Is that diversity I see in the distance?
... or is it just a mirage?
Over the ten days or so since International Women's Day, I've been reflecting on the progress that has been made on diversity, inclusion and equity in the workplace and beyond - and also how much further there is to go.
Like many people, women have played an important and influential role in my life. As a kid, I was surrounded by a variety of determined, smart, independent-minded female relations, and by stories of their similarly forceful ancestors. But this story isn't about them.
Like everyone in my generation in the UK, I was born into a world where a Queen was our head of State (before Peter Fitzsimons gets on my case, this was before I became a BritStralian). I grew into adulthood with a female Prime Minister who, whether you loved or loathed her policies, demonstrated very clearly that she was (at the very least) absolutely the equal of all those around here. But this story isn't about the Queen or "Maggie" either.
In the early 1980s, I attended The King's School, Canterbury. As one of the great, old English Public Schools, it had spent almost all its very long history as an all-male establishment. In my day, though, the sixth form was already mixed – in the early 1970s King’s had become the first major public school to accept women. Roughly a quarter to a third of the sixth form was female, and it was abundantly clear that they were as smart, capable and determined as the men.
Similarly, as I moved on to further education, the undergraduate population at my university Cambridge was close to 50:50. Indeed my alma mater Queens’ College had become the first to become mixed in 1980, six years before I started my undergraduate years.
As a result, whilst gender diversity was clearly an issue in many fields, it felt like the residual issues that remained would inevitably be eradicated over time. I did not understand then how powerful the forces were that would resist these shifts for decades to come, many of which are still active to this day.
In 1988, I spent the British summer working in my first “proper” office job. Happily, I secured a role at KPMG’s consulting business in London, located in its shiny new Salisbury Square building. This turned out to be a formative experience on several levels.
First and foremost, I had the good fortune to work with a remarkable female manager, Anne Tunnicliffe, who was prepared to give me as much responsibility as I was ready to accept. Under her watchful eye, amongst other things I completed a study for the Irish Development Board on the UK market in sheep’s milk and sheep’s milk cheeses. Through a combination of desk-based research (there was no internet to speak of), a host of cold phone calls, and old-fashioned shoe leather, I learned that British taste in cheese was extremely conservative, consisting almost entirely of cheddar, with a just little brie thrown in from time to time for something more exotic. I also discovered that most people were delighted to talk about their businesses to a total stranger, so long as they trusted your purpose.
More importantly, I also saw the first of many examples of women who were effective managers in business. Indeed, this seemed an entirely unremarkable to me, so the lesson was subliminal rather than revelationary. After all, I'd grown up surrounded by capable women, and lived a life at both school and university where they were peers and equals in most things.
Across the office sat Mike Shallcross, who taught me one of the most useful lessons of my early career. Back in 1988, hardly anyone in business knew how to use a computer. Reports were written by hand, walked down to the word-processing room at the end of the corridor, and painstakingly typed up by an all-female secretarial team using a green-screen Wang word-processing system. Drafts were returned, reviewed, corrections marked, and fed back through the pool until every error had been corrected. This was a painstaking and time-consuming process.
Mike was different. He sat at a PC, touch-typing his own work, in an age where typists worked in a pool and were all women. He worked faster, produced more output, and went home earlier than most people. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that touch-typing and word-processing were exceptionally useful skills, though admittedly surprisingly few people seemed to realise this at the time. These skills were clearly useful, so why shouldn’t I learn them?
That Christmas, I picked up a Pittman 2000 book and an old manual typewriter and spent half an hour a day learning to type. Within a few weeks, I was touch-typing faster than I could ever write. A few years later, when I moved into the investment banking world, I drew the same conclusions about presentation software, and made sure I became adept at that too. Mike, thank you for teaching me an important lesson that has saved me thousands of hours, not to mention many evenings and weekends in the 30 years since!
When I started work full time, like many of that age, I entered the professions, becoming a chartered accountant, and many of my contemporaries also entered the law. Both were male dominated at the top, but the mix of new recruits into both was around 50:50. So to my mathematical brain, and it appeared inevitable that the diversity at the bottom of the ladder would sweep through the workforce as naturally as January follows December each year, and indeed that this would influence gender composition in many other areas of the workforce. If only the path to diversity had been that simple.
Around the same time, I joined the Oxford & Cambridge Club, one of those relentlessly traditional places on Pall Mall and St James's that offered a home away from home in the city - all too appealing at a stage in my career when I was sharing a small rented apartment in West London. Happily, it voted to allow women to become full (rather than "associate") members a few years later.
To be honest, I cannot recall my own views on this shift. What I do know is that the club has spent the last 25 years slowly but steadily modernising many aspects of how it operates. Unlike many such organisations, the dining rooms run close to capacity most nights of the week, and if you want a room for the night it’s smart to book at least a fortnight ahead. More or less every inch of the building has been refurbished, and the business centre is packed, a concept literally unthinkable in the early 1990s. In short, that change to embrace a more modern world marked the start of an extraordinary transformation.
All in all, as a young professional working in London, I understood that the cause of feminism had been important, but I felt like the most critical battles had already been fought. From my viewpoint, what remained was the passage of time to allow a properly diverse generation of new recruits to rise through the workforce. How wrong I was!
Since then, a great deal of water has flowed under the bridge, both in terms of my own life experience, and corporate cultures more generally. I've lived in the UK, Middle East, Japan, Australia and USA, and worked in most of the world's thirty largest economies. I've had the chance to see how decisions are made at the top of many dozens of the world's largest businesses and been closely involved in the development of policy at a regional and national level around the world. In short, I have seen first-hand a statistically significant number of examples of how the business world works that cover many industries and environments.
The good news is that there are many good people - both men and women - who have worked hard to lift up the best people, irrespective of their gender, sexual preference, colour of skin, accent or whatever else. I believe that all those people have all seen that a diverse team makes for a stronger business, better policy, more profits and more fun, and frequently reduces risk along the way.
With the right attitude of mind, it turns out that diversity simply isn’t that difficult. When Cassandra Kelly and I founded Pottinger, we didn’t talk about diversity. We had a male/female founder team, and as we began to build the business, we simply hired the best people we could find. We established a simple title structure and clear criteria for promotion and we have never differentiated remuneration based on gender. For most of our 15-year history, we have achieve quite high gender diversity in senior management, our operational team, our support staff, and our team of senior advisers.
Like others who have followed a similar path, we recognised that the way issues are discussed and the way that decisions are made needs to adapt. This is essential not only to make sure that all the voices are heard, but also that they are understood. We sought to build a culture that was inclusive, and allowed different voices to be heard. And we have never been complacent – we continue to think about how we can improve and how we can add great people to our team.
Yet, nearly thirty years after I started work, and a decade after my peers had worked their way to the top of the commercial sector, truly diverse boards and senior teams are still the exception, not the rule. For every cabinet (eg Canada) or parliamentary party or corporate board that has achieved a 50:50 balance, there are dozens that are delighted to have reached an 80:20 male:female split.
In the UK, USA and Australia, there are still more CEOs of leading companies called John than there are women in those roles. Both Australia and the UK have had just one female Prime Minister each, and in both countries one of the two major parties has never had a woman as party leader. Meanwhile, to this day, the US has yet to have a female President, though diversity is increasing in the house (admittedly more on one side of politics than the other).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I still see examples of boorish, narrow-minded, misogynistic, bullying behaviour all too often. Some of this occurs in environments where it is easy - or at least possible - to step in and intervene. The public proclamations made by high profile members of society who should simply know better are, however, much harder to address, though year by year the public antipathy to this behaviour increases.
So, thirty years on from my first day working in an office, it's clear that the cause of equality, diversity and inclusion remains as important as it has ever been. Indeed, given that equality of opportunity at start of many people’s careers that first started in the 1980s and 1990s has not translated into equity in the end-results that we now see in senior roles, I believe a renewed sense of urgency is now needed. On this subject, I know that many people are opposed to the notion of diversity ‘quotas’ for senior roles. Though of course those same people use “budgets” or “targets” to drive every other aspect of how they run their business or political party.
So let’s face reality head on. Whatever word you use, let’s remember that if the diversity results achieved over time do not show relatively rapid progress towards a 50:50 outcome, then whatever you are doing to improve diversity is failing. And let’s reward any such failure in the traditional way – by replacing the leaders in question with others who have a credible plan as to how to improve.
One simple way to do this is to translate the current rate of change for any particular metric into a statistically robust projection of the date by which equality would be achieved – the “Equality Day”, if you like. In doing so, let’s remember so simple maths: if 40% of your board appointments are women, then you’ll only ever get to a 40:60 mix.
One reason I believe this is important is that the Robot Revolution will drive workforce and societal changes that will necessitate a very different mindset from our leaders. In particular, as most clerical, administrative and supervisory roles are automated, what will remain will be roles that are focused much more on caring, cultural and creative activities – anything that requires an essential element of human creativity or interaction. More diverse teams will be more adept at dealing with these changes, and indeed at addressing some of the more profound implications that will emerge. As with previous revolutions, a dramatic shift in mindset will be required to win in the new world that emerges.
These changes are both important and urgent for broader reasons too. As the march of automation has continued, many countries have seen an increasing polarisation of wealth. This has typically translated into a polarisation of opportunity too. If you are one of the privileged few who were born into opportunity, you may never have realised quite how difficult your life would otherwise have been. Even who have made your way their through hard work and doubtless a little luck along the way - it is all too easy to overlook the confluence of events, circumstances and people that may have lifted you up, or indeed to forget that the path you followed is no longer anything like as accessible as it once was.
So we must all remember this: inequity, adversity and disadvantage is everyone's problem. Societies that allow the few at the top of the pile to leave the many too far behind are often torn apart by some form of revolutionary change. Revolutions rarely end well for the political or economic elite. These people have the most to loose, and so should logically be the most vigorous campaigners for social change, lest they themselves are chosen as the kindling for a revolutionary fire. And make no mistake: the early rumblings of these revolutions are already clear to see in numerous Western nations around the world: ignore them at your peril.
So, what can we do about this? It would be easy to say that we must all wake up on Monday morning determined to make more of a difference in the worlds in which we live. The truth is, however, that change is much harder to effect in large, complex systems than my twenty-something brain understood. The voices that support the status quo are typically much better networked and much better financed that those that are seeking to drive change.
And yet, as I’ve explained above, it is those at the top of the system that have the most to loose if they do not address these challenges. Yet frequently they do not see that there is a problem at all - they are all too comfortable with the status quo. At best, they simply fear change, and at the worst they will fight tooth and nail to preserve their position in the system. If this is you – and you’ve made it this far through my article – please take a moment to reflect on whether you would rather spend a significant chunk of your wealth building walls and fighting wars to preserve your assets, or spend that same money on a more extensive social welfare system. I know this may sound like a bleak choice – but it is precisely the choice that nations must already make, in choosing whether to defend their boarders and withdraw from the UN conventions on human rights, or find ways to integrate refugees and turn them into economically productive members of society.
To put this another way – the bottom half of US society has net worth of roughly zero. In other words, they have literally nothing to loose by voting for dramatic societal change. Most of the next 40% struggle to make ends meet, and many have seen their quality of life decline over the last few decades. The American Dream of a land of opportunity in which almost anyone could get ahead has long since turned into a mirage the for the large majority of the population.
To add to all these challenges, I fear the dark is rising in many quarters.
The world has become increasingly complex and stressful for many people. Tens of millions of people around the world have lost their jobs to automation, and billions of people around the world have been left behind by the extraordinary advances in wealth and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. This has created an environment in which fear of change is growing, and easily preyed on by duplicitous politicians out to gain or reinforce their power in the political system. It is incumbent on us all to be on our guard, and to call out divisive, exclusionary behaviour for what it is: myopic, self-centred and risky. And what these people are saying isn't a matter of free speech: if they are preaching division, exclusion and cruelty, they are societal terrorists, and should be treated as such.
Let me end by bring this full circle. International Women's Day is a great opportunity to celebrate the achievements that have been made in improving diversity, and to say a public thank you to all those that have helped to break down barriers and lift others up. But we need every single day to be a day of action to drive a more inclusive society – indeed a more efficient and effective society.
So enjoy the achievements and accolades – but let them also be reminders of how much more there is to do in the days and weeks ahead.
By Nigel Lake
What do you think? I would appreciate your comments and questions below. And if you find this article helpful, then please do share it so that others can read it too. After all, diversity is a team sport!