Getting more women into senior management, executive and board positions requires sacrifice. It requires men to give up their positions — or never reach positions they may have obtained in the past – in order to make way for women.
And it’s a sacrifice that is starting earlier than we think. In outlining how IBM is working to see more equitable gender representation through its Australian organisation, managing director Andrew Stevens outlined the challenges the organisation is up against at the Sustaining Women in Business conference Thursday.
IBM has long struggled with getting women into its business at all levels. Even today, just 17% of the graduates of relevant courses to IBM’s business in Australia are female.
Despite this, IBM is still working to see women make up half of its graduate intake.
“We think it’s our job. It’s not society’s job, it’s ours. And we’ve taken responsibility to fix it,” he said.
This year, IBM’s graduate intake was 47% female, just missing their 50% target.
Stevens made the comment during a panel session on Thursday between ABC presenter Waleed Aly, Sex Discrimination Officer Elizabeth Broderick, and two of his fellow Male Champions of Change – KPMG Australia CEO Geoff Wilson and Stephen Sedgwick from the Australian Public Service Commissioner.
All three of the change champions – an initiative established by Broderick to engage leading men in raising the issue of women’s representation in leadership on the national business agenda– reiterated their individual commitments to making their workplaces a more inclusive one for women.
KPMG’s Wilson noted a five-year diversity strategy outlined by the firm 18 months ago. Right now, the percentage of female partners in the firm hovers around 18%, the goal is to grow that to 30% by 2015.
“Long term, there’s no reason why we couldn’t get to 50/50, but the notion of that currently in professional services firms is unheard of,” he said.
Depending on how seriously an organisation takes such targets – and Australia’s largest organiations need to take them seriously if they want to avoid talk of quotas in coming years – some men who may have reached particular positions in the past, won’t obtain them in the future.
But that’s gender equality.
And as these change champions also noted, women have too often missed out – or at least found themselves in positions where they unfairly need to make personal trade-offs between family and career.
Are the tradeoffs for gender equality fair? Have your say.