Addressing gender imbalances within agencies needs to come from the top down
Moser
If agencies are going to address gender imbalances with change needing to come from the top down, Clemenger Group Melbourne chairman Jim Moser has said.
Speaking at the Secrets of Agency Excellency conference in Melbourne on Tuesday on the topic of what does a successful modern agency business look like, Moser said of the lack of women in senior roles in agencies: “We have a lot more work to do and what I’ve learnt is that it takes an enormous amount of tenacity, effort and time, it has to be from the top down and you’re not going to get results overnight.
“It’s going to take years to get a pipeline of women moving into these management roles and then fill them.”
Gender balance in terms of mere numbers is insanity. The best that anyone can do is to employ on merit without bias. Women will always have choices that men do not have by virtue of their gender where childbirth and motherhood is concerned.
The only way to guarantee equal numbers, if that be the criterion, is to employ vastly more women than men and allow attrition to balance the tally. Clearly this is not acceptable.
Since we are vastly different human beings, men and women will always be attracted to different occupations and different cultures, this will be reflected in the ratios of male to female /female to male. In very few places in nature, does there appear straight lines or equal numbers, we are all part of the whole and we all have a role to play, many of these overlap, but some do not .
For all of you reading this right now, I want you to admit that we’re lucky. We don’t live in the world our mothers and grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were limited. We have also grown up in a world where we have basic civil rights, yet amazingly, we still live in a world were some women DON’T have them. All that aside, we still have a problem, and it’s a REAL problem. The problem is this. Women are still not making it to the TOP of any profession anywhere in the world.
The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 195 Heads of State, only 11 are women. Of all the people in Parliament in the world, 14% are women. In the Corporate Sector, women at the top, with Board seats is only 15% and the statistics are going backwards. Even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, only 20% at the top are women.
We also have another problem which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfilment. The question is ‘How are we going to fix this?’ How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I’m writing this because I really feel that women need to STAY in the workforce. To me, that’s the answer. Women are dropping out. What can we do as individuals? What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we need to tell the women who work with us and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters? I’d like you to also know that I’m not judging you. I don’t have the answers, not even for myself. This is a hard choice, and even I feel guilty when I drop my son to day-care and have to go to work. Being in the work-force and juggling a family is not for everyone, and that’s ok.
Yet us women are still systematically under-estimating our own abilities. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A recent Australian study of graduate students who just finished University, showed that 57% of boys entering the workforce are negotiating their first salary and only 7% of girls were. Most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, whereas women selflessly attribute it to other external factors. Ask a man ‘Why are you so successful?’ He’ll most likely say “because I’m awesome”. Ask a women the same thing, and she’ll say someone helped her or she got lucky. Maybe men put their hands up more when it comes to promotions, or maybe just as many women do, but put their hands down too early?
Despite this, I’m convinced that we’ve made more progress in the workforce than in the home. Statistics show this very clearly. If a woman and man both work full-time, and have a child, the women does twice the amount of housework and three times the amount of childcare. So she’s got three jobs and he’s got one. But who do you think drops out of work when someone needs to be home more? Why? As a society do we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than our girls? I know men that are stay-at-home dads and do more work in the home to support his wife and her career, and it’s hard. I’ve seen at the ‘mum-and-me’ days at Kindergarten, the dads that have to go along, and the looks they get from the other mums. That’s the problem right there. We HAVE to make being a parent as important a job, (because it is the hardest job in the world) regardless of who does it, if we are to even things out and allow women to stay in the workforce.
My generation sadly won’t see the change in the gender numbers at the top. I probably won’t ever live to see 50% of our world leaders as women. But I’m hopeful that future generations can. I think a world that was run where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women, would be a better world. I have four boys. I want my boys to have a choice to succeed in the workforce and participate in their homes. And if I had a daughter, I’d want her not just to succeed, but to be recognised for her accomplishments.