Male Champions of Women’s Advancement are a Critical Ingredient for Equality
By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
“There’s no such thing as the glass ceiling; only a thick layer of men.”
This is a quote that has been attributed to many formidable women over the years: Laura Liswood, Secretary General of the Council of Women World Leaders; Majora Carter, an environmental activist and Co-Founder & CEO of StartUpBox.SouthBronx; Kathy Matsui, Managing Director and Chief Japan Strategist at Goldman Sachs Japan; and Jane Harman, President of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Regardless of who said it first (my money’s on Liswood), it acknowledges a fundamental fact. In order to achieve gender equality in leadership, we’re going to have to deal with the men in some way or another.
Most men are not actively keeping women out of top jobs. They’re simply bystanders to the inertia of millennia-old male-dominated power structures, and many don’t see what’s in it for them to put in the work to change a system that gives them an automatic boost — that is, if they are even aware that they’re getting bonus life points simply for being male in the first place.
But this is changing as people — both men and women — develop more awareness about the value of gender diversity. One senior individual who “gets it” can make a big difference. A Columbia study, for example, showed that at Danish companies whose CEOs have daughters, the wage gap between men and women workers tends to be smaller.
There is a vast array of research detailing the benefits of gender diversity in leadership. For example, Thomson Reuters recently released a new study showing that companies with gender-diverse boards outperform those with no women. Beyond the business case, though, we live in a society that supposedly values diversity, equality, and meritocracy. The work to engage a fair share of women in leadership should be a project we are all engaged in, whatever our gender.
Men make up about half of the entry-level workforce for professional careers, and there is a greater percentage of men at every rung moving up the ladder. At the senior management level, the vast majority of people are men. In order to achieve real equality, men need to be encouraged to get involved in gender diversity. After all, a simple look at the same ladder shows that they make the lion’s share of decisions on who gets hired and who gets promoted.
Our latest research shows that, at many companies, some men are working to support women’s advancement. What’s more, the presence male champions of gender equality at a company often signifies the presence of other kinds of support for women in the same organization. When men get involved in diversity, companies do more.
What Male Champions Can Do
In many companies, there are men supporting women’s advancement, at least to some degree. In our latest research into junior and mid-level in technology roles, about half of our respondents (52 percent) said there were male champions of women’s advancement in their companies.
About a third (30.4 percent) said they were senior men, 6.5 percent said male champions were only at the junior or mid-level, and 15.1 percent said there were male champions of women’s advancement at every level. It is interesting that the majority of champions were at the senior level, rather than the supposedly more-progressive younger groups. But this could simply be a case of senior people having the power or leeway to support women, whereas younger people don’t think they have that power. Another factor could be that senior men are more likely to have adult daughters entering the workforce, and many want to change in a recently-acknowledged inequality.
Regardless of the reason why they want to be involved in supporting gender equality initiatives, senior male champions of women’s advancement should be encouraged to spend time reaching out to junior men and discussing the importance of diversity with them too.
Our report, “Women in Technology: Leaders of Tomorrow” shows that male champions also have a role to play in whether a company provides other kinds of support that women need to advance to leadership roles. For example, companies with male champions of women’s advancement were more likely to be places that “walk the talk” by supporting women to the extent that senior people say they want to. Women are more likely to have role models at these companies, and women are more likely to have experienced sponsorship-behavior as well.
When men get involved in gender equality, companies work harder to create a fair playing field for women. This increases the likelihood of success — both for women to achieve higher aspirations, and for companies to leverage the benefits of diversity.
