4 Steps to Gender Equity in the Workplace
Gender inequity is a bad, even dangerous, condition.
Some organisations are concerned about equality of opportunity. Others, are concerned about equality of outcome. Progressive employers tend to believe that in a fair company there should be no big gender gaps in employment opportunity or income. They believe that equality, income equality for example, will flow from equality of opportunity. But progress, even in the hands of progressive managers, proceeds at a glacial pace.
Women, and many men, want gender equity. They just don’t find it in the workplace very often. Research conducted by sociologist Kathleen Gerson for her book The Unfinished Revolution, found that 80 per cent of women and 70 per cent of men want an egalitarian relationship that allows them to share breadwinning and family care – this is known as work-family reconciliation. In the day-to-day reality of corporate life however, they rarely get their wish.
Take income inequality as an example. Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that, across economies, income inequality slows growth, causes financial crises and weakens demand. It is just as poisonous in the workplace. Research conducted by social scientist Ross Honeywill for his new book The Man Problem reveals that of all Australians who earn more than $80,000 a year, three-quarters (74 per cent) are men and only a quarter (26 per cent) are women.
This is not only financially punitive it is socially toxic. Studies link gender-specific inequity to all manner of poor outcomes from depression to obesity, even suicide. What is certain is that income inequality is a debilitating disincentive to women – particularly when women have worked just as hard as men to get the job in the first place.
Just look at higher education: Roy Morgan Research found that of all Australians with a university degree, half are men and half are women – total equality. And yet, once in the workplace opportunities and financial reward are deeply inequitable.
Gender inequity is a bad, even dangerous, condition.
So, what can we do about it?
We need to measure Social Intelligence across a workforce and to rate workplaces, departments and functions on their underlying attitudes. In short, to identify gender equity black spots.
While quotas, goals and rules seek to improve workplace equity, it is underlying attitudes that truly shape and deliver gender and social equity. And unless you can measure attitudes, you can’t change the behaviour that quotas and rules attempt to improve. After all, it’s what we believe that determines how we behave. If men believe it’s OK to behave inappropriately or in a discriminatory way, they will always find ways to get around the rules – while all the time remaining oblivious to inequity.
- The STARTING POINT is to establish a Workplace Equity Rubric (WER) – the set of criteria and standards necessary to be met for an organisation to score well against:
- gender equity expectations of the average population
- best practice workplace equity standards and the Social Intelligence Index or SQI? of the business sector as a whole
- workplace equity and diversity standards of direct competitors or the industry category
- WORKPLACE RESEARCH establishes Workplace Equity Scores (WES) and the SQIs for the workforce – by gender, age, department, function, organisational level, promotion/reward mobility, and social attitude. It identifies black spots.
- The TRAINING CHALLENGE is then to convert the WES and SQI scores into specific learning outcomes and to customise the Learning Management System into a high impact learning system that uses blended learning across the workforce – blended learning combines fully-interactive online learning with physical group learning, paired learning, peer assessments, and individuals holding each other to account.
- The MEASURABLE OUTCOME is a lift in the gender equity standards across the workforce – and specifically in gender equity black spots – to meet the criteria set in the initial Workplace Equity Rubric.
But what is Social Intelligence & an SQI??
Social intelligence describes the exclusively human capacity to use our very large brains to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments.
Psychologist and professor at the London School of Economics Nicholas Humphrey believes it is social intelligence or the richness of our qualitative life, rather than our quantitative intelligence (IQ), that truly makes humans what they are. For example what it’s like to be a human being living at the centre of the conscious present, surrounded by smells and tastes and feels and the sense of being an extraordinary metaphysical entity with properties which hardly seem to belong to the physical world.
Work conducted by social scientist Dr Ross Honeywill shows social intelligence to be an aggregated measure of self and social awareness, evolved social beliefs and attitudes, and a capacity and appetite to manage complex social environments and change. Nowhere is this more applicable than in the workplace.
So, if it’s not enough to be clever or well educated, something else is needed. And that is a theory of mind, a theory of how people work from the inside. For a long time the field was dominated by so-called behaviourism. Scientists thought they could understand human beings, rats, pigeons, and non-human primates by just watching what goes on, writing it all down, and conducting correlations. It turns out they were wrong – this simply doesn’t work. The process has to be thought about in terms of the inner structure behaviour.
Professor of early history at Reading University, Steve Mithen, believes there are key periods of brain expansion that contextualize social intelligence. Brains wouldn’t get larger for trivial reasons, he says, because brain tissue is metabolically very expensive, so has to be serving an important purpose. Mithen believes the social intelligence hypothesis suggests the expansion of brain size was because people, living in larger groups, more complex groups, had to keep track of other people, had to manage a larger number of social relationships that required a larger brain to do so.
Mithen proposes that more recent brain expansion is directly related to the evolution of language. Language is probably the most complex cognitive task we undertake. Language is directly related to social intelligence because we mainly use language to mediate our social relationships.
So social intelligence was a critical factor in the expansions of brain size – there is a co-evolution between social and cognitive complexity. And today social intelligence is pivotal in managing the complexity of being social animals in a sophisticated culture and in a competitive workplace.
How is Social Intelligence different to Intelligence?
Both Nicholas Humphrey and Ross Honeywill believe it is social intelligence or the richness of our qualitative life rather than our quantitative intelligence that truly makes humans what they are.
Social Intelligence Index (SQI) in the Workplace
The Social Intelligence Index or SQI is a statistical abstraction similar to the ‘standard score’ approach used in IQ tests with a mean of 100. Unlike the standard IQ test however it is not a fixed model. It leans more to Piaget’s theory that intelligence is not a fixed attribute but a complex hierarchy of information-processing skills underlying an adaptive equilibrium between the individual and the environment.
A person with a high social intelligence quotient (SQ) is not necessarily more intelligent than someone with a low SQ, they just have different values, attitudes, skills, aspirations, interests and desires. An individual can therefore change their SQ by altering their attitudes and behaviour in response to their complex social environment. And those changes are in turn reflected in that individual’s SQI.
This is particularly relevant in the workplace where an employee with low social intelligence will exhibit low interpersonal awareness and skills, and will almost certainly exhibit discriminative social attitudes and behaviour. But that is not the end of the story. Given new understanding of neuroplasticity and sophisticated training methods, it has been shown that a valuable employee with a low SQI has the capacity to evolve and transform. To lift their SQI.
Ross Honeywill is a social scientist and bestselling author. His books have been published on 3 continents with his latest, The Man Problem: Destructive Masculinity in Western Culture, to be published in December by Palgrave Macmillan (New York). Dr Honeywill is an Associate Professor (adjunct) at the University of Tasmania’s School of Business and Economics.