International Women's Day 2020

With International Women’s Day approaching I started to think about what I could do in my current role to support this.

I started to look at my team here in China. I have around 200 staff working for me, there’s a healthy distribution of ages with an expected bell curve peaking in the 30-39 age range, so far so good.

Then I looked at Gender Balance. 74.1% male, 25.9% female

Not as even as I thought it was

(subconscious bias #1).

I tried to think about where the women in the team are based and what roles they’re doing – and it’s good, we have a wide variety covering everything from engineers, inspectors, business development, sales, customer service and admin.

Why are there so few women in the mix?

 It’s probably because there are less women working in the sciences, so naturally there would be less in my business

(subconscious bias #2).

And there we have it, in a few short minutes I looked into gender equality, found out it wasn’t my fault and moved on.

Unfortunately for many, that’s where it would end.

Not my problem

I’m not making the world unequal

It’s everyone else.

I’m not biased, I’m fair.

But it’s really not true – I found out about an online Implicit Association Test (IAT) that uncovers your biases and thought I’d give it a go. For anyone else who’s interested here’s the link: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

I took one test on Gender / Science – it reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males. Unsurprising (to everyone but me) it showed that I had a strong association of males to sciences and females to liberal arts. This goes someway to me making excuses in gender balances, and I can hear myself making similar justifications in the past. At least now I know.

The second test I took was designed to reveal a relative link between families and females and careers and males (the description of the test is how it is written on the Harvard site, before anyone accuses me of displaying bias in this description). This time I came out as displaying only a moderate automatic association with male and career and female with family. I’m slightly happier about this, but still shows that there is a long way to go for equality even in my own head.

There are many other tests for sexuality, race, weight, age and even one for UK vs US (I have a slight preference for the UK!)

So what can I do about it now?

I decided to start researching the topic a bit more, to see how I can change things in my team, or to help develop things to be more equal going forward.

One thing that really surprised me was reading that when it comes to applying for new roles, typically, a man will apply for a job when he meets 50% of the job description, and yet a woman would wait until she meets at least 90% (sometimes 100%). Is it any wonder that men rise to the top of an organization quicker if they’re applying for more roles and trying more opportunities?

Change #1 – I will now seek out all potential candidates for my new positions and encourage them to apply if I believe they have the skills needed.

But it’s not about just increasing the count of women in higher positions, it’s really about making the women in higher positions count. I also need to work on my unconscious biases and realize that there are things that I can’t see (about me, about my business, about my team) that other people notice every day.

It’s time to give a voice to all people and change #2 is to create a space - whether it’s within our company’s women’s network or separately - that people can give me honest feedback, openly or anonymously, and I’ll do my best to act on it and to change for the better.

#EachForEqual