Gender diversity part 1: "At current speed the gender gap will take 217 years to close." CEOs and boards must and can do better.

This short series of three articles applies some transformation and innovation thinking to an issue in desperate need of drastic solutions.

According to Debbie Wosskow, OBE and founder of AllBright, the career network for women, we are 217 years away from closing the gender pay gap.

My two young daughters are five and nine. This sobering projection means that, at the current pace of change, they will not see gender equality in their lifetime. 

In fact, no matter whether your own budding female leaders of tomorrow are currently in pre-school, at university or already within the workplace, they will never see gender equality either. The generation of female leaders who will finally be on level terms with their male counterparts has not yet been born. 

The gender gap, whether measured by pay or the percentage of women in senior positions, is closing. The speed of its correction though is not fast enough. It is not, for example, fast enough for our children, whom we hope to introduce to a better, fairer, more equal world. We are not currently on track for the future we all hoped and planned for our dependents. Unless something dramatically changes.

As someone in the business of helping firms to lean into their biggest challenges this is something that occupies me on a relatively regular basis. When considering my daughters’ futures there’s an element of disbelief that we still live in a society where a percentage of your success is determined at birth. 

Through a large collective effort we have recently battled a global pandemic, to at least the point that said pandemic is well in retreat. We continue to send rockets into space and even regularly manage to bring them back for re-use. Gender equality and diversity should not be as difficult as those things.

And yet the statistics paint a bleak picture, unless you are a middle-aged white male who enjoys the status quo.

• There are just 41 female CEOs running Fortune 500 companies. That’s just barely over 8%.
• There are just two black women among those Fortune 500 CEOs.
• On a wider basis, women made up only 5% of the CEOs appointed in 2020 globally.
• At the CEO level, men outnumber women by approximately 17 to one.

As things stand, these numbers clearly say that no-one has effective solutions, or by now the gap would have closed further. We need then to reframe the problem, to try some ‘big picture’ solutions and to attack gender diversity with the same gusto we apply to other business issues, such as those we cover in the transformation and innovation fields.

We have to show stakeholders there is a route to change

77% of women say the biggest obstacle to gender equality at the workplace is the lack of information on how to advance. When embarking on large scale transformations, firms have to communicate clearly how and why the change is going to come about. This statistic says that most firms are not visible or not visible enough in their gender equality initiatives. I rarely see CEOs choosing to discuss what they are doing to combat gender inequality within their businesses, unless they are forced by outside commentators or specific events. Communication around how firms are changing and what they are doing for their female employees to enable their advancement has to improve.

There is a psychological block to change that must be overcome

As previously mentioned, we are firing rockets into orbit and overcoming pandemics. Gender equality should not be this difficult. Why then, do we believe that it is? It is common in transformational projects to find a level of belief that the change needed is impossible, which filters down into all facets of the business that need to change. In this environment it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that change will not happen. Firms in general and CEOs specifically seemingly think that there is an impossible level of difficulty in delivering gender equality, otherwise the aforementioned communication would be better and more prominent. To solve this, we have to overcome whatever psychological barriers are in place.

Companies have to show they are serious and believe in the change they are attempting to deliver

When discussing gender inequality on LinkedIn several commenters pointed out that companies just did not seem serious or show any evidence that they were seriously tackling the required change. This will have a direct impact on the success of the change and on other business factors. In an engagement covered here, a company with a poor retention rate of skilled labour found that many of their workforce cared enough about the environment that they were leaving because the company paid only lip service to their stated ESG initiatives. Many companies say they are tackling gender inequality, but how many CEOs and senior executives have their remuneration tied to gender equality targets? The answer within the Fortune 500, for example, may be in the single figures, or even lower.

Delivering transformational change towards gender equality: the next steps

As a middle-aged white male it should be very clear that there is no chance all of the answers are to be found in this article, nor that all answers on gender equality should or will be defined by my demographic.

This does not let that demographic off the hook. CEOs and business leaders - a group made up predominantly of middle-aged white men - should be doing more to shine a leadership light on gender diversity and contribute to a much-needed transformation of approach and culture. In Part 2 we’ll look in more detail about why this should happen. Why is gender diversity needed from a business perspective as well as a moral, cultural and societal one? In Part 3 we’ll look at the big picture ideas that could drive a transformational change in gender diversity, including how CEOs and business leaders can practically implement those changes, overcoming psychological blockers and pursuing transformation programmes that actually have a chance of realigning gender disparity.

Hopefully we can all agree that 217 years or more is too long to wait. Our children should not experience the same world we have; a world heavily weighted towards men. Hopefully you’ll join me in exploring some transformation concepts that could begin to correct this imbalance.

Part 2 will be published next week.