The Trouble with Gender Targets
“There is nothing more absurd than having a target of 49.1% women in management,” exclaimed a manager in a big consumer goods company (which, in disclosure, is a client of mine) in Sao Paolo last week. There are few things in business less popular than targets for a fixed percentage of women in management. Men don’t like them, and women don’t much like them either. They offend everyone’s sense of meritocracy.
But there are targets for almost every other objective in business, and no one seems to find those problematic. Why, then, the frustration over targets for gender? Most managers just don’t see it as a business issue. A company’s degree of frustration over gender targets usually correlates with how poorly the company has sold the “why” of balance.
When people actually believe that balance benefits their business, resistance to targets diminishes. Whether it’s about leadership and talent, or customers and innovation, identifying and communicating an inclusive aspirational vision – to both men and women – is key. Leaders too often have skipped over the why, assuming that their employees already get it, and insist they just need a bit of help on the how.
But a generation of leaders who have worked hard and contributed to some of the world’s best corporate success stories have a lot of trouble envisioning what a quota of women will add to their bottom lines. Especially as they are absolutely convinced that they and their firms are gender neutral, and only promote people based on competence. Targets are like a red flag to a bull for these men and women. They experience it as an affront to their deeply held meritocratic principles. It doesn’t help that targets are usually framed as all about ‘women’ rather than about rebalancing the organization to reflect today’s talent and markets, or about flexible gender-neutral ratios. For example, “40% minimum of both genders, at all levels.’”
Targets are simply a way of measuring progress. But in the world of gender balancing, they too often become a (little understood) end in themselves. It is faster (and cross-culturally simpler) to communicate a target than it is to share – and sell – a vision. So expediency plays over efficacy. And even if these companies reach their targets, they often realize that they have not necessarily shifted the culture to be more global, more customer-centric, or less hierarchical.
Targets don’t teach people about the unconscious masculine realities that underlie today’s corporate cultures or how unattractive they are to most women (and a fair number of men). Nor do they help the dominant majority to question – and experiment – with other ways of leading and being.
Earlier theories of “critical mass” suggested once you had at least 30% of any group, they would no longer be perceived as a minority or subordinate. What we are now starting to see is that you can have critical mass, but this does not necessarily shift the dominant ethos, mindsets, and leadership styles that continue unperturbed to define the tone and the rules of the game.
So I have seen organizations become gender balanced, like the one I was with last week, yet both men and women in the organization remain convinced that sexism persists. After years of pushing on targets, the men are convinced that the system favors women, while the women remain wary of a culture that seems not entirely convinced of their contribution.
This is partly a result of how they achieved the targets: very often by promoting men internally, and accelerating the recruitment of senior women from the outside (who then don’t have the depth of networks and knowledge that the insider males do). Men and women end up thinking that the other sex is getting promoted for the ‘wrong reasons.’ They have no shared vision or history of complementary perspectives and experiences, but rather a competitive positioning of who is getting the plum jobs. Interestingly, I have seen these reactions in companies or divisions run by both men and women.
This creates a mutually defensive – and acrimonious – culture. Which often has more to do with insider/ outsider status and cultural alignment than it does with gender, but everyone is too worked up to fine-tune the analysis. Men think women are overly sensitive and ignoring the evidence (senior leaders are gender balanced, and recent hires have been selected to fill a target). Women think men are being unsupportive and non-inclusive (which they often are, not appreciating outsiders parachuted in over their heads).
Both men and women begin to put the blame for process and cultural dysfunctions onto gender, and become convinced that the other gender is missing competence and skills. Interestingly, both sides anchor their arguments in meritocratic principles.
This may also illuminate what seems to have happened at Harvard Business School, which has pushed for years to balance its MBA class, and managed to get to roughly 40% female/ 60% male. Yet it discovered, and shared in a New York Times article, that this hadn’t had the impact they expected. The culture was, if anything, even more masculine, competitive, and class-conscious than before.
The reality is that successful gender balancing requires more than a simple statistical push. It means real organizational change. Unless companies adapt their leadership cultures, management mindsets, and policies to the consequences of a more gender balanced talent pool, women who out-performed earlier fall prey to environments that haven’t adapted to their strengths and differences and are soon perceived to be under-performing.
So while many organizations focus initially on targets, they usually wake up at some point to the fact that targets need to be integrated into a more strategic story. Gender balancing for its own sake doesn’t make sense to most managers. If you don’t take the time to make sense of the push for balance, you can create a backlash.
At HBS, it was after they’d reached 40% women on the MBA track that they realized that numbers alone would not shift the culture. That would take leadership: a new President and a committed group of deans aligned to shift the message. They did some things right. From my experience bringing the same kind of change to organizations, there are a few things they could also have improved on.
What worked:
- Strategic framing: The more HBS framed their change initiative as a culture change for effective leadership and business performance, not as ‘diversity’ or a ‘women’s’ initiative,’ the more effective they were.
- Holistic approach : The deans looked at a range of cultural and systemic issues – including the balance of MBAs, faculty, and governance. Harvard is the only top business school with a gender balanced board. The differentiator is combining those numbers with a complete overhaul of behaviors and styles. This is very rare.
- Leadership from the top: The HBS change initiative was pushed by the President and the deans. This contrasts with the approach of some companies, where the leaders think the targets speak for themselves and that they don’t have to consistently repeat the why of balance.
- Get men to lead more visibly: HBS could have gotten more men to visibly lead the charge. It seems to have been at least perceived as driven by “unapolagetic” women. Most companies have women heading up the push for balance, which often results in an antagonistic ‘men vs women’ perception.
- Explain the “why” to the majority: HBS’s lack of transparency around why they were pushing for change was perceived as ‘social engineering.’ Many companies run into backlash issues if they don’t engage their majority male managers in debating why change is necessary and relevant to the business – and then making them accountable for delivering balance. Without this intellectual context, the targets – even if achieved – ring hollow and unmeritocratic.
- Teach it as a management skill: Given the gender shift in global talent and consumers, learning to lead across genders is a 21st century skill. Targets without skill are a recipe for balance without benefit: where none of the complementarities are understood or leveraged, and where lack of transparency about the rules of the game are experienced as unfair and biased. Building and nurturing inclusive, high performance cultures is a key skill for the 21st century. There won’t be any shortcuts to developing them.
Government is the #1 enemy of the people and the source of all major problems of humanity. Anarchy is the best political system. Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com
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