I’ve seen a lot of Australian business, at all levels. I’ve run my own companies, I’ve been President of a national industry association, I’ve served as director on a great number of boards.
And in the process I’ve reached certain conclusions about the role of women.
Australian business, taken as a whole, isn’t particularly hospitable towards women. It will probably come as no surprise to hear that:
- The old boys’ network is still prevalent;
- Women managers still earn less than their male counterparts;
- In Australia in 2005, women held only 8.7% of board positions in the top 200 companies;
- Disappointingly, Australian women hold an even smaller proportion of executive positions in the core business areas which are the main feeder groups for CEO and board positions.
Things aren’t getting much better either. That 8.7% of board positions is up from 8.2% in 2002, just half a percent in three years. At this rate we’ll reach 40% in about 2070. Most of us won’t live to see it.
I pick 40% as a marker because in Norway they’ve been experimenting with mandatory quotas, and they’ve managed to boost the proportion of women on boards from 7% to 40% in five years, well within our life expectancy.
We haven’t quite got to a serious discussion of quotas in this country yet, but the Australian Securities Exchange announced this week that it would push listed companies to set targets for gender diversity. We’re on that path.
There’s encouraging news outside business as well. Those proportions cited above are different in other sectors of Australian society. In South Australia, for example, women make up just 2% of ASX 200 company boards but 50% on government boards and committees.
I haven’t got exact figures, but I suspect the number of women on boards in the community sector would be closer to the government level than to the private share. And when it comes to social entrepreneurship – well, it’s hard to get a consensus on what social enterprise is exactly, and if we did have firm criteria we still wouldn’t have any actual statistics, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics doesn’t ask these questions, but I’m sure our representation of women on boards, is a good deal higher than 9%.
I say I’m encouraged by the higher representation of women in the government, community and social enterprise sectors because it’s good to see that people do recognise that humanity’s talents are evenly distributed across the sexes, in some quarters at least.
There is, however, an alternative explanation that is less flattering to us as Australians. That explanation would be that women are seen as different – soft, caring, feminine, and no good with money – and are thus particularly suited to the less testosterone-filled world of the not-for-profit (or not-just-for-profit) sector.
After all, the community sector has always been seen as closer to the women’s sphere – even in 2009, you don’t see many men behind the counter at the school canteen or making lamingtons for the church fête. The community sector has often been perceived as secondary to the real work of the economy. The prominence of women in the community sector is therefore not as encouraging as it might at first seem.
It’s not that men are flatly prejudiced (though some are: as one CEO reportedly said recently, “Blokes trust blokes”). It’s more that men have chosen the battleground, picked the weapons, and set the rules, and – as is only natural – they’ve chosen the ones that are natural to them, not us.
Charles O’Reilly, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, has a theory based on following a group of University of California Berkley MBA’s since the mid 1980s. His conclusion is very simple – success in a corporation is less a function of gender discrimination than of how hard a person chooses to compete (not how hard they work, mind, but how hard they compete) and those who tend to compete the hardest are generally the stereotypical manly men.
Today’s women, O’Reilly says, are equal to their male counterparts in education, experience, and skill. But when it’s a painful choice between the client crisis and the six-year-old’s birthday party, for example, the employee most likely to put company over family is the traditional work-orientated male.
We might argue about whether that approach is good for the employee (or the child). It’s definitely not good for the country – a recent Goldman Sachs report found that bridging the gender gap would raise Australia’s GNP by between 11% and 20%. In the final analysis, it may not even be good for the company. Right here and now, though, in the full flower of the commercial culture, that’s where the rock meets the hard place.
In the community and social enterprise sectors it is true that people do try harder to avoid bringing rocks too close to hard places. A common characteristic of such organisations is that they believe they can afford to consider a wider range of stakeholders, can more easily make allowances for the individual, and can maximise things that aren’t profits.
When women do decide to strike out for themselves and become social entrepreneurs, they often want to do some things rather differently. Because if men are, right now, better than women at the way things are done, then we can do one of two things: we can try to get better at it ourselves, or we can try to get us all doing something else.
Just being better at being hard isn’t a very attractive strategy for women, if only because it doesn’t seem very likely to be successful. Men have had a lot more practice at it, and don’t have the problem of fighting their conditioning to get there. Men have more time to devote to it, too, because they don’t often take time off for child raising and never take time off for childbearing.
Another reason not to choose this strategy is that many of us don’t really want to. In an article entitled The Opt-Out Revolution Lisa Belkin interviews a number of articulate, well-educated women who graduated in the late 1990s, had interesting jobs and then chose to leave their workplace whilst having children. They never get near the glass ceiling, writes Lisa, because they are stopped long before by the maternal wall. When these women talk about success, they use words like satisfaction, balance and sanity. Those sentiments are backed up by a recent survey by the research firm Catalyst which found that 26% of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don’t want the promotion.
Social entrepreneurship allows for the possibility of a step sideways out of the entrenched stereotypes of big business. Here in the borderlands between philanthropy and commerce we’re not less driven – we are, after all, working for the good of humanity, and that is an intoxicating and motivating driver – but we can be more flexible, more reasonable, and more person-centred. We can do things differently.
That’s not to say that business doesn’t have to change as well. It does.
Having only one woman on a board places her in a difficult situation – she’s treated differently, there are expectations that she’ll adopt a particular approach, her concerns may be seen as personal rather than objective. Two women shifts that dynamic slightly, three may dislodge it. But if under 10% of big Boards have a woman on them, then under one in a hundred have two, and it doesn’t do to think about three.
While the business world should feel a strong obligation to changing itself, the government also has a part to play in changing the shape of the workforce. Australia recently had a visit from Clara Gaymard, President of the “Invest in France” Agency. As head of the agency and Ambassador for Foreign Investment, Clara is one of Europe’s most senior female officials. She also has eight children ranging in ages from 10 to 21.
Clara says that France is making it very easy for women to work and have children because child care, including live-in nannies, is tax deductible, because all parents get a child allowance, and because French income tax rates reflect the number of dependants at home. Clara admits that there is always a work–family compromise, but in France the government is committed to making the choice as easy as possible. How much longer are we going to have to wait for tax deductibility for child care in Australia?
Whether all this is going to happen in five years or 50, we don’t want to sit around in the meantime. If we want the flexibility and understanding that will enable us to tap the often frustrated talents of half the population we must make structural changes, and we must begin by making those changes in the areas we are responsible for.
Social enterprises should be setting the example for the commercial sector by being family-friendly, flexible, and structurally compatible with the lives of women. We should be employing the new technologies – teleconferencing, time-shifting – to enable employees rather than exploit them further. We should take our responsibilities to our employees seriously. We should question the last-man-standing model of fitness for promotion. Many social enterprises are already doing all of these things.
As social entrepreneurs, women have taken up our share of the leadership in this thriving and growing section of the economy. Our success will show what can be done elsewhere and, if we get this right, what should be expected as best practice.
About the Author
Carol Schwartz AM is Chair of www.ourcommunity.com.au, a world-leading social enterprise that provides advice, tools and training for Australia’s 700,000 community groups and schools.
Copyright 2009, Carol Schwartz. All rights reserved. All material in this article is the Intellectual Property of Carol Schwartz and cannot be reproduced, copied, published, quoted or disseminated without the prior permission of Carol Schwartz.