Women aren't going to get into leadership roles in our lifetime.

I was fortunate enough to attend a great event named “Accelerate Her” this week, which was organised by the fantastic Poppy Gaye of Founders Forum Fame. The event seeks to address an extremely important issue: How women can be given equality in the workplace, and thereby given equal opportunity to accelerate their careers. The event this week was hosted at Google’s UK HQ in London and drew together a fantastic room of leaders from a very diverse range of industries.

The keynote was presented by Vivian hunt – who is the Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company, UK and Ireland and, in true McKinsey style, a barrage of impressive stats and slides ensued. It was a little different from a traditional McKinsey set of slides however; these slides went beyond the normal remit of economic contribution and analysis (although that was featured) but it also talked about the moral and social impacts of women’s struggle to achieve equality in the workplace.

Vivian’s presentation was fantastic and did a lot to highlight how much good solving this problem could actually achieve, not just for women but for the UK as a whole. A key take-away was that A 3% increase of the UK workforce would add ￡150 billion to the economy. This was pretty mind-blowing. Here, we have Liam Fox shouting about making up ￡15bn worth of trade deals to mop up the shrink in GDP post Brexit, but on our doorstep we have a solution that could bring 4-5 percentage points to our GDP simply by taking action in an area that is desperately needed.

The call out here was threefold: To begin to tackle gender inequality in the workplace, and for the UK to have a reasonable shout of achieving this very realistic target there were three things that every employer could improve on:

1.    Bring more women into the labour force: Seems like the most obvious one, but simply encouraging more women to go into work starts at school and continues until right into their careers. To add to this, it’s about keeping women in work as well.

2.    Enable women to work more hours: Women need flexible work more than men. However, men should have it too. It’s a nice thing to have but for women it means so much more and enables the continuation of their careers rather than the pause they have to put on it today and perhaps never return to the workplace. Looking at the Nordics as a model, it’s clearly something that works both for the economy as well as improving the work/life balance.

3.    Helping women move to more productive sectors: Getting women to move into leadership positions as well as the STEM careers will also open way more doors and encourage women to have longer, more diverse and fulfilling careers.

The consequences of not doing this were pretty scary: It would take at least 224 years for women to get in to the same amount of leadership opportunities as men at the current rate of growth, and there would never be equality of women in STEM careers, with the ratio actually worsening over time.

However, it all sounds like a simple problem to solve, but the reality is that so much more can be done on a global level to improve on this – after all, there is a $12 TRILLION GDP prize as a result.

Subsequent to this, Vivian was joined by a fantastic panel with Jimmy Wales, Yonca Brunini, Lord Davies and Martha Lane Fox who was also the chair. They received a number of questions, observations and opinions from the crowd and it was clear that within the room there was a lot of passion for this topic and no doubt inspired by the McKinsey study which gave a lot of food for thought.

There was one opinion that came from an audience member which argued that this current system had been embedded over millennia, and that it would be foolish to even think about fixing it overnight. Lord Davies that objected to this on the panel stating that this is no excuse for creating impact in this sector now, and this was the time to make huge progress and quickly. To add to this, I think it’s fair to say that the restrictions that existed over the past 990 years probably aren’t relevant in the world of 2017, and arguably that we have historical, sociological, financial and technological insights and capabilities that tell us that this shouldn’t even be a question – it’s a matter of how quickly can we make this happen. 

One area that comes directly from personal experience is that of start-ups struggling to hire women when they get trapped in a very male dominated hiring cycle. You start with two male co-founders, and make your first couple of hires, who are also male. You then hire a couple of developers to accelerate your product and guess what – you’re now six guys.

The thought then comes in: “Maybe we should hire some women”, Which is where the struggle begins – lots of women don’t want to be just ‘the woman in the team’ and it gets increasingly important to have a balanced team as it’s proven to lead to better products, marketing, sales and ultimately a better business.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts about this matter and how whether they are making changes in their organisations to provide women with better opportunities and equality in the workplace.

Sidebar:

One observation that wasn’t necessarily 100% relevant but certainly relevant was that women weren’t always competing with men for the jobs, but more so that humans are now in competition with robots. I’d also be super interested in another discussion to see how that will unfold!

Twitters: @samamrani @tamocotech @getcrowdit