When HR Turned Pink

Pink is not one of my favourite colours. If at all, I’d like to keep all shades of pink at bay. So, imagine my dilemma when HR turned pink. In the last thirty-five years or so, i.e. since I first stepped into HR shoes (they were black then!) a slight shade of pink had started to appear on the future horizon of the HR profession. For those uninitiated in HR, the baby boomers in the post-WW2 period were the first to be dressed in gender-specific clothing: baby boys came in blue and baby girls in pink. The gradual feminisation of HR function over the years has now catapulted HR into the “pink-collared” profession traditionally ‘manned’ by women in vocations such as nursing, childcare, teaching, beauty and secretarial. What is to follow here is one of those analogies of a man giving a lift to a damsel in distress on an HR express highway and getting robbed and evicted from the very car he was driving.

There was not a single female HR protagonist in the play in my first job where I started my career as an HR Management Trainee. A few years later came the first one with her toolkit with a fair amount of colourful vanities in it! Then a few months down the road to Oz came another one. By now I guess you know where it is leading to… There have been times in my career when my entire team, well almost, were women. I remember going for field recruitment trips for back-office and commercial functions in the early nineties when only 1 out of 4 or 5 would be a woman onboarded for HR function. I remember attending seminars and conferences with a few women garnering the attention of all men, and even fewer in the list of speakers or panelists. And dare I say the boardroom – no room for women there, where HR itself struggled to muscle a space despite mostly men.

And look around now. Men have been slowly and steadily edged out of this genre of undertaking where ‘people come first’. Good for the HR function, aye?? As per ILO, the global share of women in the workforce stands at about 40%, whereas they take the lioness share of 3/4th of the HR roles, and every 2 out of 3 now hold HR management positions (in the US more than 80%).? HR has now become the only predominantly female function in contemporary organisations. The tables have turned. Go to any HR networking or MICE events and you feel you have accidentally walked into the doors of a women’s summit. Women's domination of HR space, especially amongst the more evolved homo sapiens in the West is attested by several research, surveys and statistics.

How did we get here? If one may care to ask. It’s not as much of a question but more of a matter of factory. You see when men worked in factories, they caused a lot of headaches for the management and the shareholders. You know, the unions, strikes, lockouts, hardball negotiations, and the side of labour relations where the rubber met the road, the kind of stuff the men in HR of those “white-collar” times liked to roll up their sleeves and got down to the business of protecting business interests, and in the passing, of its people on the wayside…. those men in the blue-collar! Well, their game has been up for some time now.

Most men retired. Manufacturing got offshored to countries with straitjacket laws. And the unions were neutered by the hobnobbing of the capitalists, the lawmakers and the judiciary.? A new crop of HR, from families less patriarchal, started taking their place along with technology replacing muscle and manliness from work. The administration took precedence over shop-floor rigours. Systems upended individualism. Compliance replaced compulsion. Collaboration tempered confrontation. Labour relations eased its way to human relations. Disciplining morphed into development. Chauvinism caved into nurturing. The right brain took over the left. And personnel became people. The makeover was complete.

So, what makes this women and HR equation work and balance so well? It would appear that times have changed. There used to be 24 hours in a day, but now there are 1440 minutes in a day. And women make each one count ;-)

Well going into a little whataboutery, the printing press was invented in the year 1440, or in proximity to that year, as some historians will have us believe. A benign beginning of women starting to read. The same year happened to be a leap year in the Georgian calendar which thence started dominating the popular Julian Calendar of that time. So, Georgina overtakes Julian (slam king Julian!). And to top it up, some mumbo jumbo numerology links this number to meaning “compassionate and caring”, as well as to 'a time of endings' and 'change and transition'. So, you see this conspiracy of ousting men from the helms of human resource patriarchy has been in the making for quite a while and has succeeded in its design in the last few decades so well that there’s not a whimper from men. Well, men don’t whimper.

On a slightly more generous note. Credit must be given where it’s due. It’s the female skill set, Brutus! Organisations have evolved from hunting and gathering to farming. And so has the HR profession from being a hunter and gatherer to a farmer. In this new role, mother nature has armed women with ammunitions of which men’s arsenals are poorly supplied. After all, men are of few words, while “communication skills” require more words than a few. Women score.

For men a ‘spade is a spade’, but for women it can be what you want it to be – empathy, caring & nurturing can make a spade a Caterpillar excavator. Women score.

Data, analytics and bottom-line drive decisions amongst most men, while women decipher intangibles with such alacrity that sceptic shareholders start seeing unseen value in them and men kick themselves for being beholden to numbers. Women score.

Being a matter of fact is okay for vocations of science and tech but when it comes to the wooliness of human nature, relations, personality, potential and tactful handling of people issues, men would rather have women take that stress. Women score. ?

Cultural awareness, sensitivity, and emotional intelligence are produce of the modern lexicon that women grew up reading Mills and Boon and were mollycoddled into while growing up by their doting parents. Most men lost their marbles with this shift in attention. Women score.?

So, the next time you see a man in HR wearing a pink shirt or pink tie don’t scoff at him, he is just trying to fit in, albeit rendered a bit effeminate in the process, in this feminised HR world. Be a bit more, ahem! sensitive. He is among the last few men standing. Their days are numbered!

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Disclaimer: In this era of heightened sensitivity on matters of gender, roles, identities, values and the like, please note that this piece is a pun-intended take on the feminisation of HR and not intended to offend, ridicule or stereotype anyone of any identity, role or value.