It’s time for companies to step up their commitment to workforce diversity, argues Elissa Sangster, CEO of the Forté Foundation
As a non-profit organisation, supporting women’s progression within business through access to education, the Forté Foundation has, for many years, focused on ensuring that women are ready to step into leadership roles. Through programmes and initiatives, such as MBA Launch and the MBA Forums, as well as the efforts and offerings of many other organisations, women are applying to Business Schools and launching meaningful business careers in greater numbers than ever before.
Female enrolment was up to about 39% in MBA programmes last year at 54 surveyed Forté member Schools – and at 19 of these Schools, it was greater than 40%. Just a handful of years ago, only three Schools met that threshold.
This achievement is something to celebrate, but it’s becoming clear that filling half the seats in Business Schools with female students is only part of the equation.
Women are flooding the pipeline, but the achievement of gender balance in MBA programmes, and eventually in senior management positions, will result only from a sea change in the awareness of those
in power – most often men – and an all-hands-on-deck effort. It’s time for men to actually participate, and it’s time for companies to step up their commitment to workforce diversity.
Unique strengths
For decades, we’ve been telling women that to succeed in business, they need to adapt, to be more forceful, to be more like men. But now we realise that this is not quite right. Women have been looking around and seeing that, despite their efforts, very little has changed – they still get passed over for promotions, they still make less than their male peers, and there are still far too few of them in the C-suite and on corporate boards.
For this to change, men need to value what women bring to the table—as women, not as women trying to be men. It’s time for institutions to recognise that women have unique strengths – and that workplace rules and career ladders can be adapted to accommodate them, not just the men who created the rules in the first place. Forté’s new Men As Allies (MAA) programme helps powerful men to see their role in achieving gender equity – how they can join the conversation, become sponsors, identify problems in the corporate environment, call them out, and change the rules so that they are fair for everyone.
The MAA helps men to understand that discrimination does not always come in the form of overtly misogynistic behaviour, such as sexual harassment, crude jokes, or passing over women for promotions. Most often, it’s insidious, unconscious biases that have been hard-wired through generations of cultural conditioning that hold women down.
One mid-level manager participating in the programme recently shared that he noticed, during his regular team meetings, that the women tended to sit on one side of the room and that he was inclined to elicit feedback starting on the other side – where the men sat. The men tended to monopolise the conversation, and the women never spoke much.
Now aware that he unconsciously favoured his male staff members, he decided to start the conversation on the other side of the room. It opened his eyes. He reported that doing so completely changed the tone of the conversation. It wasn’t that the women had nothing to contribute – it was that they hadn’t been given an equal opportunity to do so.
Start behind, stay behind
There are so many little things that contribute to the gap between men and women, literally from the moment they step into the workplace. The fracture might start with a lack of engagement, which then becomes a delayed first promotion or a supervisory position over fewer people, or a position with less responsibility or a smaller pay raise than what their male peers receive. These slights create a rift that widens into a chasm over time. Women start behind and they stay behind.
To achieve true gender equality in the workplace, business leaders need to consider the strengths of everyone, not just the men. This doesn’t mean every woman coming out the other end is going to be a CEO, but it does mean that everyone has the same chance to grow and to meet their potential.
Forté can solve the pipeline problem of bringing in talented women aspiring to build careers in business all day long, but it’s workplace policies and behaviours that dictate where women go and how fast they move. It’s a 40-year journey from undergrad to the C-suite, and corporations must take responsibility for their part in this.
Standing side by side
There’s so much companies can do. They can put in place processes that mimic the National Football League’s Rooney Rule (requiring teams to include at least one minority candidate in interviews for coaching roles) by requiring at least one woman or underrepresented minority to be on every hiring slate to help get rid of the bias in hiring. Those with the power to hire, promote and recommend must be compelled to look beyond the people they already know – candidates who tend to look exactly like them.
There are companies that have introduced measures to make critical processes equitable, including hiring decisions, promotions and distribution of key assignments. Too many companies are completely on top of quality control when they’re building a product, but somehow don’t see that they can build the same checks and balances into their HR processes to arrive at higher-quality outputs. Gender equity is a complicated problem that bears analysis. It’s important to retool, change the levers and keep at it.
In the end, we need to emphasise that this is not a winner-takes-all situation. There are enough ideas, enough need for innovation, enough space for new businesses, enough investment for anyone who has the ambition and the dedication to turn great ideas into successful enterprises that generate jobs and wealth. Gender equity is not about pitting women against men or women taking men’s jobs. It’s women and men, standing side by side, each bringing their unique strengths to make their mark on an organisation and in the world.
Elissa Sangster is CEO at the Forté Foundation. Previously, she served as Assistant Dean and Director of the MBA programme at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, and Assistant Director of the MBA
programme at Texas A&M University’s Mays School of Business. Elissa holds
an MBA from Texas A&M University.
The Forté Foundation is a non-profit alliance of leading Business Schools and companies working together to launch women into fulfilling, significant careers through access to business education, opportunities, and a community of successful women.
