A CEO’s guide to gender equality
The case for gender equality is strong. Why
is progress so slow?
Progressive executives know that gender equality is not only the right thing
to do but also the smart thing. That’s why more CEOs, heads of
state, and university leaders are committing themselves to gender-equality
goals for the institutions they lead.
But gender equality is proving difficult to achieve. How can
companies and public institutions move more quickly? This CEO’s guide
synthesizes multiple sources to make quick sense of a complex issue.
The promise of gender equality
Gender equality gets a lot of attention these days, and for good
reason: it is not only an issue of fairness but also, for companies, a matter
of attracting the best workers, at least half of whom are women. There is also
considerable economic value at stake for companies and nations.
A new study by the McKinsey Global Institute
finds that the world economy could add trillions of dollars in growth during
the next ten years if countries met best-in-region scores for improving women’s participation
in the labor force. Countries in Latin America, for example,
would aim to achieve Chile’s annual rate of increase, 1.9 percentage points,
while East and Southeast Asian countries would try to match Singapore’s
improvement of 1.1 percentage points a year.
The difficulty
Big as the prize may be, gender equality still eludes companies
around the globe. Despite modest improvements in the past few years, women are
underrepresented at every level in the corporate pipeline—especially the senior
level.
Why is progress in gender equality so hard to
achieve? A number of factors are involved, but one leading reason is
undoubtedly unconscious bias. Film actress Geena Davis believes that it
results, in part, from lopsided male representation in
television and film—a long-standing trend observed by the
Institute on Gender in Media that she founded. “When we present the data to
studios and content creators,” she says, “their jaws are on the ground. In
family films, the ratio of male to female characters is 3:1. Shockingly, the
ratio of male to female characters has been exactly the same since 1946.
Of the characters with jobs, 81 percent are male.”
Perception gaps may also be an
obstacle. McKinsey research on diversity shows that fewer men than women acknowledge the challenges faced
by female employees at work. For instance, when asked whether “even with equal
skills and qualifications, women have much more difficulty reaching
top-management positions,” the gender divide was striking: 93 percent of women
agreed with the statement, but just 58 percent of men. And while just 5 percent
of women disagreed with the statement, some 28 percent of men did.
What’s more, women hear mixed messages about
their own careers. “Think of a career like a marathon,” says Facebook chief
operating officer and Lean In founder Sheryl Sandberg. “Long, grueling,
ultimately rewarding. What voices do the men hear from the beginning? ‘You’ve
got this. Keep going. Great race ahead of you.’ What do the women hear from day
one out of college? ‘You sure you want to run? Marathon’s really long. You’re
probably not going to want to finish. Don’t you want kids one day?’ The voices
for men get stronger, ‘Yes, go. You’ve got this.’ The voices for women can get
openly hostile. ‘Are you sure you should be running when your kids need you at
home?’”
The solution
As top executives think about pressing forward with their own
gender initiatives, they can start with four prescriptions.
Broaden your action. Our research shows that gender equality requires executives to
intervene across a broad range of factors, setting in motion disparate
resources and people for years at a time. The focus in these interventions must
be to help women become better leaders—and to design conditions under which
they can. Crucial aspects include sponsoring (and not just mentoring) women,
neutralizing the effects of maternity leaves on career advancement and wage
increases, and evolving the criteria companies use for promotions to include a
diversity of leadership styles. To learn how eBay embarked on a journey to
bring more women into its top ranks. Companies that make progress tend to
hold a series of challenging conversations about
gender issues among their executive teams. The
following five questions can help spur these discussions:
Where are the women in our talent pipeline?
What skills are we helping women build?
Do we provide sponsors as well as role models?
Are we rooting out unconscious bias?
How much are our policies helping?
Sweat the small stuff. Ian Narev, CEO of the
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, notes that
gender equality requires a bias for action. “I like focusing on processes
because it helps us get past any ‘warm and fuzzy’ elements of diversity and
into action levers. For example, we discovered we had an anachronistic process
that classified women on maternity leave as ‘over quota, unattached,’ which,
among other things, essentially meant they couldn’t keep their cell phones or
laptops. This policy may not have been initiated by anyone still at the bank,
but it had gone unexamined and was preventing us from staying in contact with
parents on leave and therefore [from] allowing us to work with them to create
more flexible return options. Fixing it was easy; spotting it was harder.”
Are we on the way to creating gender equality in the corporate
world? Present trends may not be encouraging, but greater commitment from CEOs,
combined with a willingness to stay the course on big transformational-change
projects, could help finally resolve an issue that’s long overdue for fixing.
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Leading_in_the_21st_century/A_CEOs_guide_to_gender_equality?cid=mckwomen-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1511
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