Education of men the key to gender diversity

Maureen Frank

For Australian organisations to be accepted as true global leaders, they are going to have to change their approach to the issue of the gender balance.

Whether it comes down to the Aussie culture, Aussie male or female stereotypes, the family agenda or some other issue, the facts remain that Australian organisations lack women in senior roles and, typically, have more men than women in their ranks.

Solutions seem to be focused on “secret women’s business” and, frankly, I think this is the wrong approach.

You may be thinking: here we go again, everyone knows it is an issue and many are sick of hearing it.

But the Australian stats are ominous, with a clear picture that things are not getting better despite all the hype.

In 2008 there was a decline in women in senior roles and Australia is not tracking well when compared with other Western countries.

There were a lot of ooh-aahs in the media, but little is done by Australia’s top 200 companies to change the way they attract, recruit and retain women.

Whether they even have strategies for women is probably a more pertinent question.

My view is that in many instances where they do, such strategies are often tokenistic so there is little real business grunt behind them. My bet is that most of them don’t even have a strategy or a plan. So how is the problem going to be resolved?

But let me pose an even stranger question: I wonder if they have strategies that bring the men into the fold as well?

As someone who has made it to the top of my field (mergers and acquisitions) and to the most senior ranks in a global organisation, I feel I understand the issues women face and why so many of them don’t make it, give up and leave or simply don’t care.

Women have a plethora of issues to deal with and, to be perfectly honest, they don’t always deal with them in a constructive way that is conducive to helping them rise through the masculine work environments most Australian organisations espouse.

As a simple analogy, I’m sure you’ve heard of the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The reality is that the psychology of this book isn’t just pertinent to the male-female relationship from a personal perspective. It is completely relevant to the work environment, yet in terms of organisational psychology it seems to be undiscovered or taboo.

Yes, women need to learn a few things to get themselves on a level playing field with men. To me it’s about that level playing field and the best person for the job, not tokenism.

But to me the key to women advancing in organisations is to get men to embrace the problem, to understand the business case and, consequently, to genuinely want to learn about the issues women face and what they can do to help.

Then we need active participation.

Global research by organisations such as Catalyst, McKinsey and GE have all shown that organisations with more gender-diverse teams deliver higher revenue, higher dividends, more productivity, innovation and overall higher profitability.

Why? To me this is an indicator of a contemporary, innovative organisation that has true 21st-century leadership practices.

Organisations need to adopt education and training strategies for their men on the business case for why gender diversity is so important, and implement simple initiatives to create better work cultures and more dynamic results.

For too long, gender diversity has been seen as secret women’s business in the corporate world. We need to bring men into the fold and help them understand that this is a critical business issue with significant financial implications.

In my experience, when men understand the business case, they are eager to become active participants.

My research shows that 80 per cent of senior men are ill-informed and do not appreciate the commercial realities or the personal implications for women in their lives.

And it’s not their fault; they just don’t know. This barrier is followed by almost 60per cent of men fearing the disapproval of other men if they are more gender inclusive.

Men have fears about supporting gender diversity in organisations: fears of women taking over their jobs, insecurity about their abilities and capabilities, concern with innuendo about working more closely with women and peer pressure from male colleagues.

If men can learn to allay their fears and understand the benefit that women bring to the business and to themselves personally, Australian organisations will finally start to see a correction in the gender imbalance and a lot of other benefits.

Maureen Frank, managing director of Emberin Pty Ltd, is lead adviser on women’s issues to the Diversity Council of Australia.