Women May Not Need CSR

Women may not need Corporate Social Responsibility and then Men will be the losers!

By Dr Michael Hopkins[1] www.csrfi.com

Emphasizing diversity especially increasing the role of women is part of a company’s CSR. But such CSR may not be necessary as this article points out. 

Men are already starting to become the losers as far as the mainstreaming of women is concerned. That is due to the repression of women by men over the centuries, if not millennia, since women have toughened up in a myriad of ways.

In previous times, and still in many mainly poor countries today, the main role of women has traditionally been to produce children, a time-consuming endeavour. Then, for their employers, their child-bearing absence would incur a significant cost. Women would often be absent for three months or more as they went through pregnancy and consumed their maternity leave.

In poor countries the child-bearing time is typically much longer – probably most of their lives, as mothers and then grandmothers. This has been mainly because of the absence of contraception and the need to produce children and to look after the family when life expectancy was only up to 40 years. This meant that their lives were short… and maybe not so happy. Today so much of that has changed.

According to the UN's World Health Organisation, Kenya, for instance, has seen a dramatic change in life expectancy over the past 15 years. Statistics show that Kenyans now expect to live an average of 63.4 years, compared to 51 years at just the start of the 21st century.

And women in Kenya are likely to live nearly five years longer than men, WHO found. It puts the average span at 65.8 years for Kenyan females and 61.1 years for males.

The United Nations World Population Prospects 2015 report reveals that worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth over the period 2010–2015 was 71.5 years (68 years and 4 months for males, and 72 years and 8 months for females) .

As the Daily Nation of Kenya has reported, the reason has much to do in Kenya with rising levels of education, for both boys and girls. Concurrent with this has been the striking rise in standards of health, as the incidence of many previously debilitating diseases, both communicable and non-communicable, has been reduced, some dramatically so. These include malaria, measles, cholera, HIV/AIDS, polio, diarrhoea, respiratory infections and strokes.

Increasingly, as a result of great efforts having been made on behalf of the girl child, girls are performing better than boys as far as education is concerned – to the point that we now worry about boys being increasingly left behind. In 2018, for instance, Kenya’s Certificate of Primary Examinations (KCPE) exam results showed that girls, who had for long been outperformed by boys, for the second year in a row edged out their male counterparts from the top positions.

In the labour market, women are also edging out males. According to the London Financial Times, investor behaviour is recognising female contributions to the extent that there exists a correlation between gender diversity and high returns in public financial markets. And a recent report by the International Finance Corporation, “Gender diversity yields an incremental alpha”, found that funds with gender-balanced senior teams achieved 10 to 20 per cent higher returns than unbalanced ones. [Source: https://www.ft.com/content/08adead8-41a0-11e9-b896-fe36ec32aece ]

Then, in America's ongoing discussion on gender equality - I ignore the fake news false accusations - new research suggests that women's brains are about four years “younger” than men of the same age, and that as they age they remain mentally sharp for longer than if they were men. [Source: https://patch.com/us/across-america/why-women-are-smarter-men]

There are fears that technology is destroying jobs, although the evidence shows simply a change from one technology to another. More important is the worsening income distribution, as wages stagnate across the world after decades of minimal growth or even decline. The implications of this are dire for global political stability. We have seen that resentment of this unfortunate phenomenon among middle- and lower-class workers has given rise to populist leaders in both the U.S. and parts of Europe, leaders whose appeal tends to be racist and anti-immigration. It may well be that the increasing use of lower paid but highly qualified women is driving down the average wage. [Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2018/07/26/how-to-fix-stagnant-wages-dump-the-worlds-dumbest-idea/#48656f8e1abc]

Companies are not sure how to handle all these changes in the labour market. For instance the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) offers women six months of maternity leave at full salary, while new fathers are given only two weeks. Then the men’s bonuses were not affected, but a reduction was applied to the annual bonuses of the women, followed by their incentive pay not being restored to its former level, even three years or more later [Source: https://www.ft.com/content/2e72ddde-41bc-11e9-9bee-efab61506f44]

In general, the working hours in Switzerland are long, at 42 hours leading it to having the second highest rate of women working part-time in Europe. This is then coupled with women finding it difficult to access higher positions, with age discrimination on return to work and inadequate pensions at the end of a working life. [Source: Mary Mayenfisch Leadership – A Week for Women March 24, 2019 https://reconnectingwithcommonsense.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/leadership-a-week-for-women/]

Finally, the United Nations has championed women’s rights more and more in recent years. The UN promotes equal opportunities for access to employment and to positions of leadership and decision-making at all levels. It also works against the horrible practice of violence against women that occurs around the world far too often. However, as the graphic below shows, as of 2014 143 out of 195 countries guarantee equality between women and men in their constitutions. Sadly, the UN is not a body that can make universal laws, as that is up to individual countries. So discrimination continues to exist, with many countries signing on to UN recommendations and then ignoring them. 

Happily the increasingly influential Sustainable Development Goals include Goal 5, which strives to "achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls".

So will all ships rise as the water supports movements toward gender equality? Or will, as I indeed suspect, men be the losers? As CSR/Sustainability becomes increasingly important, encouraging institutions and companies to treat all key stakeholders responsibly, women will undoubtedly see their positions improve. The previous poor treatment of women by men - by many but not all - will mean that men will lose some ground and that, probably, serves them right!

 Source: https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/gender-equality/

[1] Thanks to Mike Eldon for comments on an earlier version