It’s the Women, Stupid!

Question: Should companies mandate female representation on boards and in management?

by Fil Fraser

The Case:
In hindsight, Bill Clinton might have been wise to substitute women for “the economy” in his storied slogan. Recently a group of women in France donned fake beards as part of a demonstration against a leading cosmetics manufacturer, claiming that the company didn’t have enough women on its board and in senior management. Placards showed members of the board, including the few women, with beards drawn across their faces. Women should play a greater role, they argued, parroting the company slogan, “Because you’re worth it.” A Norwegian law, meanwhile, requires 40% of directors of public companies based in that country to be women, and issues of women’s equality remain front and centre from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Despite today’s economic crisis, gender issues remain poised near the summit of ongoing challenges, and while the economy will eventually sort itself out, women’s issues are not going away. It’s indisputable that women are seriously underrepresented in the boardrooms and executive suites of today’s businesses, big and small. In Canada, some political parties vow to increase the number of women candidates. But many argue that these are small steps.

The Panel:
Janet Keeping: a lawyer and president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership
Ken Chapman: a lawyer, blogger and principal in Cambridge Strategies Inc., a public policy consulting firm

Janet Keeping: It’s an incredibly important question. It’s been discouraging over the last few years to read in the press and hear from other sources the extent to which women are not making the kinds of gains towards equality – practical, real, on-the-ground equality. In so many cases the rules look like they are fair as they are written, but in real life it turns out that things aren’t so fair at all.

Let me say, first, that people in business really have to want to achieve that result. There isn’t going to be equality of achievement and equality of result unless we really want it and if we’re not honest about what it might take. It’s not going to happen unless people are convinced it’s the right thing.

Ken Chapman: The jobs in these senior positions are often so unfriendly to families that men have been able to do these jobs the way they’ve been doing them for generations because women have been there taking care of the other things that have to get done in families. Women don’t have wives.

The women that I know who have been successful have been doing it primarily on male models and male values. We really need female values to be brought into decision-making processes. Until men step up to the plate and do more than just the dishes every now and then, take out the garbage and participate more actively in family responsibilities, it’s not going to happen.

The culture has to change, everywhere. Law, and maybe medicine, is attracting a lot of women – more than 50% of the enrolment in law schools these days are female – but when they come out to practice they don’t like the medieval morality play that is standard private practice, where you carry a spear and get abused in terms of the hours and expectations for five to 10 years, and then you get offered a partnership. In the new consciousness, nobody wants that kind of lifestyle.

Keeping: I don’t see anywhere near enough creative solutions being offered by business. One of the remaining really serious issues for women in the workplace, and that means at all levels, is the whole question of child care. You’re not going to get women in the boardrooms and you’re not going to get women in senior executive positions if they didn’t start off somewhere else. You don’t just start as CEO; you start at a lower salary, and therefore the concern about women’s progress through the ranks has to permeate businesses. Every major business should have to have its own child-care facility close to the workplace. It should give convenient access to parents of either gender, but especially women, who we know bear the greater burden of rearing children. I don’t see that happening much, and if women are not even getting that, something as elementary and obvious, then it’s no wonder that we’re not doing a very good job of handling the other challenges.

Women often don’t want to take senior corporate jobs because they are so very onerous. They actually do want those jobs, but they don’t want them under the current set of rules and conditions.

We have to rethink work. What’s not working is the present, status quo assumptions about work – and thinking that women can achieve parity within the status quo. It doesn’t work because the rewards will always go to the people who can hang in there the longest, who can rack up the most hours, all other things being equal. So if you just say, “You’re welcome here, dear,” and nothing else changes, women aren’t going to be able to climb that ladder. How we think about work has to change. It can’t be a matter of 16 hours a day; it’s certainly keeping women out of the top ranks. It’s also the case that it’s just perverse. It’s just bad for all of us. It’s bad for society.

Listen to June’s Right Call Podcasts, audio from the interviews with Janet Keeping and Ken Chapman that shaped this column.

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