24 Jul The bigger issue: changing culture and mind-sets. How I think mentoring can help achieve gender parity.
It’s finally here…..
This month saw the long-awaited publication of the draft regulations on the gender pay gap reporting, which continues to put the discussions about gender parity in the workplace at the forefront of our minds.
From 2018, companies with 250 employees or more will not only need to publish their gender pay and bonus pay gap details on their websites, but they will also have to upload those details onto a government website every year. Organisations will then be listed by sector in a league table format which will show two things: 1) where the pay gap is and 2) where it isn’t being addressed. This will result in organisations’ having “no place to hide” if they have gender pay gaps. Whilst 2018 sounds a long way off, a snapshot of the data needs to be taken in April 2017, leaving a little over one year for organisations to prepare their data.
Whilst I believe this is a step in the right direction, and a call to action for those employers who don’t currently have gender pay parity, it’s not all about the data and the regulations. It’s much bigger than this.
What is needed is sustainable change in this space.
So in preparation for the data required for 2018, organisations should be thinking about how they are going to change the culture of their organisation, as well as the mind-sets of their employees to encourage and support greater gender balance.
Despite great progress to date, there is still a way to go and progress seemingly moves at a somewhat glacial pace.
Why is mind-set and culture change so important?
McKinsey have used the term “mind-sets” to describe what stands in the way of businesses achieving gender diversity. Companies can offer all kinds of different initiatives to develop and retain women but still have only limited success. That is because their actions don’t change the underlying, invisible and unconscious ways that individuals think in this case, about gender. What’s key is that in order to achieve greater gender diversity, and what McKinsey’s research has found, is that mind-sets and company culture are significant in affecting women’s confidence to achieve their career goals. Furthermore McKinsey’s research has shown that an organisational culture reflects the “mind-sets” of its influential leaders.
Therefore we must uproot those old “mind-sets,” bring them out into the light and give leaders new mind-sets that promote rather than undermine women reaching their potential.
This is where I think mentoring can play a key role.
We know, for example, that men are better at self-promotion, networking, expressing their ambition and apply for roles, even if they don’t meet all the requirements, compared to women. It’s also well documented about the barriers that women themselves put in place, which Sheryl Sandberg highlighted in her book, Lean In, in 2013. Whilst being aware of the differences between men and women is helpful, it’s the “what are do we want to do about it” question that needs to be addressed.
How I think mentoring can help
Whilst working at Unilever, I was fortunate enough to be asked to create and manage the Unilever Global Mentoring Programme for women.
Why set up a mentoring programme for women?
The answer was simple – Unilever wanted greater gender balance across all of their leadership roles and as an organisation as a whole. Why? Because they believed that achieving greater gender balance was critical to achieving the organisational strategic goals and targets.
What was the impact?
The results were revealing. Not only did the mentoring programme help women get promoted into more senior leadership roles (30% of mentees who participated were promoted to the next work level), it started to change the mind-sets of the mentors in the business (most of whom were male). By having mentoring conversations with their female mentees, they started to understand the organisational, individual behaviours and attitudes that unconsciously contributed to maintaining gender inequality.
Research has shown that the more leaders, who experience increased awareness and a change of mind-set, the easier it becomes to address the systemic barriers in an organisation when it comes to gender balance.
When reviewing the impact that the mentoring programme had made, I spoke to a number of the senior male mentors to find out what they had learned from their mentoring relationship. The majority said that the relationship had impacted on them by helping them to understand what challenges women faced within the business. It also helped them to understand the gender diversity agenda more, and the need to make it a critical part of their own departmental strategy. The overall conclusion was that they realised that something needed to change.
How can mentoring help change mind-sets and culture?
Mentoring is ultimately about story telling with those who have a wealth of experience who can share their experiences with others. It involves sharing different perspectives and helping others see things from a different perspective. It involves empathy – putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and it involves challenging women’s attitudes and the status quo. Mentoring also enables those people who are responsible, consciously or unconsciously, for the organisational culture and mind-set to hear these challenges first hand from the women themselves.
The importance of involving men
Research conducted by Catalyst in 2009 “Engaging Men in Gender Initiatives found “that to accelerate change in gender diversity, organisations needed to stop focusing on it as a “women’s issue” and enable men and women to make changes and work together to change organisational cultures that perpetuate gender gaps”.
They concluded that engaging men was critical to moving forward, given they are largest stakeholder group in most organisations.
Let’s keep celebrating but remain focused that there’s still more to do
International Women’s Day on 8th March 2016 is an annual celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women and the hashtag this year is #PledgeForParity. There are more women’s networks now than ever before. Organisations are investing in lots of different initiatives with the aim to help women progress. We also have the highest level of female representation on UK Boards that we’ve ever seen, but despite all of this progress, we’re still not there yet.
The irony….
It’s hard to think that in 2018 it will be 100 years since women were first given the right to vote in the UK. A fundamental right awarded to them after years of campaigning and as a direct result for their contribution to the First World War. Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1970, we find ourselves in a position where organisations will be required to submit data disclosing their gender pay parity.
So I question how far have we actually come in nearly 100 years? Far, some would say and, yes, I would agree but have we come far enough? Legislation is just one part of a very slow and complex journey and some might say the easiest of things to influence and change. The hard stuff is the intangible stuff – culture and mind-sets, and I think if more organisations focused on using initiatives, such as mentoring, to change their culture and the mind-sets of their employees, then we might be a bit further down the path to gender parity.
I would love to hear your thoughts and the challenges you are facing in your organisation.
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