Women Mean Business: Getting Leaders to Promote Women on Performance, Not Quotas
By: Alison Maitland
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 (previously featured on The Glass Hammer on February 5 and April 8).
The executives represented a great cross-section of global business: Gianni Ciserani is president of Procter & Gamble, in western Europe; Paolo Fellin 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; 40% of university-educated women aged 40 are childless.
At the same time, Switzerland is where many global companies have their European headquarters. The lakeside city of Geneva has some thriving women’s networks however, one of which, Geneva Women in International Trade (GWIT), was the host of the evening event, which attracted 150 people.
After Avivah and I illustrated why gender is a strategic issue for business, not just a “women’s issue”, moderator Karen Saddler asked each of the male panelists to rank the strategic importance of gender for their organizations 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 “leveling 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, 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, thus 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, which covers 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 a 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 favor 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 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, panelists were asked for advice on getting ahead in one’s career. Lorange said it was important that people know how to listen. Fellin and Ciserani advised that 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. Ania Jakubowski, president of GWIT, wrapped up the event by underlining this point, telling the audience: “Don’t work for a company where you’re not valued – go find the right environment for you!”
