Plenty of Suits and Ties at Annual Women’s Business Forum

FEMALE FACTOR
Plenty of Suits and Ties at Annual Women’s Business Forum
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
Published: October 17, 2010

DEAUVILLE, FRANCE — The stars of this year’s women’s forum were the men.

As female business and political leaders gathered in this beach resort in Normandy last week for the Women’s Forum Global Meeting, an annual conclave that has been dubbed the Davos of women, the number of suits and ties in a sea of colorful female elegance definitely stood out.

Maurice Lévy, chief executive of the advertising company Publicis; Carlos Ghosn, the chief of the carmakers Renault and Nissan; and James Turley, global head of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, were among those who took to the stage to plead the case for more women throughout corporate hierarchies.

Twenty-three chieftains of industry — 13 of them men — committed to six concrete measures to improve the gender balance in their companies over the next 12 months. The measures included pledges to make the advancement of women a top strategic priority at the chief executive level, to require female candidates in every recruitment pool, and to deliver specific targets for more female representation at all levels of their companies.

“This is strategically as important to our businesses as revenue growth or product innovation,” said Mr. Turley, one of the drivers of the initiative. “We need women if we want to remain competitive.”

And women, observed Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and a regular at Deauville, “need men to be their ambassadors.”

The greater presence of men at this year’s forum — the sixth such session since it was first held in 2005 — is emblematic not just of a growing awareness in the business world that looming skills shortages make women a vital pool of talent. It is also indicative of a shift among prominent women toward the idea that men — as sympathetic chief executives, corporate mentors and involved fathers — are crucial to the next stage of women’s advancement.

Multinationals like the nuclear giant Areva and the food service company Sodexo have appointed men as diversity officers in order, they say, to communicate more effectively to the male executives running operational units that they should or must promote women.

And European governments are increasingly looking at policies that might nudge fathers to share responsibilities in the family to help relieve the pressure on working mothers.

“We need role models” not just of women in senior positions but of senior men making more time for the family, said Aart de Geus, deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Chris Viehbacher, chief executive of Sanofi-Aventis, the pharmaceutical company, suggested businesses help alleviate childcare worries of employees by providing nurseries at the corporate level. “What you really want to do is create circumstances in which men and women can do it all,” he said.

Meanwhile, Michel Landel, head of Sodexo, stressed the importance of a visible and audible commitment at the chief executive level: “It’s a man’s world, and companies have been shaped by men,” he said.

Or as Mr. Turley put it: “In some cases, we are fighting literally centuries of tradition.”

But if there was broad agreement on the need for more concerted action, the views among both women and men here often diverged on the methods. One of the most divisive issues remains that of quotas for women in corporate boardrooms, a major talking point now that a number of European countries are weighing or have passed legislation obliging companies to have a minimum share of female directors.

“I hate quotas,” said Mr. Lévy of Publicis. He said his own company has seven women on its 15-member board, simply because those women were the best candidates. But he conceded that the threat of legislation in France was what had recently impelled the mostly male chief executives of the industry association he heads to adopt a code of good practice committing them to a minimum share of women on boards.

Mr. Landel, by contrast, insisted that without enforceable quotas the numbers would simply not budge. “You need quotas,” he said. “Unless you take very, very aggressive steps, things will not change.”

Viviane Reding, a vice president of the European Commission and the commissioner for justice, told companies that if they wanted to avoid regulation they would have to move quickly in promoting more women.

Threatening Europe-wide quotas as soon as late 2011 — a move that would have to be agreed to by member governments — she said business had “one more chance.”

Ms. Reding, who as telecommunications commissioner responded to a failed effort at self-regulation by the mobile phone industry with rules that forced European roaming charges down by more than half, has convened a chief executive summit in the spring of next year to hear from business leaders on how they plan to address gender balance in their organizations voluntarily.

“They had better get it done,” she said.

Women are the rising stars in the new China

FT Home > World > Asia-Pacific > China
Women are the rising stars in the new China
By Patti Waldmeir
Published: October 13 2010 15:58 | Last updated: October 13 2010 15:58

Less than a century ago, many Chinese women had their feet broken and bound so tightly they could scarcely walk. Now the world’s three richest self-made women are from China, and 11 out of 20 global female billionaires are Chinese.

In many ways, they have communism to thank. Mao Zedong set out to make China a global model of gender equality, and although he failed at so much else, he largely succeeded in transforming Chinese society into a world where women think they are at least equal to men – and many men seem to agree.

“Mao said, ‘Women hold up half the sky,’” says Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the China Rich List, which earlier this week published a ranking of the world’s wealthiest self-made women. He placed Cheung Yan (Zhang Yin), the Chinese head of Nine Dragons Paper, a recycled-paper company, at number one with a personal fortune of $5.6bn.

“The single most positive legacy [of communism in China] was the emancipation of women,” write Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. “A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female,” they write. But as Mr Hoogewerf says, “then Mao unbound their feet”.

He identifies complex political, social, cultural and economic reasons that made a scrap-paper entrepreneur from China richer than Oprah Winfrey or the doyennes of Zara, Gap, Benetton and Ebay. But much of it has to do with children – or the lack of them – and Chinese women’s profoundly different attitude to childcare.

“In the west and Japan, after marriage women stay at home to look after the kids, but in modern China it’s not like that,” says Wang Jiafen, head of the Shanghai Women Entrepreneurs’ Association.

“Women will not stay at home to look after children. Chinese women do not want to stop their career just to be a housewife,” she says.

Ms Wang, 60, is now a jet-setting venture capitalist, having retired from a job heading one of China’s biggest state-owned dairies. “In China, most women think it’s boring to stay at home: they don’t have anything to do,” she says.

Many western women might privately agree with Ms Wang, but few would pronounce it so publicly. But in China “there is no social stigma” to such attitudes, says Nandani Lynton of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, who has spent 17 years in China.

“Mao made an incredible difference when he said women hold up half the sky, since then it has been assumed that all women in China will work,” she says. Easy availability of childcare helps: there is a tradition of grandparents caring for grandchildren, and Beijing’s one-child policy has meant grandparents look after every child – an impossible dream for working women in the west.

Yin Xinyu, vice-president at Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank, has three nannies, help from her parents and a tutor for her daughter in primary school. “So I don’t need to stay at home”, she says.

But Prof Lynton says the availability of childcare – whether grandparents or childcare centres popularised under communism – is only half of it. “It’s also very much an issue of what is acceptable,” she says. “Chinese women have no role model for guilt, because even before the revolution, everyone who could afford it had an ayi [nanny or maid]”. Traditional Chinese culture does not stress the importance of early childhood development, so many Chinese women do not feel guilty missing their children’s formative years, she adds.

Ms Yin, the banker, says women these days can choose between staying at home or working. “For the older generation, staying at home meant failure, but for my generation, staying at home is a personal choice,” she says. “Many of my friends stay at home and I envy them.”

But when women choose the workplace, they often prove highly ambitious. According to a recent study from the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, 76 per cent of women in China aspire to top jobs, compared with only 52 per cent in the US. Working mothers in China “are able to aim high, in part, because they have more shoulders to lean on than their American and European peers when it comes to childcare”, the centre notes. With an average work week of 71 hours, the country’s mothers would not cope without abundant cheap childcare.

Two other factors contribute to the astonishing success of female entrepreneurs in China, says Mr Hoogewerf: one is the Cultural Revolution (think Mao’s “Iron Girls” in their androgynous outfits), and the other is economic.

Ms Wang says China’s rising economy has lifted all boats, but those with females at the helm have fared better. “A thousand years ago, only men could compete with each other, but in the economic war, you need intelligence instead of just physical strength. China’s strong economic growth has created more opportunities for women.”

Ms Yin has an even more intriguing explanation for the success of girls: schoolteachers in China reward compliant children, and girls make more obedient students. “Girls are always being praised in school, and they gain confidence that way,” she says, noting “confidence is very important for an entrepreneur”.

In spite of these factors, China has not yet found the formula for perfect gender equality. In many rural areas, boys are still preferred to girls, leading to high levels of illegal (but still common) gender-selective abortion. In traditional Chinese society, sons are obliged to care for elderly parents, and their wives are expected to care for in-laws – not birth parents. In a society with a minimal social safety net for the elderly, this has led to a strong preference for sons in more traditional areas.

But urbanisation has significantly eroded that trend too, with many urban families saying they prefer girls because they remain to care for the elderly that males may shirk – and increasingly because they are cheaper to raise than boys, who are expected to provide a home upon marriage, a crippling burden given high property prices.

Echoing a common complaint of women all over the world, Ms Yin says equality in the workplace comes only after women have proved they are not just equal to men, but better. “Women need to be twice as good to get the same job,” she says, although she stresses her career has not suffered due to gender discrimination.

Will the world’s rich lists still be dominated by the Chinese in a decade or two? Ironically, wealth may lead to fewer women in the workplace: women who do not need to work may choose to stay home and, according to Prof Lynton, rich Chinese men increasingly want trophy wives who do not work. But foot binding is not coming back any time soon: gender equality is a legacy of communism that appears to be here to stay.

Additional reporting by Shirley Chen in Shanghai

Stop Stereotyping Female Leaders

Blogs - The Conversation
Stop Stereotyping Female Leaders
8:09 AM Monday October 11, 2010
by Athena Vongalis-Macrow and Andrea Gallant

Women's leadership programs are charged with imagining a new type of woman leader for whom leadership is an attainable aspiration. But effective leadership education for women is still a haven for bad practices that send mixed messages to aspiring leaders. There are two types of practices that work to stereotype women in leadership:

First, programs rely on bringing out the superwoman as a model of leadership. On the final day of our leadership program, a woman was invited to present her tips for getting ahead to a group of aspirational young female leaders. She was in her mid-forties, a professor and dean of a business faculty, and had just given birth to twins through IVF. She was immaculately put together, on stilettos all day. Can we do all that? Why do so many women's leadership programs send out this unrealistic and exhausting message? There is a lack of women leaders as role models, but sustaining stereotypes of the superwoman is no solution. For role models to be effective, they need to be both inspirational and motivational. Consider the context of aspiring women leaders, who dismiss the idea that work is your entire life and a woman needs to go it alone and to have it all. The superwoman is not affirming of choices and balance. She continues to perpetuate the traditional notion that doing leadership about getting control, dominance, and power, at all costs. Instead, leadership programs need to increase the repertoire of role models so leadership is feasible, flexible, and appealing at all stages of a career. Such role models could be better fostered from our networks and our exemplary peers, rather than from exaggerated tokens of women's leadership.

Second, programs focus on the common narratives about the woes of women in leadership. Glass ceilings, the double binds of family and work, and discriminatory nature of organizations reinforce ideas that women are vulnerable and need fixing. Women need a better way to use the language of self-promotion and accountability. We know that language creates the reality of how individuals see themselves. So, while leadership language for women still focuses on barriers and struggles, this practice maintains the backlash avoidance model of success, which suggests that women fear negative repercussions from self promotion and standing out. It is no wonder that women can often negotiate a better deal for others than they can for themselves. Compare this language context to that of male leadership programs which are littered with the narratives of success. Males learn to take charge, tackle challenges, develop talent, driving innovation and guide change. Disrupting the stereotypical use of language should be a focus of women's leadership programs.

Women's leadership programs are necessary to accelerate women's leadership aspirations. But just having a women's leadership program isn't enough. If it's not done right, women can't move forward. Effective programs for tomorrow's leaders should disrupt stereotyping.

Athena Vongalis-Macrow and Andrea Gallant are academic researchers working in education and leadership at Deakin University, Melbourne Australia. Presently they are writing a book, Glass Wall Barriers. They can be contacted at info@glasswalls.com.au.

The 10,000 Women initiative by Goldman Sachs

10,000 Women

10,000 Women is a five-year investment by Goldman Sachs to provide 10,000 underserved women around the world with a business and management education.

10,000 Women operates through a network of more than 70 academic and non-profit partners to develop locally relevant coursework for students and to improve the quality and capacity of business education.

Investing in women is one of the most effective ways to reduce inequality and facilitate inclusive economic growth. Investing in education for women has a significant multiplier effect, leading to more productive workers, healthier and better-educated families, and ultimately to more prosperous communities.

Through our 10,000 Women initiative, women entrepreneurs receive a customized business education from local universities across a range of disciplines, including:
Marketing
Strategic planning
Accounting
Accessing capital
Market research
e-commerce
Business plan writing

These pragmatic, short-term programs help to open doors for women who would not otherwise have access to a business education. Students are offered mentoring and post-graduation support by partner institutions, local businesses and the people of Goldman Sachs.

The initiative is designed to foster greater shared economic growth and is based on research which found that investing in girls and women yields significant economic growth.

The funding for the 10,000 Women initiative is provided through The Goldman Sachs Foundation.