How I Learned The Importance of Gender Diversity

In 2004, I had the honour of setting up what was to become a successful company together with my wife, Rachel. Like many good things in life, I don’t think I quite appreciated how great a privilege that actually was until many years later. The timing was fortunate, and we decided to work on what we dubbed “a project” just to see what would come of it. Within nine months, it was clear that we were producing something of value, and we ended up managing and building the operation together day after day until she decided to move on eight years later, leaving the company we built in a very good place.

Eight years… I’m amazed every time I think about it, and so many people (all married of course) have commented that they don’t know how on earth we managed to do it without killing each other. Or divorcing at the very least! I’m happy to say that Rachel and I are very much together to this day, but that’s not the point of this piece. Having worked with such a strong willed, intelligent and capable person that Rachel is, I learnt many things, but the one I wanted to share here was just how critical it was for us to have a different way of thinking right at the senior level.

Engrained so clearly in my memory are the typical senior management meetings we would hold after being in business for about eighteen months. We were still young as a company and the atmosphere was delightfully informal. Proper agendas were a thing of the future and laughter featured heavily in our get-togethers. Rachel was always very serious about her work, about pushing for perfection and about getting things done in the right way. We were six in total and she was the only woman. More than that, the rest of us were all pretty similar. Headstrong alpha males, all pretty intelligent with a nice dollop of ego on the side. A bit of a “boys’ club” if you will. I can imagine countless women reading this article right now and rolling their eyes. I don’t blame you. You can picture the scene, can’t you? We’re all sitting in a makeshift meeting room, a batch of unrelated papers scattered on the table from some previous gathering, and someone would be presenting his latest notion while reclining on the hind legs of his chair. With the men in the room being similar, there followed a quick moment of general concurrence as we all nodded at how good an idea it was. Ready to slap each other on the backs at how we knew everything and could solve any problem, we were then (very often I may add) stopped in our tracks. Rachel spoke up and voiced her very different view, expressing that she wasn’t sure that the direction suggested was at all correct. It sometimes felt like she was derailing the train of our joyous momentum. What a party pooper, right? Wrong. Her presence was a business saver.

Without Rachel in that group, what we would have had, essentially, was a classic echo chamber, and long before the days of social media at that. With comparable mindsets and approaches, the rest of us were highly likely to agree with each other. We may have all been clever people, but the five of us didn’t offer too much differentiation between us and we were basically just agreeing with ourselves, not even with one another. And with a good dose of confirmation bias, we would have gone on to make decisions that we were highly convinced were in the best interests of the business, without being presented with a different perspective.

However, there sat my wife, Rachel, and thankfully her strength of character didn’t allow us to proceed in such a fashion. Sometimes, she was able to articulate her differing opinion and it was clear to one and all. You could feel the atmosphere in the room move swiftly from haughty to humble whenever that happened. At other times though, she wasn’t able to explain exactly why she didn’t agree. That, as you can imagine, was a bit more frustrating. If I’m honest with myself all these years later, I think it annoyed the hell out of me. Being my wife and co-founder (but mainly because she was my wife…) I couldn’t really argue with her on those occasions, even though she didn’t clarify her objections. You guys know what I’m talking about, don’t pretend you don’t… And the sad thing is, that given my lack of experience back then, had she not been my wife, I may have ended up inadvertently allowing her to be marginalized over time (or simply worn down) by the male dominated dynamic.

In my experience, competent male managers are often too systematic in the way we think. It’s a simple equation: a+b=c. Nice and easy, right? But it can get a bit 2-dimensional and this is where a strong female voice will add a key extra element. When we received a first rush of service requirements from customers, I was enthusiastically chasing to upgrade operations and provisions in order to ensure satisfaction. Rachel had a calmer and wider view. She insisted on a more measured expansion on recruitment and infrastructure as she was acutely aware that scalability and robustness were more important at that crucial time than over over over delivering (which, through my placating instinct that I had back then, I was clearly trying to do). She also realized that we needed to retain a position of strength and control over our delivery in order to not be dragged in undesirable directions by customers. Thankfully, Rachel refused to allow the company to accept that a+b can only equal c. In retrospect, without that vision we would almost certainly have lost direction.

Honestly, I am not just writing this because Rachel, despite her absence from social networks, may stumble across this article one day. She’d think I am just trying to gain credit anyway by getting everyone to believe I’m such a wonderful guy who appreciates his wife. I certainly do appreciate her, but that’s not the reason I am telling you all this. Quite simply, when I look back on those experiences, I feel worried about how easy it is to suffer from a lack of vision when you only have narrow perspectives participating in the conversation. If we are all going to agree with one another, we might as well be alone.

Similarity of background, of culture and of thinking can be a curse for business development and innovation. And how do we solve the issue of similarity? Well done everybody, you guessed it. Diversity!

I am glad to say that over the years I do believe I have learned a thing or two. Over the past decade, I have actively encouraged different thinkers in all my senior management teams. If you are simply going to agree with me all the time, you aren’t adding any value. I’m not saying that I look for dogged stubbornness. Not at all. But we should insist on having positive people who bring a different point of view, and it is then up to the person at the top to nurture a culture that enables those views to be aired and to be listened to.

And how do we get different points of view? Well, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then bringing Martians and Venetians together is a fantastic start. As long as clear and open communication is embraced, we can only benefit from having such different inputs in order to arrive at the most rounded decisions.

Naturally, I have focused here on gender diversification which I think is key. Parallel initiatives should also be engaged in to support diversification through race, age and backgrounds in all areas. I have had the privilege of living and working in five different countries and have communicated in depth with a great many other nationalities. By interacting day-to-day with such different people, I have learnt so much about just how narrow our perspectives can sometimes be. I feel that when I left Italy, a little bit of the culture remained with me. Two years working with Ukrainians offered me a totally distinct way of looking at matters. And having lived in Israel for the past twenty years, I have certainly added many of the local outlooks to my thinking. Through my experiences, I have been fortunate to widen my own perspectives. But it isn’t enough. It just helps me to realize just how much more is out there.

Ultimately, differences between us instruct us greatly and allow us to grow. When people of different opinion and diverse backgrounds can come together smoothly to form a team, I guarantee you that such a team will be stronger than any group of similar minded individuals. I would advise any company looking to make headway in this dynamic world, to bring on the differences. This starts with women at the top levels, but it doesn’t end there. I am delighted to see more and more women in leadership business roles as it can only enable a greater chance of success in such a fast-developing market.

Daniel Bernard.