09 Oct 2008
SENIOR MEN JOIN THE GENDER DEBATE
17 June 2008Avivah and I’ve been busy promoting Why Women Mean Business in North America and across Europe in the last few months. We had big, successful launch events hosted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in Toronto (3 April) and New York (7 April). In New York, we also spoke at a Citi Women’s Council lunch and were interviewed on Fox Business Channel’s “Happy Hour” in the Bull & Bear Bar of the Waldorf Astoria.
Cleo Thompson, who runs PwC’s Gender Advisory Council programme, has written entertainingly about the North American book launches on her “The Gender Agenda” blog: http://pwc.blogs.com/gender_agenda/2008/04/index.html
The panels were terrific, both moderated by women journalists (in Toronto it was leading business journalist Deirdre McMurdy, in New York it was Chrystia Freeland, US Managing Editor of the Financial Times. The Canadian panel comprised Rick Waugh, head of Scotiabank, Chris Clark, CEO of PwC, and Carol Stephenson, Dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business. New York’s lively discussion involved Alan Siegel, head of Siegel+Gale, Bob Moritz, US Assurance Leader of PwC, and Thomas F. Cooley, Dean of the New York University Stern School of Business.
These events were followed in May by the launch of the French edition of the book, titled Womenomics: La croissance depend aussi des femmes (Growth also depends on women) and published by Eyrolles. This launch was hosted by the OECD in Paris and led to lots of interesting coverage in the French-speaking media, including a review in Le Monde. On the panel discussing the book were Aart De Geus, Deputy General Secretary of the OECD, Olivier Marchal, head of Bain in France, and Nicole Notat, Chairwoman of Vigeo.
Our most recent joint speaking event was in Geneva on June 6, about which I wrote the following guest column for The Glass Hammer website (www.glasshammer.com):
“Senior business men offered their take on promoting women at an evening debate in Geneva on June 6 about our book, Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the emergence of our next economic revolution.
The executives represented a great cross-section of global business. Gianni Ciserani is president of Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods company, in western Europe; Paolo Fellin is head of marketing in Europe for Caterpillar, the heavy industrial group; and Peter Lorange recently retired as president of IMD, the Lausanne-based business school that educates executives of multinationals like P&G and Caterpillar.
It was also an interesting setting for the latest in a series of presentations that my co-author Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and I have done on the book. Switzerland is one of Europe’s most socially conservative countries: women represent just 6% of directors on major company boards and it’s predicted that it will take 70 years at current progress to reach gender parity in business leadership. Women often have to choose between career and family, and 40% of university-educated women aged 40 are childless.
At the same time, Switzerland is where many global companies have their European headquarters, and the lakeside city of Geneva has some thriving women’s networks, one of which, Geneva Women in International Trade (GWIT), was the host of the evening event, which attracted 150 people.
After Avivah and I had set out why gender is a strategic issue for business, not a “women’s issue”, moderator Karen Saddler asked each of the male panellists to rank the strategic importance of gender for their organisations on a scale of 1 to 10. For Caterpillar, it was 8, while IMD and P&G both put it as high as 10. This was cheering news.
The big issue for both P&G and Caterpillar is how to ensure more women are promoted into the senior ranks. Ciserani said it was about “levelling the playing field” to ensure women were not ruled out just because they had a different leadership style or approach from men. The way to do this was to judge people purely on results – on the numbers they achieved and how well they promoted the company. Other things did not matter, he said. “You don’t look at who has been more visible, who has asked more for promotion, who wrote more memos or made more speeches. I don’t care about this.”
To judge him by the numbers, P&G is doing better than many in western Europe. Ciserani’s board and executive committee consist of 30% women – achieving the critical mass that research has shown to be linked with significant financial out-performance. Women account for 40% of overall management.
He said gender had to be central to business strategy, not peripheral, and linked to results – just what we argue in the book. “If you tell people it’s a way to grow the pie – that more women mean better business - it becomes more convincing,” he said.
Caterpillar struggles to recruit women to the core of its business because there are so few female engineers coming out of university. While women make up more than half the workforce in human resources and communications, they account for only 10% in engineering and operations. In Fellin’s business unit, covering Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet bloc Commonwealth of Independent States, 30% of the workforce, and 25% of senior managers, are female.
Fellin explained the policy that at least one of the three short-listed candidates for any internal position at Caterpillar has to be “different” from the white male norm. This led to a debate about so-called positive discrimination. We don’t recommend positive discrimination – instead we call for an undoing of the positive discrimination that currently exists in favour of men. A woman in the audience raised the possibility of a backlash if a woman was pushed forward for a promotion and then proved to be not up to it. I wonder why this argument is so often made in relation to women, but does not seem to apply to men who are not up to the job.
Although Caterpillar is reluctant to enforce quotas, Fellin strongly defended the “one-in three” practice, saying: “We want to make progress faster than we are today”. Avivah then pointed out that having only one woman on a shortlist of three was a small number, given that women are half the population and 60% of graduates are female.
At the end, panellists were asked for advice on getting on in one’s career. Lorange said it was important that people know how to listen. Fellin and Ciserani said it was crucial to “be yourself” and to be self-confident.
I believe one of the benefits of understanding our economic importance as women today is that we really can be ourselves, rather than feeling we need to adapt to a norm created by men for men in a bygone era. This point came across powerfully as Ania Jakubowski, president of GWIT, wrapped up the event, telling the audience: “Don’t work for a company where you’re not valued – go find the right environment for you!””
Coming next:
Avivah in Abu Dhabi
Oslo book launch in the autumn
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