International Women’s Day 2019: rallying women and men to support gender diversity
Today is International Women’s Day – the moment in time when women’s achievements are recognised and celebrated around the world. It’s also now a day which serves as a rallying point for women’s rights and participation in many different arenas – politics, economics and business – and the topic of gender diversity is particularly at the fore.
It’s important for all of us – not only as business leaders, but also as partners, fathers, colleagues and as members of a free and fair society – to participate in the discussion and champion the cause.
Diversity matters
Commercially, the benefits of gender diversity have been proven time and time again in various studies. One, by McKinsey, found the most gender-diverse companies are 21% more likely to experience above-average profitability.
Perhaps the most compelling case for diversity at the senior leadership level of an organization, was highlighted in last year’s report by Boston Consulting Group which found a strong correlation between innovation revenue and diversity within the management team – a whole 19 percentage points higher than that of companies with below average diversity at senior levels.
But the impact can be a lot broader than the bottom line – diversity matters because it makes us more competitive, innovative and is a key driver in making our Healthcare business of Merck a great place to work.
Which is why we have made gender diversity a strategic priority for the company. All of us from the Executive Committee down, women and men, are actively engaged in making it a shared goal at every level and area of the business. In most countries the goal is to have a 50/50 gender balance in senior roles by 2023.
We have a dedicated Women in Leadership (WIL) program in place to foster gender diversity in leadership positions as an ongoing priority and help us deliver this commitment. For example, all employees across the company will undertake Unconscious Bias training in 2019. We are ensuring 50/50 gender participation in Merck development courses as well as succession planning, sponsoring and mentoring of select women to help them reach leadership level. We also have enhanced recruitment processes to ensure robust outreach to female candidates, both internally and externally.
In practice, we are seeing our offices and teams rising to the challenge. For example, our colleagues in Latin America have already seen tangible results from their efforts in sponsoring talented women to reach leadership levels – the General Managers in both Chile and Peru and several other businesses leaders across the markets are women, increasing substantially the female presence in senior positions in the region. Our Brazil office was also one of the first to sign up to the United Nation’s ‘women empowerment’ commitment.
In APAC, our women leaders comprise one-third of our leadership team – a marked step forward from two years ago when we had only ten percent female representation. It is our aspiration in APAC to further improve this balance and aim for a 50-50 gender diversity ratio by 2020. To deliver this commitment, we are at the near-final stage of creating a WIL APAC group which will drive the concerted effort, with the inclusion of and contribution from both female and male colleagues.
It is by mobilising teams and individuals on the ground in this way that we will make the commitments concrete for everyone – and reap the benefits for all.
A 365-day-a-year cause
For International Women’s Day we are holding our first ever Unconscious Bias summit at our headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany to encourage employees of both sexes to become more inclusive leaders and to tackle systemic bias in our ways of working.
But gender diversity must be a 365-days-a-year focus for any business. We’re all committed to doing this at Merck Healthcare. And we recognise that it’s a battle we can only win together – with women and men being allies and (equal!) partners in the drive for change.
References:
McKinsey - https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity
Boston Consulting Group - https://www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation.aspx
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