The X Factor
I was brought up by my mother to believe that women had a unique power to change the world. She taught me to treat women at par w+ith men, if not higher. For a young boy, whose biggest hero has been a woman, the issue of gender diversity has always been very close to my heart.
The corporate world has largely failed women. They are one solid half of the human resource on this planet; and a greatly gifted one at that. I believe that the world’s best manager is a mother. She brings up children, manages a household and the associated social ecosystem effortlessly—sometimes single-handedly and sometimes at a very young age.
There is a clear co-relation between a company’s gender diversity and its financial success.
. Imagine what an extraordinary talent that is and then the same extraordinary talent comes to a workplace and gets lost because she has to lean back to fit into a “mould” that was manufactured for a man. A large number of women employees “opt out.” Experts describe this as the “leaking leadership pipeline”. Studies have revealed a clear co-relation between a company’s gender diversity and its financial success along with proof that a diverse group almost always outperforms a homogenous one by a substantial margin.
And let’s not forget women are also crucial to strike the EQ-IQ balance in the companies. Social scientists like Daniel Goleman are predicting the onset of an ‘emotional economy’ that propagates a balance of EQ and IQ to de-risk an increasingly uncertain world. In this emotional economy, a woman’s high EQ can be a competitive differentiator for companies.
Have We Missed The Point?
Makes you wonder then why we have still not been able to leverage the complete potential of the women employees.
While research can present many empirical and statistical data, I for one believe that the main reason for the disengagement of the women workforce is our obsession with stereotypical approaches. Let me narrate an incident that we once came across. In one of the schools, that I am supporting, there was a very low turnout of girls. Assuming that was because of the distance between the school and their homes, we distributed cycles to all the girl students. The turnout did not improve. I decided to dig deeper. That is when I found out that the girls weren’t coming to school because it lacked proper toilet facilities.
If we need to make progress, in the context of gender-diversity, we need to start with the mindset of “unlearning” first.
Assumptions are futile in the context of gender-diversity at workplace. If we need to make any real progress, we need to start with the mindset of “unlearning” first. For example, we may miss the point completely if we continue to believe that gender equality means both genders are similar and identical and, therefore, deserve equal opportunities. We are speaking only half the truth in that case. Yes, both deserve equal opportunities but they are not identical. It’s outdated to think there are no differences between men and women. And once we accept there are differences, we need to study them instead of downplaying them. Research, for example, shows that women prefer flexibility ahead of compensation, collaboration ahead of competition and family and society ahead of office and customer.
Before we start ticking-off the boxes on the common practices on the gender diversity list we need to step back and rethink—is that what women really want or does something more important precede these tactical interventions? Perhaps we may want to first aspire for an organisation that is culturally and emotionally aligned to a woman employee’s priorities. And how do we do that? There cannot be one answer or solution to this problem. Perhaps we need to change our expectation that employees be available anywhere, anytime, or find ways to navigate around the reticence of many women to fight for themselves or change some rules of engagement. The important point is to create a mindset that is ready to admit and explore this dilemma with an open mind.
Are Women Aspiring Enough?
Having admitted that we are not doing enough for the women at workplaces and that there is still lots that needs to be done before we even come close to the term gender diversity, there is another important question that needs to be answered—are women aspiring enough themselves?
I remember the New York Times magazine cover in 2003, headlined: Why Don’t More Women Get To The Top? “They Choose Not To,” said the rejoinder. The image showed a woman sitting serenely with her baby, ignoring the ladder behind her. While I do not have any intention of joining this debate, I do continue to believe that women should aspire with greater intensity. The world was never fair, most changes take longer than one lifetime to realise, so if this is the age and this is the moment, then rather than waiting for the world to change, women can perhaps step up with greater force and bring so much of their best on the table that it will make it hard for the world to push them aside.
There is something that has always inspired me—if you ever feel that life’s race is not fair and you may have started the farthest, remember the road will not shorten itself for you, nor will it get any smoother. It’s only you who will have to run with greater passion and intensity to close the gap and win the race. My mother told me that.