Gender balance is a male issue too

"Women are not a diversity dimension," says Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. "Why in the world do we talk about gender diversity if we are only talking about men and women? That's incredibly insulting unless you are talking about the 52 genders you can find on Facebook. Gender is either in balance or out of balance."

Chief executive of international gender-balance consultancy 20-first, Wittenberg-Cox was in Dublin recently to pick up the lifetime achievement award from PWN Global, the international professional women’s network she helped found.

She believes most organisations are taking the wrong approach in relation to gender balance. But they are beginning to take it more seriously for hard-nosed business reasons. “Women now make up some 60 per cent of university graduates globally; 80 per cent of consumer goods buying decisions are made by women; and in the next two decades women are set to inherit millions of dollars in wealth from families and spouses,” she says.

“In the face of this opportunity, why are 93 per cent of creative advertising directors young men aged under 35? Women now have total wealth bigger than the combined GDP of China and India, yet nobody seems to get it. There is also a growing body of research to show that more gender-balanced companies have higher profits and perform better. The question is not why, but why organisations are not availing of the resource represented by the low hanging fruit that’s sitting across from their leaders – at the kitchen table at home in many cases.”

It’s partly the way the issue was addressed up until now, she contends. “Fix the woman. Companies spend a lot of time well-meaningly trying to help women succeed. It’s as if they lack something. It’s not women that need fixing. It’s the leaders and their systems that need adapting to 21st-century realities.”

The usual solution has been to hive the problem off to a diversity committee or women’s network. “Let’s start a women’s committee,” she adds. “But some companies have changed. There is definitely a first-mover group of high-performing great companies that are gender balanced.”

Lagging behind

The others are lagging behind because the way the topic is framed is not business-oriented or strategic.

“Diversity and inclusion committees think it’s their job to gender-balance the business, but they can’t because the system has been set up to fail and it needs to be adapted,” she continues.

But there is a desire to change. “The higher up you go in organisations, the more concerned they are. But the chief executives delegate it to others. We need to get them to realise that it is their responsibility. It is about a culture shift for the 21st century.”

A fundamental change in approach is required if that shift is to be achieved. “The whole issue is man on man but the way it is being framed today is woman on woman. The top teams don’t realise they have to lead the change. It’s not about empowering women, it’s about leading change in the executive team and throughout the organisation. Gender is a male-on-male issue.”

She compares the situation to South Africa in 1990, where it took a white leader to lead the white population to move away from apartheid and share power and eventually transfer it to the black population.

“Women have risen throughout the 20th century and now its men’s turn to have to adapt,” she adds. “We are waiting for a de Klerk figure for males. It is not more female role models that we need, we need male leaders who know how to lead change as role models. Organisations built and designed by men for men with wives at home who don’t work outside the home and designed for single-earner couples are not flexing fast enough for the reality of where today’s talent is and what today’s market is. Why are we getting all these young men with male messaging pushing products at women? Every organisation that has been designed for me by men is going to have to adapt to the 21st century or they will miss out on talent and market opportunities.”