Could you achieve gender parity in your organisation without mentioning gender in the course of doing so?
Our Head of Research, Edward Haigh, recently interviewed 25 senior executives in the FTSE 350 companies that are leading the way on gender parity. Since then, he’s been grappling with this enticing question:
Could you achieve gender parity in your organisation without mentioning gender in the course of doing so?
What surprised me was how much of the progress they’d made was down to the steps they’d taken to build the cultural foundations of their business, and how little of that appeared to have made any explicit reference to gender at all. Indeed, I started to entertain the possibility that if you’re busy rolling out a range of initiatives explicitly designed to advance women in your organisation then you’re not only missing the point, but might, by virtue of feeling the need to do so, be destined to fail.
One interviewee in particular seemed to share this view: Charged with improving the representation of women in an insurance company, she was deeply cynical about initiatives in general, saying that they were completely the wrong way to approach things. I wasn’t completely sure what she meant at first, but with time to reflect I’ve come to understand it.
I suspect she was - and now I am - exaggerating slightly for effect, but the point is this: If you’ve addressed the cultural foundations on which everything else in your organisation is built; if there are deeply held assumptions about the value of inclusivity, of a sense of belonging, of supporting people and treating them with respect and fairness, then you’re much less likely to need a women’s network or a programme designed to accelerate their careers. By the same token, if you’re leaning heavily on launching lots of eye-catching initiatives then there’s a strong chance that you’ve slipped into a performative mode and are failing to do the more foundational work on which your success will ultimately depend. There’s also a chance that you’re starting to introduce exclusivity to your drive for inclusion - for instance by creating women-only programmes - and may be creating as much resentment among those you exclude as you create opportunity for those you include.
In my experience, to the extent that there’s fault here it tends to lie with the leaders of an organisation. Very often the people below them who have been charged with advancing gender parity have been given vocal support and a bit of money by leaders to - and I’m paraphrasing a little here - “go away and do something”. Both parts of that are deeply instructive: Leaders genuinely want something to be done, but they also want the people doing it to go away. Perhaps that’s because they know that the first door those people really need to be knocking on when they start trying to change things is their own.
Inevitably, what happens as a result has gender written all over it, because it’s doubly performative. Leaders want to see “gender” stuff happening both for their own peace of mind and so they can be sure other people (internal and external) can see it. And the people doing it need to show their leaders that they’re doing something.
Real change is quieter than that and runs deeper. If it has a label at all, it’s rarely “gender”.
Women in Leadership: Strategies from FTSE 350 organisations leading the way
Edward’s interviews were conducted as part of our research ‘Women in Leadership: Strategies from FTSE 350 organisations leading the way’ which reveals the practices, strategies, and leadership behaviours that have enabled a number of FTSE 350 organisations to make substantial progress in advancing female representation in leadership roles. Learn more and download the summary report here.