Chapman: This really is about power, about who gets to make the decisions, and who gets to implement those decisions, against what value set. If the bottom line is paramount, and the job of an enterprise is to increase the value to the shareholders, no matter what the extraneous costs, such as environmental and social costs, there’s no place for a female kind of consciousness in that environment.
It’s going to require a cultural change amongst shareholders, citizens and consumers, who do not look at success on a 90-day cycle and what’s happened in the last quarter. This meltdown is showing us that in pursuit of self-interest and greed, we were rewarding the wrong things.
Will the change be merely transactional and incremental or will it be transformative? If it’s going to be transformative, it will be because women bring different values and insist on change, as citizens, as consumers and as governors. For too long, men have had the luxury of having wives who take care of the balance, and we get to go and “make the money.” There are still people who believe that.
Keeping: I don’t understand why more women don’t start their own firms. There are some small firms that are either dominated by women or where there are quite a lot of women, and where people are having pretty good careers, as well as some home/work balance. I don’t know why we don’t have more of those.
It’s about power. Unfortunately a lot of the women who, historically, have gotten ahead have not had children or have not had perhaps more than one child. They succeed (if they do) on the basis of the male model and when they get to the top, even if they look around and can figure out that some things are “off” and they can see why, they don’t have the courage to push the issue.
Here’s an interesting example. At an event in Calgary, a female vice-president of a medium-sized firm was addressing a group of high school students, young entrepreneurs who imagined themselves as future business leaders. One young woman asked the VP if she thought it had been more of a struggle for her than it would have been for a man in her position. After a very brief pause, she said no, she couldn’t see any difference whatsoever. Another student asked if there were signal moments in her career, events that had been particularly advantageous to her advancement. This female vice-president said yes, she thought it was when her husband quit his job to stay home to take care of the kids. So she got a “wife.”
Chapman: Some corporations are trying to include more women on their boards of directors. Some of them try really hard, but it’s very difficult to find women who are prepared to take on that task. We even find it in managerial areas where many in the new generation are not looking for promotion up the corporate ladder, with the higher responsibilities that come with it, because there’s no lifestyle there. There’s no real payoff in terms of what
they value.
Keeping: My impression is that there are a number of companies out there that would really like to have more women in senior positions and on the board, but what they don’t seem to understand is that you actually have to do something positive to nurture that. It can’t be that you just sit back and wait for the candidates to come because by the time you get to those senior ranks, so many women have already been deterred, so you don’t have as big a pool to draw successful candidates from. You have to be thinking about the nurturing of female talent all the way through the system – at the lower and middle levels, so that you will have viable candidates to draw from when you get to the senior levels.
The Old Boys network, the old “stale-pale, male-net,” as someone recently put it, has let us down. CEOs should consult with their daughters or their granddaughters, depending on how old they are, and ask what those women want to see in their workplaces so that they have a fair shot at being CEO.
The Final Word
Some male biases are buried so deep in the culture of business that we’re not even aware of them. There have been very few cultures in human history where men and women truly shared power. And though we may think we’ve evolved, a recent CBC program reported on a study which had male and female actors pose as applicants for a senior management job. When the men displayed strong attitudes about wanting to rise to the top and be in charge, interviewers saw that as positive. But when the very same words, in the same tone, were spoken by a woman, interviewers saw that as negative. On a worldwide basis it will require tectonic changes in perception and behaviour to change the status quo. But even on an informal basis, affirmative action can work. Alberta businesses, big and small and according to their resources, should seriously consider mandating women’s representation on boards and in senior management to demonstrate their commitment to equality of opportunity and better reflect the communities they serve. Otherwise, women in our society will continue to be a statistical majority with the status of a minority.
–
Listen to June’s Right Call Podcasts, audio from the interviews with Janet Keeping and Ken Chapman that shaped this column.
If you’d like advice on a compromising situation (no names used), send details to feedback@albertaventure.com, or login to this site and post a comment.
Follow Alberta Venture On: