Live blog: 6th annual WEPs event, gender equality and the global jobs challenge
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The UN’s Women Empowerment Principles set the standard for gender equality in business around the world. We’ll be reporting live from their event in New York, so keep up with all the action here
And so the end is near. We’ve had a wonderful two days and hope you’ve enjoyed it too. Do make sure that you read up on the fantastic work the WEPs do here and if your company hasn’t signed up to them, then now is the time to start lobbying.
We’re going to leave you with some of our favourite thoughts from the day. Share yours with us on Twitter using the hashtag #EqualityMeansJobs.
And that’s all folks. We’ll see you back here next year, or maybe we won’t. Maybe 2014 will be the year when we finally solve this problem and it’s no longer an issue worth talking about. Looking at the work that this year’s attendees do on a daily basis I’m confident it could happen. Fingers crossed.
Expanding women's enterprise opportunities, building business and social value
Mayra Hernandez from Banorte talks about some of the issues around lending to women to grow their businesses. Interestingly, women are a safer risk than men at early stages and when they’re an established business but at the mid-tier, she says, women aren’t as good at repaying their debts.
She feels there are two reasons for this, the first is that women tend to be afraid of asking for help. But the second is more surprising, once they feel safe, Hernandez says, once they know they can feed the children, meet bills etc, then temptation appears and spending gets out of control.
Scale has been much debated over the past two days and Marcela Manubens from Unilever feels this is something we need to focus on. It’s all very well for Unilever to get it and to be acting on it, she says, but we’re not enough, the movement needs to grow.
Brilliantly, our chair for this panel Arancha Gonzalez has requested that all the panellists sum up at the end with one sentence in hashtag format. Any suggestions on what we might get? I’ve just spent five minutes trying to think of a funny example but give a girl a break, it’s 10pm my time and they’ve taken the coffee away. Fingers crossed the panel are wittier.
Ok, here we go... the session in hashtag format:
Marcela Manubens - #AmplifyTheVoices 4/5 I think. To the point and very shareable, well done Marcela.
Arif Zaman - # The thing which keeps me awake at night is the demographic time bomb, we need to address this urgently. The only way to crack this is through partnership.
Honestly Arif, nice try but it’s not really a hashtag is it? Sometimes we Brits just aren’t great at being short and sharp. 2/5 for an interesting point,
Joni Simpson - #ComeToRwanda - excellent. Short and sharp with a clear command. 4/5
Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, senior vice president, talent, culture, and global member services at Catalyst: “no-one wants to work somewhere that’s like high school”.
Increasing women in the workforce: opening the doors and changing the company culture
Francie Shonhiwa, group social investment manager, PPC Limited, talking about bringing change in Africa and the specific problems the continent faces. However, there are some problems which go across cultures, “Hr has been here for donkey’s years and nothing has changed because there was no focus, it required a woman to make it a priority”.
Women’s conference claxon alert #2 - Jody Mahoney from the Anita Borg Institute has just mentioned the Goldieblox adverts. Which is a great excuse for a clip:
It’s about innovation, not gender says Mahoney, that’s what we should be focussed on. UC Berkeley changed the name of their computing programme to “the joy and beauty of computing” and upped the number of women on the course.
Francie Shonhiwa talks about accepting that while not everything is perfect we’re doing what we can. Her company has gone from being dominated by white men, with no women, to a mixed race, mixed gender organisation. Anything is possible, she says.
On working in partnership with government, Sergio França Leão, managing director of sustainability at Odebrecht says South Africa has a programme paying a monthly allowance to unemployed women who keep their children in school. Odebrecht worked with the government to specifically attract women from this problem, bringing them into work. This meant they were no longer reliant on welfare and increased the amount of money they were bringing into their family.
Work, families and gender equality: stress and solutions
The first panel of the afternoon and it’s a good one. It’s all very well to say we need more women in work, we need to promote more women, we need more women in leadership but what are the issues that stop this from happening?
All the panellist seem to agree that there are three key issues; making sure that talented women are recognised, providing flexibility to keep your talent and then making sure that they are being offered the “hot jobs”, the roles that end with a board-level role.
Great advice from panel chair, Meryle Mahrer Kaplan from Catalyst, to organisations who can’t understand why they don’t have board-ready women within their company: “decide what the hot jobs are at your organisation and see who’s getting those jobs. Rather than starting at looking at every individual, look at the hot jobs and make sure you’re giving an equal number of them to women”.
Koray Bebekoğlu, strategic marketing and corporate communications director atDoğuş Otomotiv, says the firm is committed to upholding women’s rights because it is committed to upholding human rights. Good reminder that we sometimes forget that they should be one and the same.
The US is one of three countries in the world with no paid leave for new parents. The sort of fact that you know but it’s still shocking when you hear it again. Donna Dolan, of the New York Paid Leave Coalition, says that trying to change this at federal level won’t work, it has to be done state by state.
Inclusion isn’t just about sex, says Mahrer Kaplan, it’s about individuals, which is what makes it such a powerful force. Worrying about where you fit doesn’t create a good workplace and that’s bad for the bottom line.
Over lunch we grabbed two minutes with Bea Perez, chief sustainability officer at the Coca Cola company. She talks to us about the WEPs and the importance of raising your hand.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is today’s keynote speaker and has done a great job in instantly catching the attention of the men in the room by announcing that while she will speak a bit on the WEPs, she’s going to speak more on the empowerment of men.
As the mother of two teenage boys, Slaughter is very aware that she is bringing them up with fewer choices than if she was raising girls.
“We tell girls they can be caregivers, career women or any blend of the two. We tell boys that their value is measured by their earnings and status”
As Slaughter points out, no male CEO has made it to leading the boardroom and also been the lead parent. Why do we expect the same of women? She argues that if we want 50% of business leaders to be women then we need to expect that 50% of lead parents will be men and we need to value that role as much as we value CEOs.
She ends by admitting that she’s worried the idea sounds preposterous, but hopes that we’ll all remember than in the 1970s the idea of women going out to work was preposterous and look where we are now.
Is she right? By focussing on women in the workplace have we missed a trick on men at home? Tell us @gdnwomenleaders
We’ll have a full interview with Slaughter on the site on Saturday, so look out for that too.
If you’re looking for something to read whilst we’re munching, then here you go. We asked some of the speakers for their opinion on what CEOs could do to embed gender equality in the workplace:
Sue Townsen, risk consulting partner at KPMG:
Business leaders need to act on a number of fronts – this includes actions that build a more inclusive work environment, such as flexible working conditions; but also leadership and tone at the top; and importantly building the skills and confidence of women in their organizations. For CEOs it is especially critical that they be authentic and personally invested, and hold themselves and their leaders accountable.
Georg Kell, executive director, United Nations Global Compact
As the business case grows stronger and as more companies turn to the WEPs, the case for transparency and accountability is also strengthened. I would encourage companies to utilize the WEPs Reporting Guidance, aligned with the seven Principles, which helps businesses to report their progress on advancing women and gender equality. It provides general reporting approaches and specific examples of disclosures and performance indicators for each Principle. Better yet, the guidance is designed to align with established reporting frameworks that businesses already use, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or the UN Global Compact’s Communication on Progress (COP). This guidance is for all businesses that recognize the value of applying a gender lens to their corporate sustainability agenda and are committed to the WEPs.
Steve Almond, chairman, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
Organizational change happens when the CEO owns a topic as a strategic objective and sets clear targets. The only way we are going to see real strides in empowering women is through business leaders taking ownership of the issue and viewing diversity as a business imperative. Too often women initiatives are delegated to the Human Resources department or a task force with no senior leadership accountability. Top leadership needs to understand that it makes good business sense; that a diverse workforce will help their organization grow; deliver enhanced client service, provide better products or goods. And leaders need to lead --- Human Resources cannot be responsible for what happens in a leader’s team.
One audience member has just referenced the research showing that the gender pay gap starts in childhood. When you have children doing chores for pocket money, the girls earn on average $3 less than the boys. Read more on this here.
Elizabeth Kelan is talking about the stereotypes we apply to men and women, he’s very assertive / she’s great with her team, and the dangers of thinking that we need more women in leadership because they meet these stereotypes.
We had an interesting article from Binna Kandola a few weeks ago that suggested that rather than saying, “we need more women to bring empathy to our board”, we should instead employ the best individuals. To do this, we need to break down both our unconscious biases against those who differ from us and also the gender stereotypes we’ve adopted.
We’ve just had the one piece of information that comes up at every woman’s event: if you have a job description with ten required skills, a man will apply if he can do to two of them. A woman will only apply if she can do eight or more.
I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this and it always makes me think, if we know this to be true, then why are managers still hiring liars? Answers on a postcard to Guardian Towers.
Great point from Futhi Mtoba from New Faces, New Voices,
If you work in an organisation where the CEO says, I’m going to go and watch my kids play sport at 3pm, then you’re going to find more women there. They care about their children and want to be open about that.
The biggest problem is not a lack of female entrepreneurs and small business owners, the difficulty is in helping them to jump from small, often back-room, enterprises into market players, says Arancha Gonzalez, executive director, International Trade Centre.
She also argues that we need to see more investment in women owned businesses and that there’s a bias against them from investors. Sometimes there’s a good intention, adds Barbara Krumsiek, but the results aren’t there.
A stark reminder that it’s not enough to embrace an idea, we then have to change how we behave and humans find that terribly hard.
Nigel Twose, director, development impact department at the International Finance Corporation, echoes Steve Almond on the need for men who support gender equality to shout louder. He wrote a short piece for us earlier on the need for more companies to get this:
We need more companies to recognize that gender diversity is a core business issue, rather than just an HR or CSR issue. Smart companies know that human capital is their greatest asset, and that they simply cannot afford to miss out on the employment potential and skills of half the population. We have moved beyond the ‘can we prove the business case’ stage. The evidence is clear: investing in women’s employment is good for business, and good for development.
Steve Almond chairman of Deloitte being very honest today. His understanding and admittance of unconscious bias is all too rare.
“I admit that I recruit and attract people like me.”
The problem with unconscious bias is that we’re all so terrified of admitting to any bias that we proudly claim to be open-minded and close our minds to the possibility that we’re not.
Ms. Barbara Krumsiek, CEO of Calvert Investments, on whether we have made as much progress as we could have on gender equity:
There have been several moments in my 40 year career on Wall Street when I thought we were there. First when I entered the workplace, then ten years later I had my first child and realised that we weren’t there. So then we had to rethink that mid-career level. Then in the 90s I joined Calvert as CEO and thought, we’re here. And low and behold we’re not.
I think we’re closer to a tipping point because all of the elements that can affect change, whether that’s governments making gender equity a platform, consumers saying that they care, investment firms or corporations realising they can’t be competitive if they don’t attract that talent.
Equality of women is progress for all, says Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
We’ve barely been going five minutes and we’ve already gone off script. We wanted a bit more debate from yesterday so Jo Confino starts us off with a question to Georg Kell, “you’ve got 700 businesses signed up, so why are we still talking about this? Why isn’t everyone doing it?”
Kell acknowledges that whilst the Womens Empowerment Principles have had a fast rate of sign up, from 20 companies to 700, it’s still far away from a tipping point. To reach that tipping point the UN Global Compact would need 10 to 15 thousand companies signed up to WEPs. So just a little way to go then.
After that detour, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka the under-secretary-general and executive director of UN Women explains that her top priorities are increasing the number of private sector partnerships, along with bringing in men and boys, and reaching out to the media. *Waves*.
legislation won’t make men respect women’s ability in business but it will stop men discriminating against them.
Panels will be following a similar style to yesterday, so short presentations from each of the panellists, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. You can see the full line up for today here. If you have a question for the panellists tweet us @gdnwomenleaders with the hashtag #EqualityMeansJobs and we’ll try to put it to the panel.
Our very own Jo Confino is chairing today’s sessions so prepare for a good debate.
A theme of yesterday was the need for corporate transparency around diversity data and a willingess to be open about their failures as well as their successes.
Barbara J. Krumsiek the chair, president and CEO of Calvert Investments says:
During my 40 years working for and with corporations, I’ve had a front row seat in observing how women fare as they progress through their careers. While many companies have stated policies that would seem to support the growth and advancement of women professionally, there is all too often a lack of demonstrable performance against those stated policies. I would encourage every senior leader to personally seek metrics and data that show policies are actually working – and I’d like to see companies disclose this data. For instance, in Calvert’s own diversity report, we found that even among the largest 100 companies, 39 do not disclose any employee demographic data publicly, leaving consumers and investors unable to determine the effectiveness of corporate diversity initiatives. This process can be unsettling to many who are comfortable with the status quo, but well worth the investment – both to attract and retain top talent as well as position for competitive advantage.
Welcome to day two of the 6th annual WEPs event. If you weren’t with us yesterday you might have missed Jo Confino’s post on unconscious bias, Elizabeth Kelan’s thoughts on the role of CEOs in embedding gender diversity and the inevitable technical issues.
Today we’re live blogging from the UN headquarters in New York. In an incredible room, with what seems to be perfect WiFi. Stay tuned for updates from 9am EST / 2pm GMT.
Highlights from: Taking Action on Women’s Economic Empowerment
Like it or not, we all have a part of our brain that has an unconscious power over the way we think.
This automatic part of our mind, which the rational part has no control over, is thought to dominate about 80-90% of our behaviour.
Most of us have good intentions, thinking we are choosing the most competent candidates for jobs, but the result of our combined actions is to create serious inequalities.
Tinna Nielsen, global head of diversity, inclusion and collaboration at Danish-based dairy company Arla Foods, says there are different types of practical interventions companies can try out to uncover the power of the unconscious to drive our decisions.
The purpose behind these experiments is that our behaviours tend to change only when our unconscious biases are brought to the attention of our conscious mind.
One exercise highlighted by Lisa Kepinski, an independent consultant, is to show pictures of emerging leaders in an organisation and ask top managers to point out the employees they know. Once the pictures of the men are removed, what tends to happen is that they recognize very few of the women. This shows that the women are not as visible as the men and therefore often get ignored when it comes to promotions.
Another experiment is to showcase fictional candidates for a job and ask business leaders to each score one the characters on the basis of how likely they would be to hire them.
While the candidates have 100% identical records, the executives mark them significantly differently, depending on their gender and race. For example, while Asian women score highly, those with a Middle Eastern appearance do far worse.
So what are the most effective ways companies can counter our unconscious biases?
What seems to work best is to nudge behaviour change. Examples are removing data and names from job shortlists and changing the framing of conversations. So for example, rather than look at how to improve work-life balance within companies, which can often seem challenging, why not start from the idea that all jobs should be flexible and then ask managers to disprove that this is possible.
Nielsen says: “The global world of the 21st century is changing but the human mind is not. So perhaps it’s time to outsmart it.”
Question time with Meg Jones, International Trade Centre
During the event we’ll be asking speakers and attendees for their views on a variety of issues. First up is Meg Jones, women and trade programme manager for the International Trade Centre.
Q: What can business leaders do to make sure the WEPs are embedded in their organisations?
“Women’s Empowerment Principle 5 is about the supply chain. Companies that have made a commitment to increase sourcing from women entrepreneurs, need to be able to draw from a pool of women business owners – preferably those with export experience who understand the complex requirements such as meeting international standards. The International Trade Centre, as a joint agency of the United Nations and WTO is mandated to assist small and medium sized enterprises in developing countries, achieve export success. We help women entrepreneurs export. We also, in partnership wtih the UN Global Compact, UN Women and organisations such as WE Connect International and BPW International, run an annual event connecting buyers with women entrepreneurs: The Women Vendors Exhibition and Forum. WEP signatories can join us in Rwanda 16-17 September to meet carefully selected suppliers who are ready to do business with women. This new, innnovative platform has alread lead to USD20m in sales and letters of intent to purchase goods and services from women in developing countries. A date for the diary!”
Highlights from What’s New? Research and Data Driving Gender Equality:
Elisabeth Kelan, associate professor of management at London’s King’s College, has interviewed 20 global CEOs to find the key leadership qualities that are needed to create gender equality in the workplace.
While previous generations of CEOs claimed inequalities were the result of challenges, such as women finding a suitable work life balance, emerging business leaders say the real reason for a lack of progress was a management failure.
She said that many CEOs admitted the problem was that “previous generations have not led the way”.
Her research showed that CEOs are now much more eloquent about talking about the challenges and opportunities of gender parity as well as being able to argue the emotional case for change, rather than focusing purely on why it’s good for the economy.
Many of those interviewed by Kelan talked about a personal epiphany that changed their minds, ranging from the influence of their daughters, reading a book, or feeling outsiders themselves in another context.
She said the critical leadership behaviours that are essential for generating transformational change, including effective communications and leading by example, including putting women in visible positions.
Where managers exhibit sexist behaviour, Kelan said it was important for the CEO to be seen to personally respond, including sacking staff where necessary.
She also warned against companies creating too many initiatives, and that it was far more powerful to focus on a few projects and really put resources behind them.
The Women's Empowerment Principles: a quick overview
Launched on International Women’s Day in 2010, the Women’s Empowerment Principles were created through a collaboration between UN Women and the United Nations Global Compact. They set a standard for businesses who want to empower women in the workplace. You can learn more about them here.
Welcome to the 6th Annual WEPs event, looking at gender diversity in the working world and how we do it better. Over the next two days Jo Confino and I will be reporting live from the conference and talking to guests and speakers. We’ll be asking them which businesses have shown innovation in their diversity and inclusion programmes and discussing the potential barriers to more women in the workplace.
