“I flinch when I hear us being spoken about as a business case,” Cassandra Kelly, the joint CEO of financial advisory firm Pottinger told a Women and Leadership forum for CEDA in Adelaide this week.
“I certainly refuse to stand before capable women and argue the business case for us…How can the argument for equity and reasonableness be supplanted by one where I am a P&L?”
Relying on proving a business case for treating women fairly has also made me increasingly uneasy, for a number of reasons.
There’s no question that robust research on women’s workplace participation is vital and drawing from a larger pool of talent can mean organisations get better outcomes. But suggesting more women in the top ranks will automatically boost the bottom line, for example, has some obvious flaws.
What if, as is quite likely, that promised impact is hard to prove or doesn’t seem to eventuate? Does that mean that an entire gender is to blame and women should bear the responsibility for poor results?
And we never apply this stringent test to men. If they fail it’s not because of their gender, they just didn’t perform.
One half of the population simply doesn’t have to make a case for their right to a job and a fair go. The longer we insist that women do exactly that, the longer we reinforce their status as outsiders rather than normalise their workforce participation.
And let’s face it, arguing ‘the business case’, no matter how you cut it, simply hasn’t worked up to now. Progress has been incredibly slow, and the statistics have only just shifted in key areas of real power, while the gender pay gap remains stubbornly wide.
Perhaps that’s because even after all these years of effort some of the target audience is not really listening, according to the CEO of US consulting firm Catalyst, Deborah Gillis, who visited Australia last week to launch an office here.
“Why hasn’t the message galvanized action? If you saw similar information on another topic wouldn’t it galvanize you?” she said. “People who don’t want to hear it dismiss the data. I think it’s time to move beyond the business case and talk about the talent imperative and the fact that in 2014 there is no good reason to explain why half the talent is not being given an opportunity and it’s wrong and should be embarrassing. Let’s get on with it, quite frankly.”
As Kelly points out, however, the equality argument on its own doesn’t go down so well with some audiences and there’s certainly a need to frame messages judiciously.
“I accept that not everyone is ready to embrace change based on the argument of equality alone so in some audiences, this might be necessary.”
But expecting that a well-argued business case will be the crucial circuit-breaker reminds me of the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.