By Melissa Anderson
Gap, Inc. was honored last week with a Catalyst award for its achievements in building diversity and inclusion at the company. Not only has the company made strides in increasing the number of women in key leadership positions, it has also focused on improving opportunities for women of color.
Between 2007 and 2015, the company has increased the representation of women reporting directly to the CEO from 33% to 77%. Forty percent of those top level reports are women of color. Similarly, in the same time frame, the number of women serving on Gap’s board has increased from one to four, two of whom are women of color.
Women also lead four of the company’s five brands, and since 2007, the representation of women at the vice president level has increased from 44% to 49.7%.
“Equality is engrained in everything we do. For us, it was not only the right thing to do, but also a business imperative,” said Dan Briskin, VP of Global Employee Relations and HR Shared Services, Gap Inc., during a panel at Catalyst’s annual conference on Wednesday.
The company’s award-winning diversity initiative, “Women and Opportunity,” was made up of three key pillars, according to Heather Robsahm, Senior Director of Talent Management for Banana Republic, one of Gap’s brands. These include career mobility, results oriented work environments (ROWE), and pay equity.
The vast majority (83%) of Gap’s current female executives are promoted from within, and many, like Robsahm, come from the company’s field operation. As part of its career mobility pillar, Gap has created career readiness programs to ensure employees are able to build their skills and set their career trajectory.
“We have a deep bench for women who are poised the lead the company into the future,” Robsham says.
Instituting the ROWE has helped the company improve accountability and engagement, Robsahm says, and demonstrated that people can own their time and still be successful at their jobs.
Finally, in 2014, the company affirmed it had achieved gender pay equity across its global workforce of 150,000 people. When the company set out to track its workforce pay, executives expected they might come across some gaps, so the company set aside some money to make up the difference in pay for women. But after looking at the data and partnering with an external firm to verify the results, the company found it had no significant gaps and hadn’t needed to tap into the extra cash.
“When you are focused on paying people for the work they do, and you are focused on grappling to get the best talent and focused on paying the market rate for that talent, [pay equity] naturally follows,” Briskin said.
This was the first year Catalyst named only one award winner, which, conference organizers said, emphasizes the impressiveness of Gap’s achievements.
Leadership and Courage
Also speaking at the event was Marillyn Hewson, CEO and Chair of Lockheed Martin, the defense and technology firm that took in over $46 billion in revenue last year.
In a Q&A with Catalyst CEO and President Deborah Gillis, Hewson described her views on diversity. Several years ago, she noted, Lockheed’s senior management realized it needed to get more women and minorities into its leadership pipeline.
“It starts with leadership setting the tone from the top,” Hewson said. She emphasized the importance of taking meaningful action to build diversity.
Today 20% of Lockheed’s leadership and a third of its board are women. But earlier in her career, things were different, Hewson recalled. That’s why today she places such importance on mentoring other women, she said.
She recalled often being the only woman in the room coming up in her career and noted how difficult it can be to deal with negative comments or unintentional slights when there’s no one to share them with.
At one point she was greeted in an all-male meeting with a comment that the others were glad she’d arrived because they ‘needed a pretty face’ in the room. “I said, ‘I guess I’m in the wrong room because I have other things to do,’” she remembered.
“You can be caught off guard, and having the chance to talk to other women about those things makes a difference.”
Hewson chairs the diversity and inclusion council at Lockheed Martin, and requires business leaders to meet with her once per quarter to discuss their strategies and metrics on diversity. She expects them to share information on hiring, promotion and attrition with respect to the demographics of their division. The company has also recently made an effort to incorporate white men into the conversation on diversity, she revealed. Previously, this group had felt locked out of diversity efforts, she said, which was presumably doing more harm than good.
An audience member asked Hewson to discuss a quote by Gloria Steinem: “Women still require an adjective and males don’t.”
When will a woman CEO simply be referred to as a CEO, she inquired.
“This is my fourth year as a CEO, and I don’t get the woman question as much anymore,” Hewson said. “That’s why I want to talk about being a leader.”
She encouraged women who aspire to be leaders to be courageous and take difficult assignments that showcase their capabilities and experience.
“Importantly, you bring the character and integrity that the team needs,” she said.
Always Number Two At Work? How To Be The Boss
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!Reflect upon gender roles- maybe you were told to be a “nice girl” when you were little, while your brother was told to “go get ‘em tiger”.
Recommended reading “Nice girls dont get the corner office”.
If you can do it, why aren’t you doing it?
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work
Voice of Experience: Denise Landman, CEO, Victoria’s Secret Pink
People, Voices of ExperienceTrue North
“I personally have a fiduciary responsibility to create value for my organization and a secure future for my business leaders,” said Landman. “Leadership is a conscious effort. It is a muscle to develop and build, and requires deep introspection. People become leaders when they decide for themselves what and who they will be.”
“For me,” continued Landman, “the best leaders have emerged as being very authentic. Authentic leaders are guided by an inner compass, or true north. Your integrity is what creates a sense of community in the organization that ultimately translates to performance.”
“Building a culture of honesty can only create positive outcomes,” said Landman. “I make mistakes as well. None of us are mistake-proof. It is often that you learn the most through your mistakes. I embrace those mistakes when they occur in my organization.”
How to Market to College Girls
Many people involved in branding want to go straight to product development.
Landman, on the other hand, needed to spend more time thinking about the characteristics of the college girl. “I needed to define her for myself. I would not allow designers to design anything until we had a clear sense of what this eighteen year old girl wants,” said Landman. “Eighteen year old girls are still young and naive, and, in other respects, preparing to be the women they will be in the future. It is a fragile age. I have to go back to what it means to be an eighteen year old, and how to translate this understanding into a product.”
Learning Your Craft
Landman spent the early days of her career perfecting the fundamentals. “It was only when I knew I could be effective with my career choice that I strive for higher levels of responsibility,” said Landman. “I couldn’t have put myself out there if I didn’t have the right stuff. I am a big proponent of honing your craft and knowing what you are talking about.”
Work-Life Integration
Landman adopted two sons (one from Russia and one from Ohio) when she was 50. When asked about work-life integration, Landman said that she and her husband made the decision that he would stay at home and she would continue with her career. “It is such a personal journey, and there is no one blueprint or roadmap to follow,” stressed Landman.“I am learning a lot about how to be the best mom while also being whole and effective in my professional life.It is hard.”
By Hua Wang
Stoking Your Intrapreneurial Spirit
Career Advice, Next LevelIntrapreneurship is entrepreneurship, but within the context of a larger organization. An intrapreneur is “an employee of an established organization with an entrepreneurial mindset,” who thinks more like a start-up owner.
Alyson Krueger writes in Fast Company, “Obviously there have always been go-getters in companies who try to move the needle forward and push the status quo. But never before has there been such a push for employees to take ownership of their own corner of a company.”
Asserted in Entrepreneur, “intrapreneurship is the new entrepreneurship.”
Satisfaction and Engagement Meets Innovation and Leadership
A survey from University of Phoenix School of Business found people who are satisfied in their job are nearly twice as likely to report having the opportunity for intrapreneurship (61%) compared to those who are not satisfied (33%). It’s logical that organizations are being advised to foster entrepreneurial cultures as a way of attracting talent as well as increasing employee engagement.
Murray Newlands writes in Inc., “Intrapreneurs will become the building blocks of a company’s executive teams and leaders. They are the driving force that moves a company forward and they will inevitably rise to the top of the company as they understand the company from all levels. Starting from the bottom, they will see the company as a set of processes in which every process must evolve.”
Intrapreneurs shake up the ladder, which is one way to change the gender status quo. They do not obey traditional career paths, but creates new ones, while changing how things work from the inside-out. There are many articles that advise on the skills to be effective as an intrapreneur. But the first word that comes to mind when we hear entrepreneurial is spirit.
Here are five qualities that seem across the board inherent to stoking your intrapreneurial spirit.
Quality 1: Relentless Curiosity.
Intrapreneurs see the opportunity for something that is not yet there, which takes curiosity, perceptiveness, intuition, and being attuned to seeing trends before others. They also have to be able to question and “challenge current business practices,” not simply fall in line or put their heads-down and get on with it. Intrapreneurs don’t stay in the box. They question the box. Coming up with ideas is a mindset, and it’s value does not hinge on the success or failure of one idea.
According to Claudia Chan, founder of S.H.E. Globl Media, in Fast Company, intrepreneurial employees are asking questions such as,“What do I want to create that is going to fill a white space? What doesn’t exist that needs to exist? There is a hole and they want to fill it. There is a problem, and they want to solve it.”
Quality 2: Risk-Taking Creativity.
Chan writes, “If you’re not uncomfortable or scared, you’re not driving innovation.”
Intrapreneurs bring creativity where it did not exist before, in the form of ideas, processes, and solutions, and they embrace a spirit of uncertainty. As a visionary, you cannot know exactly what you’re doing, because what you’re doing has not been done before. It’s very important to be knowledgeable and leverage your strengths, but also find the right point to make the leap.
Susan Folley of Corporate Entrepreneurs, LLC writes, “This is the great divide between traditional leaders and intrapreneurs – the known and unknown. It is the difference between playing it safe or taking a risk, relying on past experience or experimentation, needing detailed information to decide or leveraging what you know, minimizing risks or maximizing value, asking for what you need or leveraging what you’ve got. They see what is possible. It’s a mindset, a way of operating that is foreign to many of us.”
Quality 3: Daring and Vocal Courage.
Intrapreneurship takes a willingness to step up with your ideas and be vocal, even finding a way to visualize them so they become more accessible to others.
As shared in her book Daring Greatly, researcher Brené Brown asked Kevin Surace what the biggest obstacle to creativity and innovation was, and he replied that it is the fear of even putting your ideas out there due to worries about ridicule or being belittled, yet “innovative ideas often sound crazy and failure and learning are a part of revolution.”
So it’s necessary to stoke your courage, but according to Brown the culture matters. Ask if the culture you’re in is also rewarding the value of creative courage. If you’re a woman of intrapreneurial spirit full of ideas, be in an environment in which you and your ideas will flourish.
Quality 4: Passionate & Adaptable Resilience.
Once you’ve put yourself out there, it’s important not to let your ideas die upon rejection of one articulation, but foster resilience and passion towards getting to the best work, just as a writer may have to find the real story one hundred pages into her first draft.
Rich Maloof writes in Forbes, “find a granular element of the concept that is undeniably of value.” You can always find the new simplified starting point and with iterative progress, your Plan D may be ten times better than Plan A started out.
Quality 5: Contagious Collaboration.
A large part of intrapreneurship is being able to “assemble” the right team around an idea and foster an enthusiastic start-up mentality – all hands-in, less silos and more shared accountability. If intraprenership requires a learn-by-doing approach, you’re going to need a passionate team willing to learn and relearn with you. You must be able to make a personal vision a team vision.
Intrapreneurial women will not be the first up the ladder. Instead, they’ll invent a new platform to stand on, from which the view looks different for everyone.
By Aimee Hansen
How Digital Could Deliver Workplace Gender Equality in 25 Years
Career Advice, LeadershipBy Aimee Hansen
Earlier this month, we wrote about how the United Nation’s International Women’s Day 2016 effort emphasized accelerating gender equality. A new report from Accenture entitled “Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work,” asserts that digital is a key factor in accelerating gender equality in the workplace.
Accenture’s report finds that doubling the pace of “digital fluency” among women could double the speed of gender equality at work.
Rather than waiting until 2065, doubling the pace at which women become frequent users of technology would bring workplace gender equality in developed nations by 2040.
Rather than waiting until 2100, workplace gender equality could be brought forward in developing nations by 2060.
The Relationship Between Digital Fluency and Gender Equality
Accenture’s report comes as global talent shortages are being highlighted by the World Economic Forum as well as Manpower Group, while women remain an underrepresented presence that could become part of an evolving and flexible workforce increasingly enabled via technology.
Combining survey data (nearly 5,000 men and women in 31 countries) with published data on digital usage by country to create an econometric model, Accenture analyzed the effect of digital fluency on gender equality throughout the career cycle for an individual. Researchers also looked at the relationship between gender equality and digital fluency across nations.
In their report, digital fluency was correlated with women’s career achievement. The U.S., Netherlands, UK, and Nordic countries have both the highest digital fluency and rank among the top performers in workplace equality.
Large gender gaps in digital fluency exist in Japan, Singapore, France, and Switzerland, and closing them would increase gender equality in the workplace.
In countries like India and Indonesia, generally low levels of digital fluency, and gender gaps within them, are holding back women’s progress.
Nations like Saudi Arabia and Japan illustrate that digital fluency is not the only factor at work, since deep-seated cultural factors also hold gender gaps wider than expected based on the model.
Though it may be argued that over time digital, and its ability to amplify the voices that are so often disenfranchised, could play into challenging the cultural factors that disempower women.
Digital Fluency as an Accelerant, Especially For Women
Accenture concludes that digital skills are helping to narrow the workplace gender gap and level the playing field and that digital fluency acts as an accelerant in every stage of a woman’s career from education and employment to advancement because technology removes many of the barriers that prevent women from working more flexibly. Digital fluency helps men and women but the
the researchers of the report found that being digitally fluent held even stronger positive effects for women than for men.
Accelerating Education
The report showed that when men and women have the same level of digital fluency, women have achieved a higher rate of education.
Women are not simply becoming better educated than they were before. They’ve become better educated than men in 16 of the 31 countries.
Digital fluency played the greatest role in enabling women to access education in developing nations – with 68% of women saying Internet was important to their education (versus 44% in developed nations).
Accelerating Employment
Digital fluency allows for more flexibility in the workplace, which is helping to close the employment gap between men and women in many countries, as more women are more able to find and participate in work.
The report found that “While men and women alike are liberated by the balance that work flexibility affords, women appear to derive greater value from it.”
In the survey, 72% of women (and 68% of men) said that women’s employment opportunities increase as digital fluency increases, with nearly half of women reporting they used digital to access job opportunities and work from home.
Accelerating Advancement
While digital fluency also proved to help accelerate women’s career advancement, the relationship was less significant. The report found that “while digital fluency is having a positive impact on pay for both men and women, the gap in pay between genders is still not closing.”
What is changing is the expectations that it’s possible to close the gap within a foreseeable future, as nearly 60% of Millennial women aspire to be in leadership positions and feel skilled for it, and nearly 3/4 of respondents agreed “the digital world will empower our daughters.” Mind you, those digitally native daughters with better education than their male peers and expanded access to work of many forms across many countries.
According to Julie Sweet, Accenture’s group chief executive for North America, “This is a powerful message for all women and girls. Continuously developing and growing your ability to use digital technologies, both at home and in the workplace, has a clear and positive effect at every stage of your career.And it provides a distinct advantage, as businesses and governments seek to fill the jobs that support today’s growing economy.”
Develop Yourself
Career Advice, Guest ContributionIf you wait for your employer, you might be waiting a long time.Recently, over glasses of wine, it came up that many of my friends felt like they weren’t being developed by their companies.
“They think we don’t care about career development because they think we don’t care about our careers because we’re millennials. Millennials…such an HR term,” complained one of my friends, who is a consultant.
“At least if they decided to develop you, you’d be getting applicable skills,” said another friend, who leads corporate training programs and is questioning her career. “I want to change my career and I’m not sure how.”
“The only kind of development we get is access to a series of boring webinars that we have to watch in the HR conference room,” said another friend in a tech company. “I fell asleep during the last one.”
Why are companies not developing their employees?
It sucks to stay at a job and not be developed. If you are at a job for a number of years, you should need to update resume every six months with new skills, projects, tasks, and reports. If you don’t find yourself doing that, well, you have an issue. I find myself regularly logging into LinkedIn to post my latest presentations, updated skills, and reports.
So you’re not being developed. Or maybe you want a new career, and don’t want to bother focusing on being developed in your current organization/role. Here are some tips on how you can develop yourself. Ultimately, you’re the one who cares most about your career, so you should be the one taking charge of it.
Really, when it comes down to it, developing your career is your responsibility. It would be great if your employer would help you, and really, any good employer will, but if it’s not happening, you need to make it happen. Develop yourself: it’s the best thing you can do for your career.
Writers bio:
Executive Presence – Do It Your Way For More Trust With Your Team
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!Now we all know that if you are a woman sometimes you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t ( see every female leader who ever lived, currently Hillary Clinton could tell you about this in detail I am sure) so the least you can do is not assimilate to behaviors that feel odd to you. However, you can be interculturally competent in any situation- which means reading the room while doing it your way!
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work
Working mothers – find the company that makes your life easier!
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work
Voice of Experience: Molly McCombe, Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer, Citi Retail Services
Voices of ExperienceFrom Strategy to Leadership
After completing her undergraduate degree in finance at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, McCombe began her career in a commercial credit training program where she was placed in a lending position, climbing the ladder to become a vice president. She began to consider other possibilities in the business world and honed in on management consulting, attracted by its opportunities to solve a variety of challenging business problems. Setting her sights on that career path, she reverse engineered what it would take to get there and realized a top-tier business school was a must.
After earning her M.B.A. from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, she joined McKinsey & Company and became a consultant for financial services firms, a role she found both fascinating and challenging. Eventually she realized that she was ready to move to an operational role, where she could “practice what she was preaching,” and took a strategic role in the credit card group at HSBC, where she held a variety of positions, including leading business development, digital marketing and product development. She joined Citi in 2011 as part of Citi Retail Services, the division responsible for providing credit cards and related services to stores such as The Home Depot, Macy’s, Best Buy and many more. In her CMO role she is responsible for all aspects of joint credit marketing and analytics between Citi and the retailers, from campaign development and management through execution and assessment, as well as leading Citi’s digital marketing, loyalty, and research groups.
One of the achievements she’s most proud of is making the transition from a strategist and advisor to a manager and operator. “It’s been a 180-degree turn. I love both jobs because they’re different and yet they inform one another,” she says. She enjoys the strategic side — working on thorny problems and helping the client see them through — and also appreciates the day-to-day aspects of leading geographically dispersed teams and tackling tactical and operational issues. “I am a better leader and manager because I’ve done both,” McCombe says.
Managing the marketing of credit card programs with leading retailers puts her in a front row seat to what’s new in both the banking and retailing industries, and she is fascinated by the changing ways that people approach shopping.
“Consumers are in the driver’s seat in how they interact with retailers now, because they can leverage so much information to make informed purchases,” she says. No longer is it just about finding product and price information online, but also considering peer reviews about products and sharing experiences.
“At the same time, consumers are increasingly open to building deeper relationships with retailers,” McCombe explains. “Part of the value we bring to retailers is our experience in this area. We’re using our understanding of consumer preferences to drive more relevant offers to our retailer’s customers and enhance market share for our retail partners.”
The Advantage of Being a Women
McCombe says that women can be discouraged when they don’t see as many women farther up the ladder, which will continue to be a deterrent until the payments industry can promote and retain women at multiple levels. “It’s a challenge to say ‘I’m passionate about this industry, and I’m going to jump in,’ when there aren’t many women on the upper rungs,” she says, citing a niece who just graduated from Northwestern University who had remarked on the lack of women in senior roles. But she advocates that young women view it instead as an incredibly relevant place for women since they are the primary decision makers in households on budgeting and how money is spent. “A savvy organization is going to want that experience and input, whether they’re evaluating their product offerings or their payment options. Since I started, there is a much greater appreciation for a woman’s perspective in this business, and the opportunities are endless.”
And as women do rise to leadership positions, she says they should be sure that they are still focused on growing, learning and taking on cross-functional roles to avoid being pigeonholed.
Grow Your Network to Grow Your Career
Along the way McCombe has appreciated the opportunity to mentor and grow other professionals throughout the years, both on the consulting and corporate side. “I have been able to create a strong network around the globe that is both professionally and personally rewarding.”
She encourages women to participate in programs at their workplace for both educational and networking benefits. “These are terrific forums for junior women who want to get to know senior women; it’s a way to demystify and humanize these senior leaders. When you build personal relationships, you find out they’re just like anyone else, and I found that very empowering.”
She finds that these connections often lead to informal mentoring relationships, the type that are grounded in commonality. “It’s so helpful to have an off-the-record sounding board, where you can talk about challenges and get input on how to handle them. Mentorship and connectivity is incredibly powerful and will help retain women,” she says.
A Rewarding Personal Life
Married to a hospitality professional who owns three restaurants, McCombe appreciates that it has gotten her connected to the Chicago dining scene and its farm-to-table movement.
And McCombe remains connected to her undergraduate alma mater — serving on the Dean’s Advisory Board at the Questrom School of Management at Boston University — for a very important reason: She was able to attend Boston University thanks to an academic scholarship, and now is committed to paying it forward by sponsoring a scholarship for undergraduate women studying finance and analytics. “It’s very gratifying to be able to give back to an institution that gave me my start, and to support the next generation of women business leaders,” she says.
Rising Star: Kavita Joseph, Lead IT Business Manager, TIAA
Rising StarsForging Her Own Path
Joseph, a Lead IT Business Manager at TIAA, had a nontraditional upbringing compared to many of her peers. Although women were encouraged to attend school and have a job where she grew up in India, they were rarely expected to pursue a career. Even in light of this cultural challenge, Joseph was successful in overcoming the stereotypes and pursing her dream of having a fulfilling career.
“When I was 20, very few girls in India moved out of their parents’ homes to live in the big city, but my parents supported my decision to live independently and pursue higher education. I am proud and happy that I was able to break the cycle because it inspired my younger sisters and cousins to do the same thing,” she says. “The whole concept was unusual at first. But my proudest realization came years later when I noticed that not only my family, but my small community in general, had turned a corner in viewing women’s careers as not just an indulgence, but as something very essential.”
Joseph credits her mother for being an exceptional role model. In a society where women were mostly home makers, her mother was the head mistress of a reputable school and also largely in charge of raising her and her two sisters since her father traveled frequently. “Looking back on those years, I can see that my mom was always on top of her professional game, was very sought after in the academia, and through it all she modeled an excellent work/life balance. So growing up as her daughter, observing her tenacity, passion for life and constant pursuit of excellence, influenced me heavily.”
Joseph began her career on an inside sales team, which she describes as “trial by fire.” “I made the classic mistake of not speaking up enough and owning the outcome. I struggled initially because I did not know how to navigate that. Eventually I asked for help and found my very first mentor. That was the beginning of really understanding and realizing the importance of reaching out, building relationships and that it is okay to step outside of your comfort zone.”
After a different role in operations, Joseph joined UBS’s Wealth Management division in Marketing Strategy and Development, before eventually moving to IT. She says her biggest accomplishment was being part of the team that built the first mobile platform for UBS Wealth Management’s field staff, a disruptive program that redefined the way things were done and won the CIO award for technology innovation.
“Due to security concerns, financial services firms are typically conservative when taking technology risks. It was exciting to find the balance between pushing barriers in providing mobile access and allowing our financial advisors to untether themselves from their desks so they could spend time in front of their clients.” Joseph went on to become the program manager until joining TIAA in 2015 in a position in the IT Business Office working on strategic programs.
Mentors Make the Difference
“It was a fairly challenging transition to IT, and I was successful due to my hard work and because I had a mentor who invested in me. Even though my mentor wasn’t a tech person, she made sure that I had the support and tools that I needed to make the transition and that made a big difference,” Joseph says.
Based on this positive experience, Joseph made a conscious effort to coach and mentor others: to be there for them as others had for her. “Diversity programs are great platforms to meet people and learn from their experiences. When I joined TIAA, one of the first things I did was to sign up as a member of one of the local diversity council chapters. Very quickly, I had built relationships with a number of people outside of my group, and that was an investment that will pay off in time.”
She is currently active in TIAA’s IT Women’s Council and helped to spearhead the launch of an IT Group Mentoring Program. This program facilitates visibility, mentorship and coaching for program participants as they aspire toward growth. Although the Group Mentoring Program only has been in existence for a little more than a year, there has already been excellent feedback from the first group who completed the six month-long coaching cycle. “The program has introduced a positive change in the culture of the organization” she says. “I feel like a proud parent.”
Learning to Balance
The Group Mentoring Program is not her only baby, as Joseph also has a five-year-old son. “Work-life integration is all about prioritizing on a daily basis because they are both real commitments. Your personal brand is at play every day. This is something I really appreciate at TIAA – that the culture recognizes you on a personal and professional level.”
She and her husband love to travel, but these days tend to stick closer to home, spending time exploring Manhattan and local Jersey haunts together with their son.
Joseph remains active in philanthropic endeavors, sponsoring a program with her family that provides artificial limbs for children in India.
Giving back to others, whether via these activities or through mentorship, is what brings Joseph joy.
Catalyst Honors Gap for Pay Equity, Leadership Diversity
Career Advice, LeadershipGap, Inc. was honored last week with a Catalyst award for its achievements in building diversity and inclusion at the company. Not only has the company made strides in increasing the number of women in key leadership positions, it has also focused on improving opportunities for women of color.
Between 2007 and 2015, the company has increased the representation of women reporting directly to the CEO from 33% to 77%. Forty percent of those top level reports are women of color. Similarly, in the same time frame, the number of women serving on Gap’s board has increased from one to four, two of whom are women of color.
Women also lead four of the company’s five brands, and since 2007, the representation of women at the vice president level has increased from 44% to 49.7%.
“Equality is engrained in everything we do. For us, it was not only the right thing to do, but also a business imperative,” said Dan Briskin, VP of Global Employee Relations and HR Shared Services, Gap Inc., during a panel at Catalyst’s annual conference on Wednesday.
The company’s award-winning diversity initiative, “Women and Opportunity,” was made up of three key pillars, according to Heather Robsahm, Senior Director of Talent Management for Banana Republic, one of Gap’s brands. These include career mobility, results oriented work environments (ROWE), and pay equity.
The vast majority (83%) of Gap’s current female executives are promoted from within, and many, like Robsahm, come from the company’s field operation. As part of its career mobility pillar, Gap has created career readiness programs to ensure employees are able to build their skills and set their career trajectory.
“We have a deep bench for women who are poised the lead the company into the future,” Robsham says.
Instituting the ROWE has helped the company improve accountability and engagement, Robsahm says, and demonstrated that people can own their time and still be successful at their jobs.
Finally, in 2014, the company affirmed it had achieved gender pay equity across its global workforce of 150,000 people. When the company set out to track its workforce pay, executives expected they might come across some gaps, so the company set aside some money to make up the difference in pay for women. But after looking at the data and partnering with an external firm to verify the results, the company found it had no significant gaps and hadn’t needed to tap into the extra cash.
“When you are focused on paying people for the work they do, and you are focused on grappling to get the best talent and focused on paying the market rate for that talent, [pay equity] naturally follows,” Briskin said.
This was the first year Catalyst named only one award winner, which, conference organizers said, emphasizes the impressiveness of Gap’s achievements.
Leadership and Courage
Also speaking at the event was Marillyn Hewson, CEO and Chair of Lockheed Martin, the defense and technology firm that took in over $46 billion in revenue last year.
In a Q&A with Catalyst CEO and President Deborah Gillis, Hewson described her views on diversity. Several years ago, she noted, Lockheed’s senior management realized it needed to get more women and minorities into its leadership pipeline.
“It starts with leadership setting the tone from the top,” Hewson said. She emphasized the importance of taking meaningful action to build diversity.
Today 20% of Lockheed’s leadership and a third of its board are women. But earlier in her career, things were different, Hewson recalled. That’s why today she places such importance on mentoring other women, she said.
She recalled often being the only woman in the room coming up in her career and noted how difficult it can be to deal with negative comments or unintentional slights when there’s no one to share them with.
At one point she was greeted in an all-male meeting with a comment that the others were glad she’d arrived because they ‘needed a pretty face’ in the room. “I said, ‘I guess I’m in the wrong room because I have other things to do,’” she remembered.
“You can be caught off guard, and having the chance to talk to other women about those things makes a difference.”
Hewson chairs the diversity and inclusion council at Lockheed Martin, and requires business leaders to meet with her once per quarter to discuss their strategies and metrics on diversity. She expects them to share information on hiring, promotion and attrition with respect to the demographics of their division. The company has also recently made an effort to incorporate white men into the conversation on diversity, she revealed. Previously, this group had felt locked out of diversity efforts, she said, which was presumably doing more harm than good.
An audience member asked Hewson to discuss a quote by Gloria Steinem: “Women still require an adjective and males don’t.”
When will a woman CEO simply be referred to as a CEO, she inquired.
“This is my fourth year as a CEO, and I don’t get the woman question as much anymore,” Hewson said. “That’s why I want to talk about being a leader.”
She encouraged women who aspire to be leaders to be courageous and take difficult assignments that showcase their capabilities and experience.
“Importantly, you bring the character and integrity that the team needs,” she said.