Gender Balancing: Everyone From Uber To The Rugby World Cup

That sounds a lot like Uber, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi set bonus-incentivised targets for increasing the ratio of women in management above 35% by 2022. His Board’s push to clean up Uber's post-Travis Kalanick sexist image, or continue to suffer the global reputational backlash that was hitting its growth strategy, has already resulted in the percentage of women in leadership rising to 28% from 21%.

Targets are a highly effective way of reframing gender balance as a business objective rather than a nice to have. It makes gender balance like any other business goal and puts the accountability for achieving it in the right place—on leaders (and the cultures and systems they create and entrench) rather than on women. If you are thinking of introducing targets, remember these key success factors:

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1. Make them realistic. Nothing turns managers off more than setting absurd gender targets that are impossible to achieve—and makes every man in the company believe his future progression is compromised.

2. Make them gender neutral. Avoid what everyone is still doing, which is communicating a target for a percentage of women, as Uber has. So yesterday. It’s an easily-avoidable way of making both sexes uncomfortable about fairness. Instead, gender-neutralize targets by setting a maximum number for any gender, eg. 60%. This also underlines that dominance is the issue being corrected, not women.

3. Empower managers to achieve them. Most managers haven’t got a clue about gender issues and many older male leaders really don’t get ambitious career women (they didn’t need to until recently, unless they married one or, more rarely, reported into one). A little training and skilling-up goes a long way to developing the next trend, towards gender bilingualism (see below).

4. Don’t call them quotas. This is business. Use business language. The word "quota" is just a red rag to any Wall Street-respecting bull.

Becoming Gender Bilingual

The Rugby World Cup has decided to rebrand. Both the Men’s and Women’s Rugby World Cups will now simply be called The World Cups. A small step? It’s in response to a growing recognition of the power and attraction of women’s sports and a recognition that it’s time to put them on a level playing field with the male versions. Two options:

1. Make them gender neutral, as the Rugby World Cup did, or

2. Add gender labels to all events. That’s what the French national team did by renaming themselves the “XV de France Masculin” or the English did with the Premiership champions, Saracens. They have become the Saracens Men while Harlequins Ladies has modernized to Harlequin Women.

World Rugby Chairman Bill Beaumont proudly explained the move as an enlightened strategic adaptation: “As a global sporting federation we need to be leading from the front on the issue of equality. By adopting gender balance in the naming of men’s and women’s Rugby World Cup competitions, we are setting new standards in equality in rugby.”

This kind of understanding, that words matter and that gender stereotypes are increasingly passe is even permeating the advertising sector. Like many other sectors, it is under pressure for the male domination of its creative leadership (89% male), and the resulting persistence of the gender stereotypes it doesn’t hesitate to flaunt. But the U.K.'s industry watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) just banned two ads that show where things may be headed. The ads, one for cream cheese and the other for cars are good illustrations of unthinkingly entrenched biases. The first laughs at hapless dads ineptly caring for children (a long tradition of depicting men as buffoons incapable of fathering), the second features active men conquering space or disabilities while mulling mom sits with a baby carriage (sic).

What’s interesting is neither ad is offensively sexist in an obvious way. Instead, the ASA is raising the stakes. They are telling companies that it's time to retire the old tropes and adapt to the 21st century. Fathers are, at last, skilled and engaged in caring for their kids, and one wonders who Mondelez U.K. (and their Philadelphia cream cheese) is trying to connect with by denying this delightful reality. Spoofing men’s parental prowess seems like a pretty stupid ad strategy. At one fell swoop you are alienating most men, and the wives who’ve been encouraging them to step up for decades. “Let’s not tell Mum,” the ad concludes, again managing to insult both sexes – men for being wimps, women for being weaponized.

More commonly, the Volkswagen ad, seems to unconsciously hone to the men-as-heroes, women-as-wombs segmentation that is so depressingly predominant, even in an age of box-office-busting female superheroes.’ “It wasn’t meant to be gendered,” complained the company, echoing the defensive stance of most advertising teams I’ve ever challenged on their unconscious biases.

These rulings are slowly but surely showing an awakening (OK, I know it’s past time to most of my feminist friends) that gender blindness is no longer an excuse. And creating the inevitable backlash. Companies are pushing not only for gender balance, but also for the next step, a sophisticated level of gender bilingualism. An understanding of all the subtle, pervasive, stereotyping sub-texts we all vehicle every day in a multiplicity of ways. Until we don’t. And choose to stop.

Small, insignificant tiptoeing you may be sighing? Well the last tidbit of good news was that there is no longer a single company on the S&P 500 with an all-male board. Interestingly, the vast majority of them (86%) had already disappeared by the year 2000. It took the last 14% of them almost 20 years to catch up. But the all-male S&P Board is dead. Long live #BalanceForBetter. For business. For all of us.