The gender composition of the Australian workforce reveals men comprise more than 75% of the full-time workforce in mining; construction; electricity, gas, water and waste services; transport, postal and warehousing industries. There is a current skills shortage in Australian male-dominated industries, however despite government intervention and decades of organisational strategies to attract more women to these occupations, the numbers are barely moving.
This lack of progress can be frustrating for leaders of organisations in these industries. Rio Tinto’s CEO Sam Walsh made comments to this effect last week around a lack of females in the mining industry. Rio Tinto’s global workforce is made up of 82% men, and Walsh has introduced a number of strategies to interrupt the status quo, including communicating Rio Tinto’s commitment to diversity, setting internal diversity hiring targets, providing development programs for high potential women, role modelling successful women, and making workplaces more flexible. But it was Walsh’s comments last week- citing that it was primarily women’s lack of confidence in their own ability-that perpetuates a common myth that ‘fixing the women’ will solve gender inequity.
There is research that shows men to be overconfident that they possessed the skills and qualifications required to apply for jobs (Taris & Bok, 1998). Then there is a multitude of literature on women’s lack of confidence playing a significant role in women not applying for jobs, promotion or pay negotiations which align with Walsh’s perspective. This thinking drives organisations to set up mentoring programs to ‘fix women’s confidence’. Quoted in Sandberg’s Lean In, The Confidence Gap, McKinsey Quarterly, and many other sources is the Hewlett Packard research that women apply for promotions only when they are confident they have met 100 percent of the qualifications, whereas men apply when they think they can meet 60 percent of the job requirements.
Only there is actually no actual identifiable source for this ‘research’. The Hewlett Packard research does not exist. There are both overconfident and unconfident men and women in the workplace.Confidence is a self-concept that is not gendered. By contrast- organisations are gendered- organisations reflect the gender construct in our societies. Australia is considered by Hofstede to be a masculine culture with a preference for ‘achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material success’.
In the Committee for Perth’s recent Filling the Gap Report (focused on gender inequity in Perth’s male dominated culture where mining companies feature heavily), more than 90% of women reported that in their experience, their male colleagues seem to ‘naturally possess a greater sense of entitlement for promotion and career progression’. Over 90% of female interviewees also reported having recently experienced a culture of indirect discrimination in the workplace. Research shows that subtle bias impacts upon recruitment, selection, promotion and assignment decisions. Unconscious bias, is one of the biggest barriers to Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace. However, we can’t pin everything on unconscious bias.
McKinsey’s 2013 report found that females are confident about their own abilities to become top managers, but much less confident that their company cultures will support them. McKinsey found that an organisation’s culture is more than twice as likely to impact women reaching leadership roles. Bain & Company’s 2014 report supports this finding; 43% of women are confident that they can reach top management positions at the outset of their careers contrasted with only 34% of men sharing that same goal. Only two years into the job, women’s confidence in their careers goals plummet to 16% while men stay steady at 34%.
In a Stanford 2012 study, executives view the “ideal” worker as always available, with no outside responsibilities or interests, with the ability to prioritize work above all else. Bain & Company’s research correlates; the main reason why women’s confidence and career ambition drop off a cliff is because “they don’t feel supported by management and they have a hard time fitting into stereotypes of success within the company”. Most disturbing is the finding that women are twice as likely to believe that men are in fact more confident; creating a virtuous circle of self-doubt for women reconfirmed by bias in the workplace.
Workplace culture is critical to understanding what the ideal worker looks like, what is the definition of success, and what is valued (vs what management says is valued) and rewarded. Throwing women at mentoring programs to ‘fix their confidence does not holistically address diversity & inclusion. Effective mentoring programs need to be closely linked with the talent management pipeline. Biases will be perpetuated unless they’re intentionally interrupted. Leaders who think they work for meritocracies are less likely to do what it takes to interrupt them. Moving the status quo requires sustained strategic leadership with a holistic understanding of the structural, cultural, interpersonal and personal barriers in the workplace. Mitchell Services framework leverages Acker’s Gendered Organisations theory targeting all four of these dimensions to address diversity & inclusion interventions using bias interrupters. Bias interrupters are focused on collecting detailed data about whether gender bias plays a role in daily workplace interactions; identifying specific ways to measure its effect; creating strategy about what “interrupters” might move those metrics; execute; measure what happened, adjust your strategy, and do it all over again until you get it right. UN Women’s recent report Re-Thinking Merit, endorses the bias interrupter strategy as a key recommendation to achieving gender equity.
Instead of focusing on fixing the women, interrupt this bias by addressing structural, cultural, interpersonal and personal barriers in workplaces.
This article was initially posted on Mitchell Services blog. Acknowledgement to Dr Jen De Vries for input on Mitchell Services SCIP model.