Being Bold for Change means we have to face some hard truths too... #IWD2017

Two years ago I wrote a piece here asking the question “where are the women in major projects leadership?" It marked the start of a new action research programme which was intended not just to understand and explain the current situation, but to do something about it. 

The first part of the research, though, was to find out what works, and how this could be translated across into the major projects environment (major projects are those national critical politically sensitive very high cost programmes that impact on all aspects of our lives - infrastructure, defence, technology, health, education, criminal justice and so on. 

I’ve just finished the opening paper and if, like me, you’ve been working for equality and inclusion for many years (thirty five years, in my case) it makes very depressing reading. 

The reality is that in spite of decades of effort to improve the representation (and experiences) of women in management and leadership, there is continuing, persistent, structural gender inequality in organisations. It is now internationally recognised as ‘stalled progress’ and identified as a critical risk to economic and social futures by groups as diverse as the World Economic Forum and the International Labour Organisation.

Since the 1970s, women in management and gender studies has been a significant field of inquiry.  From the start, the underpinning question has been “why don’t women do as well as men?” Whilst talking about gender in organisations, the research, nonetheless focussed on the position of women and the problems they face. Women were the problem needing to be fixed, whilst men were the norm against which women’s experiences must be judged. 

The ‘think manager - think male’ association persists. Research shows that women are held to different standards, in interviews, performance conversations, and pay negotiations, even when, in experimental conditions, they behaved identically to men. 

Further, researchers observe how women are disadvantaged because they don’t ‘fit the mould’. This explains the persistence of the glass ceiling, where women struggle to break through to the places where men predominate (in senior leadership, and also in the high value STEM professions). More recently, researchers have identified the ‘glass cliff’, where women who do break through are appointed more often to the ‘poison chalice’ roles, with an increased risk of failure. “If it’s risky it’s better that a woman fails to deliver it.” And when this happens, gender has been an apparently legitimate line of discussion to account for their ‘failure’. 

So how can we explain this?

One way is to see this as an outcome of certain ‘thinking processes’ - such as social judgements, theories of leadership - where inaccurate stereotypes interfere with accurate perceptions of women. This shows up when competencies are attributed differently to men or to women - assertiveness, goal orientation, collaboration, communication. Each sex is expected to exhibit certain characteristics, and when they don’t, it provides further evidence that they ‘don’t fit’. The double bind for women is that to be seen as a ‘proper’ leader they must act in ways to disconfirm gender stereotypes, but in doing so, they risk coming across as ‘not a proper woman’. Women face a backlash when they act counter-stereotypically - labelled too pushy, too emotional, too assertive, too angry. It falls to women themselves to work out the ‘work-arounds’ - making extra efforts at self-monitoring to fit in, and adopting more stereotypical (often low status) behaviours (indirect influence, self deprecation, talking less and more quietly). What is proving to be most revealing, though, is the initiatives designed to improve women’s participation do not remain gender blind. For example, apparently neutral policies, such as flexible working, quickly become gendered and have little impact on advancing equality.  

Instead of inquiring into gender inequality more deeply, it is taken for granted that organisations are gender-neutral, and the norms by which their members are judged are both value-free and indeed desirable. And so it is women who have to try harder, engage in more training, or education, or mentoring, to learn how to be different; it is women who have to be ‘fixed’ to fit. I’ll take as today’s case study Accenture’s #IWD2017 offering on how to improve gender equality. To be fair, their Chairman & CEO and their North American CEO make strong statements about how important it is to improve the gender equality. But then their ‘research’ (which isn't research to stand up to peer review) and their ‘solutions’ are all propositions which are absolutely stuck in the thinking processes and the taken for granted assumptions outlined above - ‘learn STEM subjects’; ‘have a career strategy’ - in short, it’s all about what women have to do to fit the pattern and be more like the men.

The critical questions must be, then, why it is that most current research still persists in repeating, in ever more elaborate detail, what we already know - women face multiple difficulties in organisations and they are judged as inferior to men. And why is it that most current practice rehashes different versions of the same ‘fix women to fit in’ strategies, which have so palpably failed to have the effect we expected?  

So what’s the alternative. 

First, we have to recognise that gender is a social process; “not something we have, as individuals, but something we ‘do’ to each other”. Second, gender difference is a historically and culturally institutionalised way through which social power is exercised.  And third, we have to recognise that this power is distributed unequally: “the point is not that women are different, but that [these social institutions choose to] use gender difference as the basis for unequal distribution of power and resources” Finally, when it comes to investigating, researching, writing and talking about this subject, we have to start from a fundamentally different set of ontological and epistemological assumptions; that is, acknowledging that who is doing the researching determines what they find.  

Yes - we have to say the P word. It’s the Patriarchy, innit. It seems almost old fashioned to have to bring this up - provocative even; but denying patriarchy makes as much sense as denying gravity. We may not be able to see it or touch it, but its force shapes our lives every day and in every way. And it's not going away without a fight - in fact, it seems emboldened by recent victories. Just reflect on the rise of the alt-right and the US presidential elections in which misogyny (and racism, disablism, homophobia) is an apparently legitimate political strategy. 

We need to take a long hard look at where we’ve come from and where we are now; a critical, reflexive perspective, which up-ends the conventional ‘fix women’ model and instead, inquires more critically into the organisational and societal norms and processes that have kept things unchanged for decades.  

All those players who have an interest in changing this system have to play their part in addressing it. This is not an issue for women or about women, but rather the position of women in leadership represents one of the sentinel indicator for a fair and just society. The question goes much wider, into how we understand, construct and lead organisations, and social systems. The current leadership needs to shift to another level of involvement, recognising that their organisations are deeply gendered. The language, the cultures, the work design, are gendered, since they are both nested in, and reproduced by, unequal social systems, privileging and amplifying masculine norms. This is not a reason to despair; rather it becomes a call to action to design more rigorous processes which engage ‘self and system’ in a systematic, multilayered plan for change.

We have to avoid binary constructions. This is not about theory OR practice, but theory AND practice in dynamic relation to each other. It is not about women OR men, but how gender is constructed, for what purposes, and how it has different effects on people and the institutional structures we create. Shining a light on this improves the position of women AND men and moves us towards a more just and sustainable world.