Feeding chicken soup to a corpse
Edition 94
“Things like parental leave, childcare, flexible work, well, it's like feeding chicken soup to a corpse. It can't hurt. These programs are necessary but not sufficient.” - Laura Liswood, secretary general, Council of Women World Leaders
This weekend I’m featuring a conversation that should make you pause and re-evaluate; in case you believe being labelled ‘a female leader’ is passé. It frankly may be too early to erase that gendered tag.
Laura Liswood is an icon in the world of impactful diversity. Her advice is sought by global leaders. Her speeches are always to a packed room. And her books, like ‘The Elephant and the Mouse’ and ‘The Loudest Duck’ are like bibles for organisations who want to create a fair and level playing field, for a diverse and multinational workforce.
Laura is the secretary-general of the Council of Women World Leaders (CWWL), an organisation she co-founded in 1996 with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland (1980-1996), the first woman in the world to be democratically elected president and Mary Robinson, the President of Ireland (1990-1997). CWWL lists 90 women presidents, prime ministers, and heads of government (both current and former) as members.
She’s been a Senior Advisor at Goldman Sachs, where she was also the firm’s Managing Director for Global Leadership and Diversity. She was the CEO of the American Society for Training and Development, held executive positions at the Boston Consulting Group, TWA, Rainier National Bank and Group W Cable. This is a woman who truly has a 360-degree picture of where women stand, across sectors!
In the last edition of the Chief Brief ‘No Time to Be Complacent’ I wrote about the terrifying and dramatic fall in trust in women leaders depicted by the data from the Reykjavik Index. Not to mention the massive gaps in gender equality from pay and political empowerment to economic participation, survival and health.
With that dismal data firmly on my mind, I sat down with Laura to talk about the state of women in leadership and equality today.
Please note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Maithreyi:
Should we be terrified at the data from the Reykjavik Index showing a dramatic decline in trust in women leaders? Where are we today when it comes to women’s equality, their role and representation?
Laura:
With the Reykjavik Global Index? Absolutely. When you look at the World Economic Forum's data, they keep pushing off when gender equality is going to occur too. You have to ask yourself the question, why so slow?
It turns out effort is not equalling outcome. In that intent is not equalling impact. That's part of the challenge, in identifying what the key leverage points are in the face of what seems like quite a bit of resistance to moving forward for women.
Maithreyi:
Is this resistance more on the political side or visible on the corporate side as well?
Laura:
You're seeing it on the political side clearly, and that's because the Reykjavik Index is mainly focused on politics. But we're also potentially seeing it in other spaces. In the United States, we had the Supreme Court’s decision to push back on support for race-based admission. That decision was strictly on academics, but there have already been lawsuits challenging corporations who have programs supporting women and other historically underrepresented groups. That decision seems to have busted the wall between academia and corporations.
I think corporations now are going to probably fall into three categories.
One, will be the corporations that say: we’re not going to stop. In fact, we're going to double down, because we see the need. We see what we're trying to accomplish.
Two, will probably be the corporations that say, okay, we're just going to keep kind of doing what we're doing.
And three, will be the corporations that were only doing it for performative reasons anyway - like the nice annual report picture. They'll say, now we have a reason why we can retrench on these issues. Time will tell as to where a corporation falls.
By the conversations I’m having the most important people in a corporation going forward will be the general counsel and the chief risk officer. Because some of these programs will open organisations up to risk. Programs like employee resource groups, women's mentoring circles and even recruitment. Corporations are going to have to make their own decisions where on that spectrum of risk they decide to land.
For those corporations fully committed and see the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion there is more focus on moving away from strict representation numbers - what I call the Noah's Ark approach (from Laura’s book The Loudest Duck) of two of these, and two of these, into a more inclusive approach. The thought is - Okay, we’ve got them in the door, but then what? How are we going to get what we say we want, from this diversity: differing perspectives, innovation, creativity, all of those kinds of things that we know is a business case while avoiding the risk of homogeneous thinking.
Maithreyi:
Are organisations really ready to move on from the Noah’s Ark approach to this next phase? Most are still focussed on numbers and representation.
Laura:
They still are. For many organizations, it is their comfort zone to claim hiring numbers. But what I've also seen from an evolution point of view for corporations is that many of them are moving away from the intake problem. That’s at the lower levels within the analyst, the associate recruitment. The numbers at that level are looking pretty good. What they have is an upgrade problem.
Maithreyi:
Are the often talked about measures like flexibility, parental leave - what is put into the bracket of ‘women’s issues,’ effective in addressing that upgrade problem?
Laura:
Things like parental leave, childcare, flexible work, well, it's like feeding chicken soup to a corpse. It can't hurt. These programs are necessary but not sufficient. These programs are table stakes. You’ve got to have flexible work and parental leave programs. The new generation are expecting that kind of thing. On the other hand, there's a potential that this flexible, work from home stuff is going to have a secondary consequence of penalizing women. Because it's women who take most advantage of it. As we know, women still do a disproportionate amount of the childcare, home care, elder care, etc. So, they're subsidizing men's ability to get ahead, because they're freeing up men's time.
Maithreyi:
It is a slippery slope if you also take cultural differences into account. Are you seeing this upgrade problem in the political sphere as well? We seem to be losing women leaders at a very fast rate - Nicola Sturgeon, Sanna Marin, Sigrid Kaag, Jacinda Ardern.
Laura:
What's always both comforting and discomforting is that when you start getting this gender disaggregated data (Reykjavik Index), then you at least can understand what's going on rather that it being just an anecdote. Women politicians are ten times more likely to be subject of digital harassment, digital bullying and digital hate. The data does not have sufficient longitude yet, but it potentially discourages and has a chilling effect on women in public life. They don't want to subject their families to this abuse. The men don't either, but women are getting over scrutinized with ten times more hate being targeted at them. Legislation and punishment will follow at some point but there's always a time lag.
Maithreyi:
Has social media simply just laid bare society’s inherent misogyny?
Laura:
I think we're all searching for the various variables causing this. The Double bind, the tightrope bias, all those things add up to part of the answer. They've been around a long time, but they're just magnified on social media, and particularly anonymous social media, where anybody can say anything mean, hateful, bullying, harassment, and there's no accountability around it. And until and unless it becomes illegal and there are mechanisms by which you can trace the perpetrators it will continue. The question is why?
Why do they feel that way? What's so visceral around it? I don't know if there is a kind of a rule of unintended consequence, which is - the more power women get, the more men begin to feel threatened by it or they begin to feel like they're losing out.
Virginia Valian wrote a book called ‘Why So Slow.’ The main issue she identified was that men do not want to lose their centrality. In many societies it's the men who are really central to society and everyone else is peripheral. I don't know about you, but maybe if I was central to society, potentially losing power is a power dynamic.
Let’s take a hypothetical scenario of someone joining an investment bank. A few years ago, let’s say the investment class going in was 70% men and 30% women and other historically underrepresented groups. In that same hypothetical scenario, today that investment bank’s intake is 50% men and 50% women and historically underrepresented groups. If you went from 70% to 50%, what would be your mindset? That I'm losing out. It may be 50-50 or equality today, but the mindset is - I'm losing out and we've gone too far.
Maithreyi:
That is the perspective? The pendulum has swung too far for women.
Laura:
Yet, you know, every statistic we see, the pendulum hasn't really. If you look at who company CEOs are, if you look at the number of men in Parliaments, if you look at the number of heads of state, if you look at the top leadership in most management organizations, I will say the pendulum hasn't swung too far, but it's the perception people have.
Maithreyi:
Did we as women create that perception, by being too visible?
Laura:
What women were trying to do is celebrate victories, celebrate opportunities, create role models, show that it could be done and that women are equally as capable as men to do kinds of things. That the good intention of it.
But I also remember a scenario where I was teaching a group of women in MBA classes. I asked these MBA students what percentage of women do you think are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? On average they said 25%. This was when women made up about 6% of Fortune 500 CEOs. You're right, because if you see them on television taking on that role, if you see them on the covers of magazines, you begin to think - my gosh, they are all around us - it's got to be at least 25%. Geena Davis has this great statistic where she's found that when women are 20% of a room, men see 50%.
Maithreyi:
There also seems to be reticence among younger female leaders about embracing their gender in their public persona. Do we believe as women we are further ahead than we are? I know I personally felt more empowered 20 years ago, than I do today.
Laura:
If you haven’t read it yet, there is an article the Financial Times did about affirmative mechanisms or quotas. When they spoke to young women, they responded by rejecting quotas. The thought -.no, no, no, we don't need it. The study was based on how old the woman was. Once a woman hit her 40, late 40s, early 50s, into an older age group, the response was a resounding – yes, we have to have affirmative mechanisms because nothing's working.
If you're going to undergraduate school, or if you're going to medical school, law school, business schools now, your class is made up of 60% women, 40% men. Now, if you’re going into your analyst role or joining your first job, or a consulting group it's probably 50-50 men and women.
But, after that initial period, I always tell young women - Give it five years. Come back and talk to me.
World News To Note
Politics
COP28 is rocking and rolling in Dubai (yes, it’s already been a year since the non-event that was Sharm-El-Sheikh). Beyond the noise, maybe this 28th edition of an annual battle to commit to the planet will be fruitful? It never hurts to be optimistic, does it?
Highlights till now?
HE Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, UAE’s minister of Climate Change and Environment and COP 28 food systems lead, has convinced 134 countries to sign a declaration to adopt policies and come up with finance to transform their respective food systems. Between them, these 134 countries account for 5.7 billion people, almost 500 million farmers producing some 70% of all food produced worldwide. Read more at Devex
The Loss & Damage Fund, which has secured US$420 million in pledges, will be hosted at the World Bank for four years – with money used to help emerging economies repair damage, though Civil Society participants remain sceptical about its actual distribution.
The inaugural Business and Philanthropy Climate Forum (BPCF) saw 500 business leaders join the fight against climate change – the first time that the private sector is being heard at COP.
And in 72 hours of COP, we have plenty of other ‘pledges’ I could write about. But since the key point about Fossil Fuel ‘Phase down/Phase out’ is still under debate (multiple COPs later) all these signatures, declarations and commitments are not even worth the paper they are written on, for now anyway.
Going by the controversy and vociferous denials of COP being an opportunity to do fossil fuel business by the President of COP28 Sultan al-Jaber, (also the boss of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) before it even kicked off - let’s assume COP28 will once again be more noise than news. But it remains a great place to network!
Especially because this year we actually know who is attending and who is rubbing shoulders with whom. As part of new measure from UNFCCC for greater transparency (after a massive number of fossil fuel lobbyists attended last year’s negotiations in Sharm El Sheikh), this year’s disclosures show a massive contingent of hundreds of bankers, consultants and lobbyists invited as UAE guests to COP. Read more at The Financial Times
Business
Nairobi-based climate tech AI start-up Amini has raised $4 million in a seed funding round from Female Founders Fund and Salesforce Ventures. Amini was founded after COP27 (last year) by Kate Kallot (named one of TIME 100 most influential people in AI 2023). The company is building an AI ecosystem/infrastructure to collect and monitor key African environmental data. The platform will aim to create real time monitoring tools that give insights into soil health, water use, flood detection, crop health and a myriad of other intelligence. Read more at Amini
Southeast Asia's biggest coal mining company, Banpu plans to enter Thailand's growing electric vehicle market. According to CEO Somruedee Chaimongkol, the company plans to being producing lithium-ion batteries in Thailand, for Chinese EV makers by the first quarter of 2024. Earlier this year, Banpu also invested $70 million to increase its share from 47.68% to 65.10% in Singaporean lithium-ion battery maker Durapower Holdings. Read more at Nikkei Asia
Civil Society
Around 100 civil society organisations have written an open letter to European countries, namely Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the European Commission. The open letter urges those addressed to revisit Palestinian/Israeli NGO funding cuts, stressing vital human rights roles, policy alignment needs, and the need to debunk unsubstantiated claims. Read more at ISHR
Amnesty International has stated advanced spyware, probably Pegasus (yes. That ugly name is back in the headlines!) has been used against Serbian civil society just weeks before snap parliamentary elections in the country. Read more at Amnesty & Euractiv
Back in the summer, Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld, who spearheaded the work of the European Parliament’s PEGA (Pegasus and other Equivalent Spyware) Enquiry Committee had even stated: the abuse of spyware threatens the integrity of elections.
Pegasus was created by Israeli cyber-war company NSO, which was revealed in 2021 to have sold it to governments around the world, allowing them to illegally track anyone deemed targets.
Entertainment
Nan Goldin, pioneering photographer and campaigner against the billionaire Sackler family (the owners of Purdue Pharma - who fuelled the US opioid epidemic) has topped the prestigious Art Review Power 100 list which ranks the contemporary art world’s most influential people and organisations. Read more at the Guardian
Beyoncé has offered up fans a cherry to top off a bind boggling tour. She’s released a new song, “My House,” to celebrate her new concert film Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé.
The lyrics are timely indeed - “heal the world one beautiful action at a time, this is real love!” that's what a ‘Renaissance’ looks like to the Queen!
Enjoyed this article Maithreyi