Flash back to Year 3010 B.C. As twilight sets in, Eve (for lack of a better name) is at her cave, waiting for Adam (again for lack of a better name) to return from his hunting for food.

At the cave, while water boils in a pot at the corner of the cave, Eve’s young kids are at play at the far inside end. Eve is all ears for any noise that signals an unknown animal – a snake or a predator, and for the water else it boils over. She also keeps watch on her kids at the far end, and at entrance of the cave, as she cuts some plucked vegetable to boil.

Year 2011 A.D. and you replace the cave with a cubicle at the office. Eve is at work – going through her e-mails, instructing her team member on something urgent and the same time keeping a tab on her 2.5 year old daughter’s well-being at home via the cellphone. While at all this, she is also ears for conversations happening around. When back at home she manages to cook food, look after her kids and catch up with TV as well.

Most men would consider women as over-sensitive to color, tone & manner, as being un-able to focus – “can’t finish one thing at a time” and indecisive.

 

We always knew we were different!

Men	Women
Play team sports	Play relationships
Are Ok with conflict	Avoid conflict
Compete	Be nice, get along
Focus on goal line/win	Negotiate for win/win
Avoid asking questions	Ask questions
Are linear focused	Multi-task – do things simultaneously
‘Kill’ the problem	Talk over and discuss it
Table 1. Men & Women: Differences

Evolution, genetics, physiology, up bringing – all contribute to making men and women different. These differences have huge implications for the way we hire talent, what we do to retain them, the way we plan careers and how we deal with men and women talent in our organizations.

Research has proven that some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to the way they are genetically made up. They are also able to distinguish various frequency levels of sound than men can’t.

Men and women also bring to work a lot of diversity in the way in which they approach their work and relationships (refer Table#1).

Women employees tend to ask more questions- helping the organization review & correct aspects of a course of action that men may have completely missed out. They are more prone to discussing out problems and resolving them in a win-win manner, than simply ‘hunting down’ the problem and ‘killing’ it. The process of achieving the result is as important to them as the result itself.

Women at work bring this diversity of inputs and methods of processing on the table for your organization, thus yielding diverse and different levels of output.

Because it makes business sense

Research says that 80% of consumer purchasing decisions are made by women, covering everything from cars and computers to IT and insurance (North America & Europe, OECD 2007). After a good/bad experience, women will tell 7 times more people about it than will men. Hence, it makes immense business sense to have women on board to understand product features that women consumers like and to appreciate their purchasing preferences.

Gender Diversity is a sound business practice with independent studies clearly pointing out to the direct correlation between diversity and the profitability of companies globally. Here are some of them:

• US Companies with highest representation of women on top management teams delivered 35.1% higher ROE and 34% higher total return to shareholders than those with lowest representation. (Catalyst USA 2004)
• Performance was even greater where there was a “critical mass” – companies with three or four female directors had 83% greater return on equity, on average, 73% better return on sales and 112% higher return on invested capital. (Catalyst 2007)
• In a 2007 study of companies across Europe, Asia and America by McKinsey & Co. those with 30% or more women in their senior management team achieved higher average scores for “organizational excellence” than those with no women. Operational excellence tended to correlate with better operating margins and market cap. (Women Matter 2007)
• A further McKinsey study of organizations in Europe showed that companies with the highest levels of gender diversity in top management enjoyed substantially better financial performance (including EBIT and Stock Price Growth) than the average for their sector. (Women Matter 2007)

Gender is a business issue, not a ‘women’s issue’. The under-use of women’s talent has an impact on the bottom line. Taking action to address this will require sustained courage and conviction from all of us.

Addressing 500 of the world’s most powerful women at a self-styled ‘Davos for women’ conference in Deauville, France (Women’s Forum, 2006), Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan said that women directly make or influence two-thirds of car purchases in Japan. Nissan conducted surveys which revealed that 80% of women buyers would prefer to have women salespeople in the showrooms – so would 50% of men.

More and more organizations are learning to leverage diversity of talent for competitive advantage.

Question the number of resumes of women that your talent resourcing team presents, the number of women candidates that you meet to hire for a position. Have you looked at women employee’s career-paths differently? Are they supported with a flexible work-time policy post maternity? What mentoring & development support systems do you have?

And helps build more productive & innovative teams

The more the diversity in your teams, you will have that much more innovative ideas and creative outputs through different opinion and discussion points. The more the variety of approaches, the more chances of coming out with differentiated products and services, process improvement opportunities, and better focus on new & diverse customer segments.

Cross-functional teams, office meetings and official social gatherings can become breeding grounds of exclusion of certain members. These members are likely to be one who may not be fluent communicators in English or one who do not come from affluent family backgrounds. Can be the introverts or can be the women. Or the one who have just joined your organization or the usual “not like us” – a homosexual or a disabled individual.

What we miss out is that our customer base has these same people – women, homosexuals, disabled or old people, those from rural and poor backgrounds or minority communities. Who in your organization is listening to them and is able appreciate their unique needs? Which of your employees are reaching out and interacting with them? Who in our teams are probably more equipped to think of products and services for them?

You can do a quick self or organizational check:

• Are we creating ‘space’ in meetings so that everyone has the opportunity to contribute regardless of style, first language or level in the organisation?
• Do we combine different perspectives to innovate and challenge?
• Do we create an environment where all feel respected and are able to freely contribute?

 

Though it’s not about numbers

While building gender diversity in our organization is not about numbers, but as business and human resources leaders, you can track these male-female ratios in:

• Resumes received for key positions
• Candidates shortlisted for a position
• External hires
• Various work-levels, geographical regions, functions
• Location transfer requests effected
• Attrition especially early (0-12 months attrition)
• Promotions in a certain cycle/period
• Identified/assessed top talent
• Successors for senior/top management roles

These ratios will throw up areas of focus for your organization. Besides these pure metrics, you may also analyze various other organizational or people related reports. For example, you may split responses to various people pulse or health & safety surveys by gender to understand what needs your immediate attention. These ratios and reports will also help you diagnose whether

Training man-days report, working hours report, whistle-blowers reports and the minutes of your sexual harassment committee can be other resources to check your diversity & inclusivity (D&I) health.

Map & understand lifecycle of a woman’s career

It is imperative that not only business leaders and HR leaders understand a woman’s career lifecycle and the changing needs of individuals, but even first-level supervisors need to appreciate and understand how a woman professional’s career path progress and what she needs at each stage.

The graph below (refer graph #1) is illustrative and presented as a template and is not comprehensive. However, it is sure to start a thinking process to proactively manage and respond to the crests and falls. Most managers shy away from hiring or promoting women team-members purely from a perspective of avoiding the ‘falls’ that come with hiring women.

What hiring managers often forget that even male employee may go through such ‘falls” in their career lifecycle due to various other reasons like dissatisfaction with current role or supervisor,etc..

It is also important that you communicate success stories of women who have managed to have fruitful careers in your organization through these stages.

To create a support infrastructure and monitoring mechanisms, at each of these stages of ups and downs, that sustain through other organizational changes especially leadership change, will key in attracting and retaining women talent.

 

Different strokes for different folks

There are various examples across progressive organizations and across geographies, of women specific initiatives. Some examples of such actions and initiatives:

• Flexible working
• Work from home option
• Crèche facility, Concierge facilities
• Inclusive behavior and leadership training for people managers
• Enhancing employee experience pre maternity, during maternity & post maternity return to work
• Reviewing women talent pipeline & development plans
• Women’s network @ work
• Mentorship programs for women
• Buddy at work for new women employees

Well beyond the above actions and initiatives, you need to build support infrastructure and process to sustain what you may start as an intervention. The organization’s learning and development (L&D) team needs to be geared up with programs that are specifically designed to deliver on women’s career, work-life balance, health, environmental awareness, etc.

The facilities team should plan for rest rooms build especially for women employees and vehicle drops for those sitting late.

Culture should get driven by organisational norms rather than by the personality of the business leader. Communication should go out that as senior leaders promoting diversity is just as important as performance. The more transparent, fair, honest you are – the better you come across to people – you can’t be an excellent performer and un-inclusive.

However, we all know that there’s no magic wand. It takes time to change existing norms.

 

Summing it up… keep the hat on and apply the lens

Keep the “D&I hat” on and “apply the D&I lens” in your role in order to incorporate D&I in processes you are responsible for, and to raise the awareness of D&I among line managers and employees

Be courageous and make a positive intervention when you see non-inclusive behaviour in yourself and others.

Watch for the subtle messages that get out every day. Alone, they may seem petty but together they create insiders and outsiders. They undermine your efforts to build diversity in your team and create an inclusive environment.

As leaders, we set the tone & “norms”, for instance: the jokes we laugh at, how we conduct meetings and what we do when we see inappropriate behaviour.

We can make a positive intervention without coming down “heavily” on someone. We can do that by bringing issues out into the open, by re-setting the line around what is appropriate. By ensuring that there is zero tolerance of any abuse of power by someone in a leadership role.

Not to miss the positive strokes, you can think of awards to recognize those promoting diversity and an inclusive culture.

Various researches show that diversity in the workplace was the bridge between the workplace and the marketplace. If you are not trying to build and sustain diversity in your team or organization, you are missing out on significant potential of half of the human race.