Thursday 15 May 2014

Gender Diversity? It’s Not About Sex - It’s About Skills

I had the pleasure recently of being one of two men in room full of the best and brightest women working for tech firms.

I’d been invited to Cisco Connected Women Client & Partner Event (with AT&T and GE). The event was held at IDEALondon (Innovation and Digital Enterprise Alliance) sited in the heart of London’s TechCity just around the corner from the Google Campus.
If you haven’t heard of it IDEALondon is an incubator or as at it likes to style itself `an innovation centre for startups and entrepreneurs to grow and expand their businesses`.

It's a very impressive space with 17 tech firms currently busy developing the next big thing amongst its transparent meeting pods and fern-encrusted living walls. It’s driven and funded networking giant, Cisco, publisher DC Thomson and University College London. And it’s full of proper companies developing cutting-edge technologies - including Amy Lai's Wittos http://www.wittos.com and Jenny Griffith's Snap Fashion http://www.snapfashion.co.uk . Not the web design agencies and PR firms so often included to swell TechCity’s numbers. 

The need to `man up`

The objective of the day was to explore what 'success' looked like through different perspectives. In this respect, one of the constant themes from the succession of inspiring and already highly accomplished speakers, not just from the world of tech but from the law, journalism and science, was that in order to succeed in `a world of men` each had to supress some their nature `female` tendencies and `man up` to a more macho work style.

Issues such as caring how people feel about situations, it appeared, needed to be brushed aside in order to succeed.  It was the stuff of so many current discussions around gender equality and diversity in the workplace, women defining themselves in comparison to men. Having spent my life managing companies where women are in the vast majority, I think that is a mistake. The issue should be about how to do things better.
For me it’s not all about inherently female or male traits or apologetic or oafish behaviour at the margin, it is about what behaviours are both appropriate and advantageous for success in the modern workplace.  And make no mistake, in the modern team-oriented, coached post-industrial workplace the winning firms are those that recognise they need to maximise the contribution of their entire workforce.

It’s not about sex, it’s about skills

Yes folks we are all human beings. It’s not about sex, it’s about skills.  If someone’s gender or orientation blinds you to their superior or inferior potential or contribution it’s time to retire.  But for the time being it seems whether winners or losers we will be viewing the world of workplace skills through polarising lenses.   
Sitting in a room full of impressive human beings who happen to be women who command some of the world's top tech firms and have started their own, apparently, is unusual. In the UK currently women account for between 15-18 per cent of the `IT profession` and, of course, we are in the middle of a month-long` Women in IT` campaign which aims to encourage more women to enter the sector.

Ten top tips

As part of its PR campaign to highlight this issue BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has published ten top tips to encourage understanding of the way those with XX chromosomes may differ from the imagined XY benchmark
The Institute’s top and undiluted tips are:

1. Many women almost never say they can do the job on offer in an interview, whilst identically qualified men do;
2. Many women aren’t good at hearing good news but are often obsessive over bad news or criticism, so be careful how you deliver it;

3. Women tend to think they will get promoted by working long hours and doing more than is asked of them. They don’t realise this isn’t always the case;
4. They often find it hard to ask for a salary increase or higher package when offered a job. However, men are generally good at this and it can lead to unwitting or unnoticed pay gaps. Employers need to watch for this and ideally conduct regular independent pay audits – and publish the results;

5. It is helpful to insist that all candidate lists for promotion or recruitment include at least some women;
6. Unconscious bias training is more or less standard across most companies these days. Any training undertaken should be offered to everyone, especially those involved in recruitment and middle and senior management layers of your organisation;

7. Double check the wording of your recruitment advertisements. Are they gender friendly? Will they specifically attract women? Are they likely to catch the eye of more experienced women returning to work after a career break who wouldn’t mind starting again at the bottom of the ladder?
8. Have you got three women on your Board? It makes a real difference in productivity and in profits. Ideally you will have 40 per cent women on your Board and in your executive teams – because that will really put you on the map and attract other high calibre women to your organisation;

9. Women really make the most of mentoring opportunities, and will return the blessing for those less experienced than themselves, so make sure that you are proactive about offering mentoring throughout their careers; and
10. Women are much more ambitious than you think, but are less likely to put themselves forward for roles, so good succession planning which values the skills of transformative leaders will ensure that recruitment doesn’t happen 'in my image.'

Although in all generalisations there exists some truth I have to say find much of this patronising, particularly at a time when women are increasing pulling away from men in achievement at school and dominating university courses and the professions.

A similar list could be drawn up focussing on the needs of a lost generation of generally less mature, less articulate, less qualified, less accomplished, less motivated and less ready all-round-for-the-modern-world-of-work men who are trying to enter the workforce, but I’ve yet to see such a thing.
No matter. As I said it’s not about sex - it’s about skills.   

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