If we want senior business leaders to ‘get’ the need to address gender diversity within their organisations, we need them to see the numbers.
We can’t, as PwC’s Jon Williams put it to me, wait for senior business leaders to have an epiphany. You know, that moment when fathers realise all’s not fair for women at work, usually around the time their daughters enter the workplace.
Numbers speak louder than words when it comes to women in leadership and women’s workforce participation, and provide a more solid start for addressing the problem.
And it seems many HR managers and business leaders are not too fussed about managing the paper work to determine just what those numbers are.
Having just been on a road trip around the country discussing gender reporting with HR managers, among other people issues, Williams believes there’s a strong appetite to go ahead with mandatory reporting requirements under the 2012 Workplace Gender Equality Act, and a general sentiment that reporting on such gender metrics is not particularly onerous.
This is despite the Abbott government now considering winding back gender reporting rules for companies with less than 1000 people in a bid to help them save costs and time on ‘red tape’.
“There’s not that much red tape to do in the reporting,” Williams told me following the release of PwC’s latest Women in Work Index. “People are prepared to do it and understand it’s an important issue. Without doing it we don’t think we’re going to get the change that’s required.”
WGEA set about formalising the collection of gender metrics in order to help companies benchmark their own gender progress against similar-sized organisations and industry peers, and to obtain a more wholistic view of just what’s going on in Australian business.
As it currently stands, mandatory reporting for organisations with more than 100 employees is due by May 31. The report involves gender metrics on pay, recruitment, retention, promotion and occupation with the details to be signed off by the CEO and shared with stakeholders and employees.
Willams believes many organisations are already keeping such records, just in different formats to what WGEA is requesting. He adds the more “clever businesses” don’t see it as red-tape at all, but rather an opportunity to benchmark their gender progress against their competitors and peers and to ultimately improve staff retention rates.
“The feedback was consistent across both small and large business which was that this was an important issue, and they are relaxed about the reporting they have to do.”
He sees reporting as the first step for change. Without it, we can’t measure any progress nor identify and share programs that help.
In a February statement to Women’s Agenda, Business Council of Australia’s chief executive Jennifer Westacott gave her support to the proposed Abbott government amendments, citing BCA concerns that the reporting requirements “divert resources from the real effort being made by companies to change recruitment and retention processes, performance management and other practices that are holding back individual women and the Australian economy as a whole.”
Late last year the BCA set a target for its member firms to reach gender parity across senior executive positions in the next ten years, highlighting new measures such as female-only hiring shortlists and the testing of CEOs for unconsious bias to help.
It’s a commendable, ambitious target – one that’s no doubt supported by some men leading BCA member organisations who’ve had that emotional ‘epiphany’ after seeing firsthand the challenges their daughters, wives, sisters and female friends experience at work.
We don’t need to wait for the daughters of male senior leaders to grow up to see there’s a problem when it comes to women’s workforce participation, particularly in management and senior leadership positions. The numbers will confirm it, and provide a benchmark for making improvements in the future.