According to research by Mercer, the majority of companies worldwide were expected to increase both long and short-term international assignments. The research also told us that men have typically fulfilled these assignments. Global HR consultants Caroline Kersten and Sapna Welsh, the authors of Worldly Women—The New Leadership Profile, affirmed that the need for women to fulfill international assignments still persists in a recent interview with the Society for Human Resource Management. In addition, they say that men are still the first ones put on the list to be considered for overseas work opportunities.
Tag Archive for: Melissa J. Anderson
Recently, tech-news website The Verge published a report on diversity at at the U.S.’s biggest technology companies. In data scraped from Equal Employment Opportunity reports filed with the government, the article revealed official stats on workforce diversity at Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, and Twitter.
The numbers weren’t assuring. While women made up 47% of the U.S. workforce in 2014, the seven big, publicly traded tech companies that The Verge tracked only averaged 29% female. Amazon had the highest share of women workers at 37%, while Microsoft came in with the lowest share of women workers at 24%.
The share of women in leadership roles was even more stark. On average, at the seven companies studied, only 18% of executives and senior managers were women. The company with the highest percentage of female leaders was Facebook, at 23%, while Microsoft had the lowest percentage at 13%.
These are embarrassing numbers (and just as embarrassing were the statistics on racial and ethnic diversity – on average, only 21% of leaders at these companies weren’t white). But they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Researchers have long identified the problems behind the lack of diversity in the technology industry.
What is surprising, though, is how clearly defined the solutions to these problems are. Women keep leaving the industry; we know why; we know how to fix it. Yet the gap persists. A recent report by Catalyst identified several concrete reasons high potential women in tech leave for greener pastures and what these companies can do about it.
The technology industry purports to create innovative solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Perhaps it’s time for industry leaders to shift their gaze toward their own ranks, and implement the solutions experts have crafted to solve one of tech’s toughest problems: the workforce gender gap.
Leaky Pipeline
Tech companies like to tout their work to develop the “pipeline” of women into the industry, sponsoring programs designed to get girls and young women interested in STEM fields. This work is important and laudable. But an early lack of interest in science and technology isn’t the only reason for the low rate of women leaders working now in the industry.
The diversity benchmarking and solutions organization Catalyst says high potential women actively seek to leave the industry. According to Catalyst, women who took business jobs in the tech industry after earning an MBA were more likely than men to leave for another industry (women, 53%; men, 31%). And women who started in business roles in other industries were less likely than men to migrate to the tech industry (women, 9%; men, 13%).
Male MBAs who left the tech industry were more likely than women to say they changed jobs for greater opportunities (men, 67%; women, 52%), while women MBAs were more likely to say the left for personal reasons (women, 21%; men, 12%).
“Organizations invest tremendous resources to attract high potentials, and if that talent walks out the door—for any reason—it is incredibly costly for the company. Not only has that talent taken their skills and training elsewhere, but new employees have to be recruited and trained,” writes report author Anna Beninger, director of research at Catalyst.
The attrition problems are well documented, and so are the reasons behind them. Catalyst says women regularly start in lower level positions in the tech industry than men after earning MBAs. That means they also start at lower salaries from day one, a pay gap that persists over time.
In the study, high potential women MBAs in tech said they faced unclear requirements for evaluation and advancement, while men said their goals were clear. High potential women MBAs in tech said they had fewer role models than men, and vastly fewer said they felt similar to their coworkers than men did.
“Feeling like an outsider relative to their coworkers affects their access to development opportunities, sponsorship, and ultimately their aspirations to the top,” Beninger writes.
“Given the dearth of women in tech-intensive industries, including those in business roles, it is crucial for senior-level men in tech-intensive industries to champion women, and in time, create more women role models.”
Clarifying evaluation and promotion requirements, paying employees fairly, ensuring workers are able to meet family responsibilities and still get their jobs done, building cultures that value people outside the majority, and having corporate leadership set the tone from the top on diversity — these are all things that can help stop the female and minority attrition from the tech industry.
In practice, these solutions will take hard work to achieve. Implementing new policies is easy — it’s changing people’s mindsets that is difficult. But it is possible and necessary. The tech industry needs the best minds out there to solve problems in an increasingly complex business environment. It won’t be able to attract and retain the top people until business leaders approach this problem earnestly. Their work is cut out for them.
By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
Gender diversity and inclusion doesn’t just happen, as Catalyst shows every year at its awards conference. A sustained improvement in the percentage of women in corporate workforces and leadership comes from hard work by companies to achieve and maintain set goals. It also requires a visibly demonstrated commitment to diversity by those in charge.
Honorees at this year’s Catalyst Awards Conference shared their companies’ secrets to success in increasing the percentage of women in leadership levels and throughout their companies’ workforces. The winning programs at Chevron Corporation and Proctor & Gamble combined three tried and true ingredients for advancing women at work: accountability, common sense, and leaders who took personal responsibility for improving diversity and inclusion at their companies.
“How we are behaving in any interaction speaks louder than any company effort,” said Melody Boone Meyer, president of Chevron Asia Pacific Exploration and Production Company. “Your behavior is how people read what’s real or not. The communication is there, but much more important is whether you’re living that.”
“Your behavior is how people read what’s real or not. The communication is there, but much more important is whether you’re living that.”
At the conference in March, Meyer, along with Mike Wirth, executive vice president of downstream and chemicals at Chevron; William P. Gipson, chief diversity officer and senior vice president of research and development at Proctor & Gamble; and Colleen Jay, president of global hair care and color at Proctor & Gamble, took to the stage to describe not only how their companies changed their approach to improving gender diversity, but also their personal journeys with taking responsibility for diversity as well.
As Meyer said, “Leaders need to live it.”
Accountability
Leaders from both companies detailed how they were held accountable for meeting corporate gender diversity goals.
Wirth explained that, at Chevron, leaders have to answer for their diversity action plans as part of their performance reviews. He also described an exercise the company’s CEO had leaders undertake: “The CEO said I want you to go out and spend time with three people who are very different from you and I expect you to respond,” he recalled.
“Accountability is nothing unless you have goals,” Gipson agreed. “Targets change everything.”
Proctor & Gamble ties diversity goals to executives’ stock options, he said. But the goals aren’t easy to meet and they aren’t merely window dressing to placate investors who care about diversity – they’re stretch goals.
“To really move the needle, you need to have some stretching,” Gipson said.
Indeed, Wirth commented, Chevron even employed reverse inventives at one point. “If you didn’t make progress, the bonus would be affected for everyone in that group,” he said, explaining that Chevron’s leaders wanted to make sure executives understood that diversity was a shared responsibility.
Common Sense
Diversity initiatives wouldn’t work without a heavy dose of common sense, as well. For example, Gipson explained that a few years ago, leaders at Proctor & Gamble realized women were leaving the company at a disproportionate rate. The company undertook a workforce survey to figure out why.
One of the reasons, P&G discovered, was that the company’s flex work program just wasn’t working. Offering employees the ability to work flexibly is one way companies can help their entire workforce meet their personal responsibilities. Since women as a group bear the brunt of child- and elder-care disproportionately compared to men, flex programs have been identified as a way for companies to retain female employees.
It turned out, Gipson said, that P&G’s flexible work program wasn’t flexible enough.
“We were trying to mandate when and where to work flexibly, but life is not really that way,” he explained. The company amended its program based on the survey results.
Leadership Responsibility
Finally, the panelists described what is possibly the most important part of an effective gender diversity initiative. Leaders have to internalize the value of diversity and demonstrate that value in their personal actions.
For example, Johnson said she and other P&G executives help each other keep track of blind spots.
“We help keep everyone sharp so we can role model that going forward,” she explained.
Similarly, Wirth described how he had to face his own personal blind spots a few years ago when Chevron undertook a dramatic restructuring. He picked all white men to lead his new team.
“I got a lot of feedback from the CEO, my kids, and women in my organization,” he said. “I had to do a lot of reflection on myself. I genuinely believed I had the right beliefs and behavior, but that’s not good enough. People need to see action.”
“I got a lot of feedback from the CEO, my kids, and women in my organization,”
He continued, “As a white male, I’ve got an extra responsibility to catalyze the discussion [on diversity], and create an environment where everyone is supported and everyone understands the expectations.”
Gipson described how, as an R&D executive, he had to learn to “embrace the soft stuff.”
“It’s the hardest stuff,” he said. “But no matter how much progress we’ve made, we can always get better.”
That attitude – that we can always get better – is an important one in diversity and inclusion. Simply meeting the numbers isn’t good enough. True inclusion will require everyone in the workforce – especially leaders – to keep pushing themselves harder to identify and change their own personal weaknesses when it comes to diversity and working to change their companies for the better.
By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
“People sometimes ask me, ‘If you could do it all over again, given your practice focus in the financial services area, would you be a banker as opposed to a lawyer?’ I would be a lawyer. This is a particularly exciting time to be a lawyer, with all the regulatory changes, and my clients rely on me to provide counsel and advice,” said Donna M. Parisi, Partner and Head of the Asset Management Group at global law firm Shearman & Sterling LLP.
Parisi’s practice deals globally with derivatives, structured products, securitization, capital markets and commodities, as well as regulatory, risk management, and compliance counseling. It is an area of great interest, and her advice is in high demand.
She explained, “My clients need help navigating complex regulations– especially in light of Dodd-Frank. We’re in a period of great change. There’s a lot happening out there.”
Leadership diversity pays off, and a new study by McKinsey “Why Diversity Matters” has the hard numbers to prove it. It also points out that most corporate diversity programs don’t go far enough to be inclusive of ethnically diverse leaders.
The Glass Hammer has long upheld the “business case for diversity,” and senior women in the corporate space will be pleased to see statistically significant results supporting this argument. More women at the top will indeed help a company perform better. But the study is also a reminder that the definition of diversity extends beyond the group of white women who make up the bulk of those taking part in leadership diversity programs. According to McKinsey, including more ethnically diverse individuals in the leadership tier of companies will produce even better financial performance.
“Diversity matters because we increasingly live in a diverse world that has become deeply interconnected. It should come as no surprise that more diverse companies and institutions are achieving better performance,” write the report authors, McKinsey’s Vivian Hunt, Dennis Layton, and Sara Prince.
According to the study, the top quartile of companies for racial/ethnic diversity in leadership were 30% more likely to outperform the industry median.
Companies in the bottom quartile for gender and for ethnic/racial diversity underperformed compared to their peers. McKinsey urges companies to be more intentional on increasing diversity. While acknowledging that there is more to do before companies approach gender parity at the leadership level, the report shows that efforts toward raising the percentage of women in executive leadership have made a difference.
“The data appears to show that less attention has been given to the attainment of racial and ethnic diversity,” McKinsey says. “By this measure it becomes apparent that for US companies, a dedicated effort would be needed to achieve leadership diversity that begins to reflect the demographic composition of the labor force and the national population.”
Comparatively, companies still need to do much more to improve ethnic diversity in leadership. And according to these numbers, the difficult work of addressing implicit racial biases in the workplace is worth the effort.
“Organizations are often uncomfortable with the discussion of race here in the U.S. and abroad,” says Katherine Phillips, Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics Management at Columbia University. “Targeting women is easier for organizations because it doesn’t feel as controversial somehow.”
But, Phillips says, there is much that companies can do to broaden their efforts toward improving diversity in leadership and throughout the organization.
“Organizations can better incorporate racial or ethnic diversity targets by first acknowledging that their organizations may not currently be designed for racial minorities to thrive. That was the first step with women – there was an acknowledgment that women had not been so welcomed before and that their needs were not being met. The same acknowledgment needs to happen with racial/ethnic differences to help change things.”
According to Phillips, senior women can help push for more meaningful change at their companies. She encourages the leadership to mindfully sponsor of people of color which will “diversify their own networks and build a broad coalition across these various groups,” she says.
Women who’ve focused on gender diversity have the tool kit to push their companies toward addressing the need for more ethnically diverse leaders as well, Phillips says.
“The barriers and issues may be different but the process of moving the needle is the same – sponsorship and mentorship, vocal advocacy, acknowledgment of biases both explicit and unconscious, and a commitment to changing the status quo are all critical.”
According to the research, businesses with the most women in leadership were 15% more likely to produce above average financial returns. Studies have long shown that diversity makes business sense – teams with greater diversity produce smarter, more collaborative decisions. Research has also shown that companies with more women in the boardroom outperform the market.
But this new research, which crunched companies’ average earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) between 2010 and 2013, dug deeper. It tracked the gender, ethnic and racial demographics of senior management and boards of 366 large, public companies in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Brazil, Mexico and Chile, and while greater gender diversity produced better returns, greater ethnic diversity produced an even bigger result.
As we move toward a more diverse and global economy, companies that fall to the back of the pack on diversity will also find themselves lagging their peers in terms of corporate performance as well, this study indicates.
Diversity is the competitive edge that most companies are not taking advantage of. By empowering women and ethnically diverse leaders to push into the upper echelons of corporate management, companies will enjoy outsized performance. Unlocking the potential of leadership diversity will take constant and careful work, like any business transformation. But in the end, that work will pay off.
By Melissa J. Anderson
“Differences do matter,” began Karyn Twaronite, the EY Americas Inclusiveness Officer and a partner of Ernst & Young LLP. “I’m excited about expanding the definition of diversity as it applies to all men and women.”
She explained, “Many years ago, diversity work was about compliance, looking at numbers and representation. This is important, but there’s more to it than that. I like to think of the evolution as the three Cs. The first C is compliance and was focused on following the rules. The second C is character — diversity was seen as the right thing to do and something that your company needed to do to be viewed as modern. Today, we’re at the third C, which stands for commerce. It also focuses on making a difference to top and bottom lines in business.”
Twaronite continued, “Today we see diversity and inclusiveness, or D&I, as a way to further deliver quality service, innovate, and solve problems. For so many companies this is a competitiveness issue, not only to be seen as employers of choice, but also to enhance the quality of work. Diverse and inclusive teams provide better service to clients, and our high-quality service to our clients is key to our brand.”
She added, “I’m fortunate that I work at a company where D&I are embedded in our culture, and where D&I get a seat at the leadership table.”
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Lisa Agona describes herself as very thoughtful and very driven. After studying economics in college, she pursued a career in marketing for financial services and professional services companies. After climbing the ranks at Accenture to become the global marketing director for capital markets, she got a call from LexisNexis. “I actually wasn’t going to come – I loved New York City and I was satisfied at Accenture.” The role would mean moving away from the excitement of the Big Apple, and she also had the impression that the company might be a bit conservative for her tastes.
“But when I came and interviewed at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, I found it was anything but uninteresting,” she said. “The people were innovative – even ingenious. From a marketing standpoint, it was a place I could get my arms around and build transformation and new ideas into the business.” So she took the opportunity and made the move to Atlanta, unsure of what the outcome would be. That’s her first piece of advice on getting to the C-Suite – take risks.
“I was right. It was a risk that paid off. When I wake up in the morning, I can’t wait to get to work.”
Agona, now Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, shared her advice for women on breaking into the C-Suite.
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To Reshma Saujani, Founder of Girls Who Code, success means taking risks and pursuing your passions – even with the understanding that you might fail. In fact, in her new book, Women Who Don’t Wait in Line, she explores the importance of failure and its connection to risk, and what it means for today’s women.
“It’s about understanding what your destiny is and striving for it,” she explained. “When I ran for Congress, people said ‘it’s not your turn yet.’” Saujani’s run was ultimately unsuccessful. Yet, she explained, she learned a valuable lesson. “It’s embracing failure,” she said. “Often, we feel like we have to do the job to get the job.” By shedding fears around failure and taking big risks, more women could achieve their dreams.
She also learned about the value of sisterhood during her campaign, another theme of her book. “Women have the power to help other women. We have to create a culture where we help each other. I can’t tell you how many women leaders, when I was researching for my book, said they seek to hire women. I want to encourage women to do the same.”
“It’s in our own hands to crash through the glass ceiling,” she added.
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Today, with our myriad platforms on which to publish, promote, “like,” and share, maintaining a reputation is both easier and more difficult. The Internet as a tool can make our thoughts and feelings public instantly – so you had better be sure what you do share is authentically you, and carefully considered. That goes doubly for leaders – because especially when they self-publish over social media, leaders are the subject of other people’s scrutiny and discussion. And that’s the essence of reputation – you can craft it with your own behavior, but it is spread by other people.
Davia Temin, Founder and CEO of the global reputation management firm Temin & Co., sincerely believes that your reputation is your biggest asset – and it’s also a big responsibility. She explained, “The first quote on our website is by Warren Buffett and I think it’s the best and most true way leaders think about reputation. He says, ‘It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.’”
Your reputation encompasses how you conduct yourself, what you say and do, what you say about yourself, and what other people say about you. It’s built on a lifetime of actions and interactions, Temin says. Leaders need to be sure they’re living up to the reputation they want to have. “Seek to create an authentic and consistent reputation that encapsulates and captures your best self. And then live up to it.”
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According to Cynthia Steer, Head of Manager Research & Investment Solutions at BNY Mellon, the benefit of a mentoring relationship comes down to learning. “You always learn something from sitting down with someone else,” she explained. “Women are always managing something else – whether it’s your job, your marriage, your family – and there’s always something one can learn about. It’s very simple.”
“I’ve always been a mentor and I’ve always learned more than I gave,” she continued. Steer explained that she quickly figured out the value of cross-generational relationships when she began her career on a team managing foreign exchange rates. “The team was made up of new kids on the block like me and seasoned individuals – and I saw that every perspective was valuable, but the combination was more valuable than the discrete parts.”
“Portfolio management is like fashion in that it always needs to be remade at the edges, with new thinking or new foci, and having multiple generations’ perspectives furthers that.”
She added, “Also, I think it’s vitally important for women like me at this point in my career to stand up in front of the room and be counted. I’m always humbled by the opportunity to do it.”