When billionaire Warren Buffett makes a stand you can’t help but take notice. He did it on taxing the rich, and now he’s doing it on advancing the place of women in American society. He’s rich, powerful and vocal: the three keys to getting heard. Add to that male, and (sadly) he’s got a solid advantage over the rest of us.
He penned an essay for Forbes magazine on the issue in March and published this week online, declaring women are key to America’s prosperity. He believes with so much being written about women and work recently that Americans are missing the bigger point – the country’s done great with one half of the population being given access to opportunities, imagine what it could do by enabling the second half too?
We need rich, powerful and vocal men to champion the needs of working women in Australia too, to show that our economy also depends on how the other half of the population are engaged – whether that’s in small, medium or large-sized businesses, or in not-for-profits, governments and the general community.
We have some excellent “Male Champions of Change” who are rallying for women in leadership at the corporate end of town – the heads of IBM, Deloitte and KPMG among them. But we need someone who can cross the issue out of the corporate world and into the general working community.
We need someone who can convince other men to not just see the issue as the “right thing to do” (or rely on their daughters, wives and sisters to be convinced, as Joe Hockey suggested this week) but rather to view it from the lens of “self-interest” – something Buffett advocates in urging men to look at the broader economic benefits.
“If obvious benefits flow from helping the male component of the workforce achieve its potential, why in the world wouldn’t you want to include its counterpart?” Buffett writes in his essay. “The closer that America comes to fully employing the talents of all its citizens, the greater its output of goods and services will be. We’ve seen what can be accomplished when we use 50% of our human capacity. If you visualise what 100% can do, you’ll join me as an unbridled optimist about America’s future.”
Sure there will always be resistance to change from those already powerful who may see their influence threatened by engaging the other half of the population. But Buffet suggests another enemy of change: the ingrained attitudes of those who can’t imagine a world different to what they already know. And those who can’t yet believe such a world could actually be better than what we’re living in now.
Dismantling these ingrained attitudes is important. Rich, powerful, vocal men can help.
These ingrained attitudes are everywhere – and they’re perpetuated by both men and women. They define our thinking on domestic life, including the breakdown of chores and child caring responsibilities. They’re in the value we place on time spent in the office, the fact we’re still tied to a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday working model that was developed during the industrial era. They’re in the tax and superannuation system that continues to disadvantage women.
They’re in the opening hours of our childcare centres and the fact childcare is seen as a privilege. They’re in the referral networks that see jobs go to mates, headhunters and recruiters who return to the same pool of candidates over and over, and the idea that the best employee you can hire is someone who looks just like yourself. They’re in the suggestion – from you gran, you Mum or someone else – that you should “marry well” and feel the need to question your career if you choose to have kids. They’re expressed when it comes to a woman’s looks: be “pretty” and you’ll get ahead but apparently not deserve it, “ugly” and you’ll just miss out. You can’t win.
They’re in the idea that women are not as inherently ambitious as men, that ambition disappears once you start a family, and that women still feel a need to put their ambitions to one side in order to protect their sanity while attempting to juggle it all. They’re in the idea that the “have it all” debate is only relevant to one half of the population.
These ingrained attitudes also define our thinking on success: men are better at business because, well, they’re always been in business haven’t they? So they must be doing something right?
People will listen to the Warren Buffetts of the world because that’s an ingrained attitude in itself – that we’re open to hearing what rich, powerful and vocal men have to say. So let’s use that to our advantage. Let’s have more such men discussing what dismantling such ingrained thinking can do for our future prosperity, and ourselves.
Suggestions? Who can do it for Australia?