There’s a great line in the new Barbie movie when the CEO of Mattel played by Will Ferrell denies that the company has a female representation problem in its all male boardroom.
This denial is still commonplace in today’s boardrooms when it comes to gender diversity and inclusion.
Of the top 300 listed Australian companies, men occupy 64.4% of all directorships, compared to 35.6% women. The stats improve the bigger the companies get with men occupying 60% of all board seats compared to 40% filled by women.
It seems that despite the best efforts of advocates, some leaders are just unaware or deliberately in denial that a problem even exists.
In fact for some, it’s not until they are called on it, or perhaps watch the Barbie movie, that they actually start to understand that they are in fact part of the problem.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review gave the example of Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, when two of his executives, both women, told him that the company was paying men and women unequally. Benioff later recalled his response during a US 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl:
Benioff: I said, “That’s not possible here.” You know, it’s — it’s not possible.
Stahl: Why was it impossible?
Benioff: It’s impossible because we have a great culture here. We’re — we’re a “best place to work.” And we don’t do that kind of thing. We don’t play shenanigans paying people — paying people unequally. It’s unheard of. It’s crazy.
The problem with these cases of denial is that business leaders often confuse team culture with good performance on diversity and inclusion. And whilst it would be nice to think that one thing ultimately leads to the other, the fact is, that it doesn’t.
“The belief that “bad things can’t happen in a good organisation” is one that I hear quite often,” said UniSA Professor Carol Kulik and author of Human Resources for the Non-HR manager.
“Ironically, it’s especially likely to be expressed by managers in value-led organisations and in small progressive startups.
“These organisations wear their culture “on their sleeves” and that can sometimes blind managers to inequities that are literally under their noses.”
What’s critical to facing up to denial about diversity and inclusion, is doing a thorough audit of your business and not just cherry picking the areas where you think you’d perform well.
“It’s what makes pay audits and other kinds of data reviews so important. You can’t fix something you can’t see,” said Prof Kulik.
“But blind spots emerge in other places too. We did some work with an organisation that had strategically positioned itself as a wage leader in their sector.
“They took great pride in saying that anyone they hired enjoyed a 10-15% increase over their previous salary.
“Unfortunately, because that pay rise depended on the new hire’s previous salary, the organisation’s policy maintained the gender pay gap operating in the market.
“The organisation’s leadership was shocked when they saw the results of their first pay audit.
“The lesson is that managerial good intentions aren’t enough to create gender equity.
“Only data tells managers where they need to act on those good intentions.”
Financy writes about gender financial equality, diversity and inclusion. We also provide the software, Impacter which makes DEI performance easy and accessible for business. We also publish the quarterly Financy Women’s Index report which measures timeframes to equality in Australia. To stay up to date with us, subscribe to our newsletter.
