikely to shift statistics or make changes that matter in the long term.
FRONTLINE FEEDBACK: “In the past, there were leaders who created distrust and competitive behaviors, and functioned in a siloed approach. We’re now undergoing a strategic transition, which demands a new way of working and a new leadership style. People need to understand each other’s businesses and work in a way that is much more integrated and aligned. It’s about a different core of values and behaviors.”
Asking the right questions of the right people is key to setting up an effective gender-balancing effort. This is more of a change management process than a diversity issue, so it helps to start at the top to ensure alignment. Then you will need to get all managers on board while simultaneously adapting the organization’s policies and procedures.
Here are a few of the questions that each segment of the workforce will have to answer:
Senior executives. Are the company’s leaders convinced and aligned that gender is a strategic priority for the business? Do they understand the implications and leadership consequences if they decide to proactively push for balance?
Middle management. Are all managers, both male and female, on board with the goal and why it has been set? Do they have the management skills and the understanding of gender differences to be able to implement an actual shift in the current balance?
HR and talent management. Are HR and talent management policies aligned to support and facilitate the goals? Leadership development and identification, flexibility, career management, sponsorship, mobility, and dual careers are some examples of issues and policies that can block balance efforts. Each of these needs to be reviewed and gender “neutralized” (more on this in chapter 7).
Sales and marketing. Are the sales and marketing teams able to understand the benefits of gender differences and to maximize the business opportunities they offer? Men and women have different preferences and behaviors at every step of the customer journey, from website and channel management to social media and shopping experiences. Are those variations fully understood and addressed? Are traditionally male-dominated categories being examined to determine if the gender balance of their customers, end users, and stakeholders are shifting? If they are, are managers prepared to make changes?
To summarize, first, gender balance becomes a business imperative: it’s an opportunity for growth, rather than a diversity problem. Second, accountability for improving gender balance puts the focus on leaders and leadership, not on women. In order for real changes to happen in a company, all organizational functions and levels need to be aligned.
Identify Your Framework
Before we move on, take a minute to identify your own framework in Figure 1-1. The most common framework we encounter when meeting with a new client is the one on the left. The one we then try to build is the one on the right. Which element is your company already doing well, and where could it improve?
1 For US statistics, see http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/27/college-graduation-gender-salaries/; for international statistics, see http://www.oecd.org/edu/highlights.pdf.↵
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Redefine Gender Balance
Part of the challenge in reframing gender issues is recognizing that the world—and the subject—have changed. Much of what has been done for the past twenty years on the topic is now obsolete given the dramatic shift in global gender realities. Talking about “gender diversity” in a world where women are a dominant market force isn’t just out of date, it’s dangerous.
The term “gender diversity” itself is a misnomer. How many