Man up: Why more guys need to join the women's movement

For decades, the struggle for gender equality has been about one gender.

That challenge is being thrown increasingly to men -- to pursue greater balance in recruiting and promoting staff, to commit their organizations to equal pay for equal work, and to make female leadership both a corporate and social priority.

The head of UN Women, who is leading a global campaign for gender equality, says much more can be gained through the leadership of men – along with the women already there -- on these issues. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told a group of business, academic and non-profit leaders at RBC in Toronto last week that the United Nations goal of gender parity by 2030 won’t be achieved without both genders at the forefront. And she is pushing Canadian men to forge a global path.

Despite Canada’s reputation as a global leader on social issues, the lack of progress on wages, C-suite promotions and board membership has frustrated many governments as well as businesses focused on gender equality. Some politicians have started to suggest quotas and tougher regulation to close the gap.

Mlambo-Ngcuka, a former deputy president of South Africa, came to Toronto to urge business leaders – particularly men – to step up.

She compared it to whites and blacks working together against Apartheid in the 1980s.  We need to “evoke that intensity of purpose” to end women’s inequality, Mlambo-Ngcuka said.

She noted that the anti-Apartheid movement was more united then than the global women’s movement may be today. The white-led regime finally agreed to change global corporations, athletes and celebrities refused to do business with it.

A key part of that was the willingness of whites to stand up in large numbers to help knock down the pillars of oppression.

“It was unacceptable to be on the wrong side of the argument,” she recalled.

Mlambo-Ngcuka’s optimism came on the day Hillary Clinton became the first woman to secure a spot on the US presidential ballot.

The UN executive urged men to lend their voices to bettering the lives of women and girls— “to come out of the closet as feminists.”

She had met the previous day in Ottawa with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to promote the UN’s #HeforShe, a UN-led social media campaign to engage men in the inequality debate.

Trudeau has noted to business groups that the picture for women’s economic advancement in Canada is not stellar:

• Wages sit at about 82% of that for men
• Fewer than 20% of directors on corporate boards are female, driven in large part by the natural resources sector

• Only a third of managers and professional positions are held by women (PLS CHECK)

Despite these numbers, significant strides have been made in post-secondary education, where females now outnumber males in most Canadian schools.

There’s an economic case for gender equality, Mlambo-Ngcuka said, citing a McKinsey and Co. study that estimates advancing women’s equality would add some US$12 trillion to global growth. Right now, “the face of poverty is a woman’s face,” she said, urging leaders to promote the economic participation of women because “it is good business.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka earned a PhD from the University of Warwick for her work on using mobile technology to make the world a better place.

She made it clear that, when it comes to women’s rights, mobile technology is more than a social media tool. It can also be used to educate girls living in remote or restrictive societies about sexual and reproductive health, to fund women entrepreneurs, or to connect women in different places working on common business goals.

She spoke about violence against women, singling out the problem of child marriage: UN research suggests 14 million girls will be forced into marriage every year for the next decade. She brought the issue of violence closer to Canada as well, noting that while Canada is a leader on women’s rights, we have to address the safety and health of indigenous women.

Since Mlambo-Ngcuka was named to lead UN Women in 2013, the organization has pushed for more investment in education and healthcare for women and girls, gender parity in politics, and economic empowerment for women.

She ended her speech with a call for collective action, asking people to imagine a world in which everyone jumps at once, and how the collective thud would reverberate everywhere. It was a collective leap that helped her native South Africa end Apartheid, she noted: Enough people jumped and the system fell.

“This is do-able.”