Stop Fixing Women: Why Building Fairer Workplaces Is Everybody's Business
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Stop Fixing Women: Why Building Fairer Workplaces Is Everybody's Business
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742242798 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 433 KB |
About the Author
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Stop Fixing Women
Why Building Fairer Workplaces Is Everyone's Business
By Catherine Fox
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Catherine FoxAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-279-8
CHAPTER 1
From victim blaming to system shaming
'Men invented the system. Men largely run the system. Men need to change the system.'
Gordon Cairns, non-executive director, chair, Woolworths Ltd
AT THE END OF 2011 I got a call from the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, who had just been at a meeting in Canberra with the head of the Australian Treasury, Martin Parkinson. They'd been discussing a major review of how women fared in one of the nation's most powerful and prestigious departments, and he was happy to discuss the findings and the plans to address them with me, she said. The interview a day or two later was fascinating, and not quite what I expected from one of the more influential mandarins in Australia. Instead of the usual defensiveness, denial or victim blaming and bland platitudes about doing better, Parkinson said the findings of the detailed and candid review by consultant Deborah May had set off loud alarm bells through the organisation.
He admitted that for years he'd believed that the discrepancies in gender numbers in the upper ranks of the department were mainly the result of childbearing breaks and care responsibilities shouldered by women. Like many of his peers, he said it really didn't occur to him that there could be covert or indeed even overt bias to blame for the lack of women making it through. Treasury, after all, is an enclave of the smartest people in the country, who pride themselves on excellent analytical skills. Surely they couldn't be missing something quite fundamental – and detrimental – about how their workplace operated?
As it turned out, many of the senior bureaucrats had indeed been blind to this. And Parkinson came to see he had been missing a key factor. 'I had a light bulb moment: that we were treating the symptoms and not the cause. I had thought the barriers for women were self-resolving.'
There's a slightly donnish quality about Parkinson, although much of his career has been spent in the top enclaves of government. At a launch of a case study about the gender work done at Treasury in Parliament House, he revealed he was raised in his early years by his grandmother, while his mother worked to support the household. It's clear that along with a growing awareness of the breadth of the issue, he also has a strong personal motivation for seeing better outcomes for women. In 1997 Parkinson joined the IMF before returning to Treasury in 2001. At that time he realised that the rate of female progression hadn't changed much despite a decade of recruiting high levels of female graduates. But there was a reasonable spread of women across the department, and again he thought that time would see these discrepancies resolved. The problem, he thought, would fix itself.
In 2011, he again returned to Treasury after establishing and leading the Department of Climate Change. After a major study on gender in the department, he knew that expecting a change to the status quo without action was a mistake and too convenient an explanation which didn't address the significantly lower numbers of women in many parts of Treasury from early on in their careers. The organisation had indeed focused on addressing the symptoms, not the underlying problem. There were systemic issues and Parkinson and his team set about tackling them using the review findings, which he admits were tough to read. 'I remember very clearly hearing Deb's findings with my Executive Board, and Nigel Ray, Deputy Secretary of the Macroeconomic Group, turned to the group and said, "We are not leading the organisation we thought we were leading"', Parkinson recalls. 'The Executive Board was bound together on this issue from that moment onwards.'
Treasury went on to release information about pay, recruitment and progression. Individual groups in the department reported on their own data – interview rates, conversion rates to appointments and so on, with Parkinson telling interview committees not to stop at advertising vacancies but to actively seek out the best candidates for them. Nigel Ray adopted the '50:50: If not why not?' initiative and encouraged women to put themselves forward for roles.
The results began to emerge shortly afterwards. Dubbed the Progressing Women Initiative (PWI), the program includes gender audits, unconscious bias training, making managers accountable to gender targets, improving flexible working arrangements, and creating a senior diversity committee. It saw female representation in senior executive roles rise from 22 per cent to 33 per cent in three years to 2014, although the level dropped to 28.6 per cent by mid-2015 (according to the 2014/15 annual report). Women made up 51.5 per cent of Treasury's workforce in mid-June 2015, an increase from 50.6 per cent a year before. In 2015 Parkinson was appointed to run the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and there are plans to use his PWI framework as a model to be rolled out across the public sector. His successor at Treasury, John Fraser, however decided not to join the MCC.
There are many reasons why the Treasury under Parkinson and his team was able to make such a shift in operations and rules to change the gender ratio in the organisation. An important factor was that the men running the department underwent a reality check about what was actually happening in their own workplace rather than what they thought was occurring. Making powerful men advocates for women's empowerment has been equally cheered and jeered in recent years but it is an approach that rests on some fundamental logic: many female flag bearers for gender equality have long attempted to have their concerns taken seriously by the men running organisations. Their efforts were of course necessary and steadfast but not sufficient – you only have to look at the sobering list of statistics that haven't budged to know that this challenge rarely made it to the serious business agenda. A circuit breaker was needed.
That was one of the reasons the Male Champions of Change, which Parkinson belongs to, was formed by Elizabeth Broderick in 2010 when she was Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Although he was ambivalent about the all-male membership, Parkinson said the rationale made sense. 'It's men who are in power positions; if you can't get a bunch of men to talk to other men about this, why would we believe the pace of change can be any different? For me it was very much a sense that we needed to be seen as stepping up alongside women, and as men trying to fix the system by trying to do the right thing. That's why it has been so important to work with (membership body) Chief Executive Women on the core strategy.'
When I asked her about the thinking behind the group, Broderick explained why relying on women alone to solve the under-representation of women at the leadership level is illogical. 'Women by and large do not hold the levers of power. If this issue is allowed to sit squarely on the shoulders of women alone, any failure to make progress will also be laid at their feet. Not only that, but progress will remain painfully slow. That is why blaming women for the lack of progress is not only unfair, it's also unhelpful. Gender equality is not a women's issue. It's an economic and societal issue, one that affects all of us.'
As she also points out, the structures holding women back are part of a system that is deeply rooted in a male way of being – which means men, and particularly powerful men, need to use that clout to create change. 'They represent the system. I was recently asked by a man, "Well, who will speak for me, a white Anglo-Saxon Christian man?" My response was, "You are the system; your voice, your views are crowding out every other voice. That's why we need you to take the message of gender equality to every other man".'
And Broderick is well aware that it's much easier to focus on fixing women to fit into this existing power model, because that's been the comfortable alternative for most organisations from the year dot. Fixing the system requires men to step up beside women as equal partners in change. And while she sees this happening more and more, there's still a way to go in building a critical mass of men as equal partners in reform.
The men who are on board have begun to understand how crucial it is to switch from seeing gender balance as a women's problem to seeing it a workplace issue, and that at its heart, this is about who has access to power. That shift gets some momentum from analysing and challenging the deficit model. When organisational thinking doesn't concentrate on how women fail to match masculine norms, then the steps to address bias start to look rather different. The approaches can broaden out and away from tinkering with measures for women, such as the 'mummy track' of part-time work (which I will examine in the next chapter), or sending women on remedial programs to hone those networking skills or boost confidence. This is sometimes called the 'sheep dip method', as it involves dunking women into training and expecting them to come out the other end magically transformed.
But no amount of sheep dipping will alter the beliefs of leaders who have traditional values and rely on stereotypes, particularly when it comes to the vexed question of merit and who should be the boss (more on this in chapter 3). To do that there has to be a focus on identifying and changing the norms, practices and policies that fail the fairness test and don't match today's workforce demands. As the work of Parkinson and his colleagues makes clear, that kind of action is now being initiated by male leaders. That is a radical change from a few years ago – and the thinking is catching on.
I've known consultant Deborah May, who produced the review of women in Treasury, for many years and seen her effectively provide detailed workplace analysis to kickstart this process. Her work in Treasury is just part of a number of projects with a range of government agencies to help their senior echelons – mainly men – to understand how organisational norms can stymie women. 'I think it's the culture which is central and behaviours – how we do things around here – and the more we understand that, and the fact it sometimes doesn't work, the better.'
May begins her projects by asking questions – lots of them – that focus not on women but on the organisation's workplace culture, and the informal rules that work to the advantage of men but to the disadvantage of women. Her work with Treasury found there were two clear factors at play that disadvantaged women. 'One was the allocation of work, which meant that women were assigned organisational relationship and co- ordination roles and men were given hardcore economic analysis. Even though they had the same qualifications from day one. In addition to that, the cultural norms of "how we do things around here" that were recognised and rewarded were clear.'
The behaviours that ticked boxes and were therefore rewarded were direct communication styles, decisiveness and being seen as authoritative. What didn't get rewarded was being seen as too consultative and not knowing the answer. No prizes for guessing that the two styles split pretty neatly into what was perceived as a male versus a female approach. Further analysis found the policies and practices within Treasury such as performance management systems were subtly penalising women because they had (or were believed to have) a different interpretation or way of exhibiting conceptual and analytical skills – the most crucial performance factors in the organisation. There was a level of unconscious bias, May says, but the bias was grounded in the system.
These findings had an effect on how certain responsibilities were distributed to men and women from early on in their careers. The department now puts young men into the coordination roles once deemed more suitable for women – and there is increased recognition of the impact of these decisions and more conscious changes as a result, she says. The penny has been dropping in all sorts of ways: it's not just recognising the pattern of who gets a role, but how that work allocation gets in the way of progression. And May says helping people start to see themselves and their culture through the eyes of others is pivotal to change. She usually spends half a day with women when running workshops to normalise their experience and help them to understand the way bias in practice operates. A core message to women is 'It's not about them and it's not because they are incompetent'.
At the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade the problems with systemic bias were more about career paths and attitudes to flexible work, particularly how and whether part-time work could be arranged, May explains. Given this is a workplace where overseas postings are part and parcel of many careers and jobs, the whole issue of flexible work becomes a crucial differentiator between the up-and-comers and those heading for the career cul de sac. In the past there was not really any such thing as flexible work and if you didn't get a posting you were in trouble. Some women told May they felt their careers were over: they had to make a choice between having a career or a family.
The new approach to flexible work and parental leave in the department was about tackling the systemic bias that saw senior managers reluctant to put people into part-time roles and therefore left many women unable to progress. Development and training were other areas where problems would arise for women, May says, particularly with secondments and high-visibility roles where careers are often forged. But it's not enough to recognise the problem – action has to be planned and executed. A strong leader makes all the difference – and luckily more men are stepping up to the task, given they continue to run the majority of organisations in most parts of the world.
Treasury and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade are quite different environments to the workplace at Aurizon, the former Queensland Rail. The traditional transport and freight company is a major listed company employing nearly 7000 workers, of which 16 per cent were women in 2015 – not too many of whom are driving the trains, although that is changing. The CEO for six years until late 2016, Lance Hockridge, is a former BHP executive, and has been a champion of better gender balance for many years. He publicly made a commitment to have 30 per cent of the Aurizon workforce made up of women by the end of 2019 and his active interventions – as he calls the changes he is making – are quoted throughout this book. We sat down to chat in early 2016 and he says that while the battle for more progress with women continues, there is a change in attitudes and a growing sense this is no passing fad.
'It's way too early to declare victory but there's a sense of having taken hold. It's a cultural journey but accompanied by a broad range of processes. Over the last twelve months one of the more significant things has been the impact of the internal male Champions of Change Group – it started out with a dozen people and it got to twenty-four and it was voluntary, having gone around and tapped people on the shoulder originally. What it has done is to take a decision that it's a twelvemonth tenure and then they get a whole new group that will be appointed. This year they are running a series of programs in the culture space, and last year they did a survey on what was women's experience and that got some good stuff.'
But it also picked up on some not such good stuff too, Hockridge adds. Disturbingly, some of the attitudes the company would have liked to think had long since disappeared were still around – that women should be seen and not heard, questioning why women were being appointed to senior roles when they will just go off and have babies, a woman in a meeting is there to take notes, and so it went on. 'There were still entrenched stereotypes and we've launched a "Stand Up and Speak Up" campaign and the first part of that is encouraging people to ask "What did you mean by that?"', he says. The idea is to give permission for a response when poor behaviour or passive-aggressive comments are made and to try and tackle the bystander syndrome – that is, that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. It's starting to have an effect and is part of legitimising doing the right thing but it will be a while before the impact can be measured. 'The power of 150 years of culture will not change by simply doing the right thing and having the right recruitment processes – that's not what will make the big difference.'
'It may be important to change some of the formal rules but you also have to intervene and that's at the heart of where Aurizon is at, driving the different approach, and it will create discontent and dislocation but the men in the organisation have run the rails for 150 years and all we are doing is creating some balance', says Hockridge. Driving trains is not assumed to be a woman's job. But Aurizon has found there is no difference in the skills of female drivers when compared to male drivers, and similarly to the mining companies, there have been benefits from the way women use more care in running the machinery, with the upshot that having women in the role has 'lifted the game for everybody'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stop Fixing Women by Catherine Fox. Copyright © 2017 Catherine Fox. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,CHAPTER 1 From victim blaming to system shaming,
CHAPTER 2 The fight for flexibility,
CHAPTER 3 Who gets the job?,
CHAPTER 4 Earning power,
CHAPTER 5 How targets build meritocracies,
CHAPTER 6 Promotions not panaceas,
CHAPTER 7 Military manoeuvres: An army of women,
CHAPTER 8 Backlash and confidence tricks,
Conclusion: And where to from here?,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,