There is at least one large corporation in Australia with KPIs that include the number of women in leadership roles. From the outside it sounds like a dream organisation for an executive career.
The board has set targets for the CEO around gender balance. Clearly the board had good reason to set specific targets which are the executive equivalent of board quotas. The CEO is apparently not as female-friendly as the board would like.
A friend of mine is a senior woman in this organisation and tells me the perception is almost the opposite of the reality. Since this CEO joined the business the numbers of women in leadership roles has actually declined. My friend was head of a key business unit previously. Her career has languished in a talent pool with no defined role since this CEO became her boss. The same can be said for the few other women who were also previously in the leadership team.
Many of the women in the leadership pipeline have quit the organisation due to frustration with this apparent hypocrisy. My friend recently put her hand up for a redundancy package as they were being discreetly offered. She had decided to take the money and use the time it would buy her to reignite her career elsewhere.
She was informed that her application for redundancy had been denied. This information surprised her as there was no career plan for her in the organisation and she had been without a clear job function for at least six months. Imagine her shock when she uncovered that a senior male in the organisation had received approval for his redundancy package request. What was more of a shock was the reason she was to be kept in the organisation. My friend wasn’t told she was a valuable member of the team or that her skills were essential to the organisation’s capability audit. They wanted her to stay because of the CEO’s KPIs around the numbers of senior women in the organisation. She was simply a senior woman in an organisation that senior women were fleeing. After all that she’d achieved in her career her gender had reduced her value to a number in the organisation.
On paper this organisation appears to be one that champions women and would nurture their careers through to leadership roles. Every year the brightest of female graduates sign on for a brilliant career there. But as my friend has painfully discovered there can be a downside to organisations that have targets for the numbers of women in leadership roles if the plan to develop and retain women is anything other than genuine.
Have you experienced similar in your organisation?