Why I care about equality

My wife recently showed me an email I sent to her ten years ago, in which I said "women have the exact same opportunities, what's the fuss about". I'm white, I'm male, I'm straight – honestly, I'm the least qualified person to speak about equality. So what’s changed for me in the past ten years?

I have a hugely talented and intelligent wife, an awesome sister, and lots of amazing, driven, female friends and colleagues who are becoming outstanding leaders across many industries. But through the years I have come to realise that they face hurdles I couldn’t imagine. Men being promoted above them for speaking up, not for experience; women losing out on key roles because they went on maternity leave; women always being the ones asked to take notes in a meeting and that is just a tiny sample.

Rina, one of my best friends, began her career 30 years ago when awareness regarding these inequality issues only surfaced. Now she is back to work after a longer break, and there is awareness, yet there is no change and she will see her daughter facing all of the same issues she did 3 decades ago. 

If my friends and family face these issues it is probably na?ve of me to assume Gousto is entirely free of such biases. As Gousto’s CEO, I therefore see an opportunity to have an impact not only on my company's success by making the most of all available talent, but more importantly strengthening the career of every woman that walks through our door. 

Awareness yes but no change ? 

?We know that women represent a very small percentage of leadership in the UK (10-20% of C-level vs almost 50% of workforce), earning less money (c. 10% pay gap – more pronounced for educated women in higher paid jobs), but we also know equality has a positive impact on earnings and GDP growth. ??80% of the population believe that women are equally qualified at leading but the pipeline theory (few people in, few leaders out) is easily proved wrong as women consistently outperform at school and university, yet don’t make it to the top. Even in industries where men and women are hired in equal proportions on graduating, the pipeline does seem to end at an invisible glass ceiling.

Through my personal research, I believe this inequality in the workplace can be attributed broadly to the following structural biases. Read them, you most probably will learn something new:

??Structural bias 1, gender stereotyping ??

• The biggest bias and the hardest to change: whilst girls are told that they should play with pink princesses, boys get cars and computers. This behaviour is positively reinforced by adult reactions, and thereby it is deeply ingrained into our thinking.
• Leadership in itself seems to be a trait more attributed to men, which means that these boys will grow up into men, who show more appetite to lead as society expects them to do, simply because they have been rewarded more.
• It is important to stress that we all seem to fall prey to these implicit biases, whether we are men or women: A Columbia University study showed that both women and men recruiters thought male applicants were more analytical despite achieving the same results in tests as the females.

?Structural bias 2, workplace conditions 

??Long hours make certain jobs, especially senior management, less compatible with family life, and in a lot of organisations quality work matters less than face-timing, resulting in an environment that's particularly difficult for women given the higher likelihood of having to care for a family (yes sad but true).

Effectively there is a “mummy” tax from missed promotions and loss of experience from leave as maternity leave is almost exclusively a female thing in the UK. Based on my conversations, I get the impression that some women also tend to stop going for promotions and new roles before they even have a family as they see the time set out in front of them. Suddenly a woman has stagnated for several years while her theoretically equally qualified partner has progressed in leaps and bounds. When it does come time to return to work a woman is by then paid substantially less - so who should go part time?

??Structural bias 3, group think 

??People with similar backgrounds think similarly. Male dominated cultures often think in a certain way and thereby expect others to think similarly, marginalising the benefits of equality and running the risk of pigeonholing women as less reliable or as having other priorities given daily family emergencies. It's also particularly important in our business where a high proportion of our customers are women to ensure that our group think is gender balanced.

We all have in our minds an idea of what a leader looks like - and it over-indexes on things that men are stereotypically great at (e.g. confidence) - this means that we are even more likely to promote men because we haven't challenged ourselves about what really matters in a leader and we can't shake the images we've seen time and time again.

??Structural bias 4, promotions

?People generally promote (subconsciously) in their own image - with a leadership and management team over-represented by men there is a danger organisations will perpetuate this situation. People also mentor in their own image (with men happy to go for a drink with a male colleague but not women, men heading off for corporate football matches etc.) - men are much more likely to get a leg up. 

Finally, women generally apply for jobs when they are 120% ready for them. Men on the other hand apply when they are 75% ready - there is a big gap in confidence vs. competence between men and women (on average).? This conditions managers to hire women for competence and men for potential. 

?What should we do??

We will act. Gousto will go from 200 to 1000 people over the next ten years, and we must attract and retain the very best candidates in. Gousto will

1. Discuss equality throughout the organisation. The team and I had our first workshop, and some fascinating insights and ideas emerged. Unfortunately, we only had 3 male employees turn up, so I'm now rolling this discussion out to all of Gousto to really shake things up.
2. Re-thinking parts of the hiring process. Did you know that certain words and phrases appeal more to women and others to men? Neither did I! There are very clever tools, such as Textio.com, that allow you to scan your job ads for these words, achieving less biases in job ads and ensuring that more equal amounts of applicants come through. ?
3. ?Anonymising parts of the hiring process. Women tend to ask for less money (yes I see this every week) therefore salary questions should be removed, and only reviewed by the people team based on an applicant’s experience and test scores. 
4. Creating awareness around biases by training hiring managers and all staff. For instance, women don’t tend to sing their own praises, unlike men. This needs to be taken into consideration (similar to extroverted / specialist jobs). ??
5. Performing regular salary, promotion and fast tracking audits for comparable experience is important. Who gets advanced how fast? We also need to challenge ourselves on what attributes and values we're using to score who is ready for promotion / pay AND help women to have the confidence to put themselves forward.
6. ?Moving to a results focused culture away from a face-time mentality. The positive side effects are improving work-life balance, office hours and per hour productivity. It’s not just achieving results though, it’s how someone does it and how they work with everyone else in the organisation.
7. The leadership team and the Board should have 50/50 split, or else how do we mentor and encourage our female employees? Gousto has a long way to go here, but actions are in motion to improve quickly! 
8. Encouraging paternity leave, as it seems to have a lot of effect overall in other countries. In my opinion it is very important to have a stated policy of not removing responsibility when an employee is pregnant. Employees should also be encouraged to move jobs if a great job comes up - even if they will only do it for a short time due to maternity/paternity leave. Great for dads too! 

?Change starts by talking about the problem. We’ve talked about it. Now we need to take action. If I have kids, I want them to live in a world with equal opportunity. Thanks to my wife, Sally (Gousto's CFO), Rina (a dear friend and power woman), Alice D / Marisa / Jessica / Flo from team Gousto, and all the amazing people who opened my eyes.  

LOVE feedback.

Timo, Gousto

Disclaimer: I’m a white, male, straight, young guy.