(Adapted from Business in Vancouver, Issue 1112)
In a recent article in Business in Vancouver, Curt Cherewayko interviewed Nancy to get her take on the key roles that both males and females have in bridging the gender gap.
He noted that whenever Nancy speaks to women's business groups about ways to promote gender diversity in the workplace, she makes sure that top male executives are going to be present.
Here's what Nancy had to say:
"Female champions can't change things alone. We really have to engage men more so that they have the opportunity to see that women are just as talented as men in CEO roles and any other management positions in a company.
When you have companies with male-dominated teams, it is men talking to men. It's men, not women, who are going to say, 'This is a problem.' Peer pressure is a lot more influential than women saying, 'There's a problem here.'"
There isn't necessarily buy-in to the business case for gender diversity, so companies just keep doing what they're doing, and use excuses such as, 'Our industry is male-dominated anyway'.
According to Catalyst Canada Inc., a Toronto-based non-profit organization that aims to expand opportunities for women in business, too many gender initiatives focus solely on changing women - from the way they network to the way they lead.
As well, says Catalyst, too many organizations look to women alone to change the organizational practices that maintain the status quo.
Says Nancy, "The reality is that there are more than enough women in the workplace, they're just not at the top. An increasing number of companies are taking the usual proactive steps, such as implementing boardroom policies that ensure a certain percentage of women are short-listed for roles when it comes to recruiting, succession planning or promotion."
March 8 was the 100th anniversary of International Woman's Day, and hundreds of events were held around the world to inspire and celebrate achievement.
Interesting Statistic: Women use 25,000 words per day and men use only 11,000. That requires both to adjust to improve communication between genders.
Additional Reading:The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World by Dr. Helen Fisher. Fisher makes a strong case for a near future in which the natural talents of women as thinkers, communicators, and healers, adapted to the age of information, create a new kind of global leadership in business, medicine, and education, skewing the power dynamics of sex and relationships towards the feminine. Women, she says, are contextual thinkers to a far greater degree than men; this "web thinking," as Fisher dubs it, is an asset in a global marketplace. |
Mackay&Associates
