The diversity dilemma

Imagine spending 10 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a problem only to make it worse, not better. I am talking about the futile attempts of many companies to recruit women into senior roles in business.

I have been working with a client recently trying to address this very issue, and as part of my preparation I did some research to find examples of best practice.

We ended up focusing on 23 global companies which had won awards in the last few years for their women’s initiatives. What we found shocked me so much that I feel compelled to share it with you.

Of the 23 companies we studied, we were only able to find evidence that six of them had made any substantial improvements in the number of women they had in senior roles.

One European arm of a Big Four accounting firm even went so far as to claim credit for 26% of their graduate intake being women. Some further search indicated that 50% of the available talent pool was female. Hardly an achievement worthy of commendation.

And here is the most disturbing part. The six who did were only able to do it with arbitrary quotas and targets. It turns out that because we have such deep biases our prejudice is mostly unconscious.

How is it that in 2010 we need to be “forced” to promote women into positions they deserve as much as the men with whom they compete for them?

I need to confess here that I feel like the pot calling the kettle black. In the middle of this research I hosted a lunch for 12 highly successful young entrepreneurs.

Only when we all arrived for lunch did it become evident that I had invited 10 men and one women. And it took the one woman to point that out to me.

Even as I was knee deep in this stuff, my unconscious biases were so strong I failed to take appropriate action.

Consider some of the following things that also came out of the research:

• As a general rule senior managers overestimate their “open-mindedness” and ability to make non-sexist judgments. It turns out that we are half as open-minded and inclusive in our behaviour as we think we are.
• Women are just as capable of discriminating against other women as men are. Some researchers even suggest they are trying to protect their positions as the “only” woman on the board.
• Even when women’s networking groups exist, they are often excluded from the informal networks that count. That is, the networks where the most important decisions get made.

And what makes this most shocking is that ALL of the credible research shows that companies with greater diversity (namely, more women in senior and executive roles) outperform the market by as much as 33%.

In other words, it is good for business but we don’t change. Can that really be right?

Here are some insights from the six that have had progress which you may find interesting:

• Quotas work. As “insulting” as the need for a quota may be for many women, to get results we must forcefully break the biases which keep the status quos entrenched. Insisting that at least one female candidate be in the final three for each appointment and promotion to a senior position is good and effective policy.
• Senior leaders are required to find at least one female that they will personally mentor and make it their personal responsibility to ensure they progress to the higher ranks.
• Facilitating much more intimate networks between aspiring women and senior managers (especially men) is far more powerful than the traditional strategy of formal women’s networks.
• Unleashing “change agents” with the power to enforce the diversity agenda is a powerful initiative. These people should actively seek out insight from women in the business and actively coach them to get on development programmes and the like.
• Making these programmes customer focused and NOT diversity focused works. Just using the word “diversity” makes people’s eyes glaze over, but when it the idea is framed as enticing more women customers and improving the retention of female clients, the changes are typically more openly embraced and sustained.

I know I am a little late to weigh in on this issue, and I know I am a man, but when I learned that the situation was regressing, I felt the need to speak up!

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+       Peter Sheahan is a globally-recognised Generation Y and business strategy expert. He is the author of five books, including business bestsellers Generation Y and Flip