@Nikki - my understanding is that even the Gillette ad didn’t hurt bottom line (although it’s a tough one to judge for various reasons).
A great program is by Catalyst is MARC - (Men Advocating Real Change) which “empowers men to engage in workplace inclusion through research-based programming and an online community to continue the conversation.” In the 2018 Women in the Workplace Report by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company, we profiled P&Gs MARC program that raised awareness among men about the common biases women experience, like the belief that men are better leaders and how to mitigate those biases. 950 senior leaders at P&G have completed a MARC leadership workshop. And surveys of the participants found that 96 percent of the participants acknowledge having more privileges than women, compared to 70 percent before the workshop. And 100% of the men who participated said they have a personal stake in D&I and will work on recognizing their own biases.
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Implementing policies such as paternity leave is a way that companies can influence change by sharing the responsibility of parents from the earliest age. Once Aviva introduced equal parental leave (up to 12 months full pay), 67% of new dads took six months off and 95% took more than the statutory two weeks paid paternity leave. This demonstrates that men are keen to have such policies implemented in companies. According to an IPSOS study men also want their employers to do more. Challenging traditional roles, 75% of people disagree that a man who stays at home to look after his children is less of a man and three-quarters of men (72%) want employers to make it easier for men to combine childcare with work.
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Seems there are lots of HeForShe fans on this panel! De Beers Group has been part of UN Women’s HeForShe movement since 2017. HeForShe is UN Women’s movement for gender equality, providing a platform for all genders to be part of the solution and take tangible action. As part of this our CEO, Bruce Cleaver, is a HeForShe Thematic Champion and we have made three commitments to 2020 related to our leadership appointment rate, our community programmes and our advertising. We have found HeForShe a really positive way to demonstrate to our employees that we are serious and authentic about making real change on this issue and to build momentum and engage everybody but particularly men across the business from mining to retail. 80% of our workforce is in mining which has historically been a male dominated profession so we wanted a positive and action-orientated way to start the conversation and engage the majority of our employees. Having public commitments which we can communicate and engage on internally and hold ourselves accountable to really inspired the business to unite around this common goal. Thousands of employees across our global operations have signed up to HeForShe, made personal commitments and we see people wearing the HeForShe pin all over the organisation as a visible symbol of support.
Early on in our partnership with HeForShe we realised that we needed to create some safe spaces for men to be able to share concerns and ask questions. We worked with Dr Charles Robbins from the ‘Centre for the Study of Men and Masculinites’ at Stonybrook University (another HeForShe Champion) to run sessions across our UK and southern Africa offices but also with front line workers, supervisors and senior management in our mining operations. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive – the men who participated felt that it had helped them to better understand how complex an issue this is, how gender stereotypes had impacted not only the women in their lives but also themselves, and the importance of their role in making change happen. We have used what we heard to strengthen our engagement, communication and policies across the business and many of the men who participated then signed up for male advocate training to learn how to be partner with female colleagues to be visible ambassadors on gender diversity and inclusion and how to challenge bias in a constructive way. Post the pilot, we have been rolling this out further working with local facilitators in each context.
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@Pamela - yes #SeeHer has done great work for the US - really valuable and I recommend it to people. And we’re starting to see similar examples around the world.
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Companies are investing in training their male workforce. Volvo has its leaders through a six day program on the subject. Men have also become visible diversity champions across the company and 250 men in the company have become internal trainers on the subject. The trainings emphasize. Other companies such as Chevron have implemented the Catalyst MARC program, a 1.5 day workshop is a unique Catalyst program to raise awareness and generate interest in supporting and promoting workplace equity. MARC Leaders introduces concepts critical to sustained collaboration between men and women leaders who champion inclusion.
Promundo’s been engaged in working directly with corporations on both their internal cultures, and their public-facing branding. For example, we’ve worked with Rio Tinto to support the rollout of their new domestic violence policy for the United States and Canada. Their policy provides paid leave and other resources to employees experiencing or potentially at risk of experiencing domestic violence, and also extends support to immediate family members of employees experiencing domestic violence as well. To accomplish this, we conducted interviews and focus groups with over 60 Rio Tinto employees, and developed an online survey for all Rio Tinto North America employees to better understand the prevalence of domestic violence in the selected communities and to gauge the office climate around these issues. Based on these interviews and the survey results, Promundo developed a training package – with the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children at Western University in London, Ontario – for managers and HR staff, focused on the impact of domestic violence in the workplace, to better prepare HR and managerial staff for understanding and working with the policy.
A2: The best examples from development programming are willing to recognize the privilege that men and boys experience as a result of gender equality, they are accountable to women’s movements and they seek to challenge and support men/boys and women/girls to move towards greater gender equity. Programs from CARE, such as Journeys of Transformation and Indashyikirwa in Rwanda, combined women’s economic empowerment (via savings and loans) with workshops to promote more equitable relationship behaviours. Also, CARE has worked with workplaces such as the garment industry in South East Asia to support them to address workplace harassment and promote gender equality.
A place that many corporations have led change in the USA is parental leave. Lack of parental leave is a major cause of wage disparity between women and men. Many corporations have recently provided increased parental leave. That said, the availability of parental leave in the USA is the worst for industrialized nations with approximately 25% of mothers returning to work within 2 weeks of giving birth! Corporations that support gender equality can take the lead and support legislation around parental leave, exerting peer pressure on other corporations to do the same. If employers support parental leave laws or join campaigns for parental leave (such as PL+US), it will likely become law across the nation.
Workplace harassment is also an area that corporations already seek to address given it is the law in many countries. That said, there are still countries without effective legislation. Corporations have worked with partner NGOs at times to better address the causes of workplace harassment.
Male Champions for Change provides some interesting tools for men. Including pledges (for example not accepting to speak on panels without women speakers) and examining the leadership shadow (seeing if one is actually doing what one should do for diversity in one’s daily life). Their approach is also based on listening and learning, suggesting that companies need to start listening to the voices of women in order to be able to take the right actions, start by listening and understanding. Companies should start with focus groups, surveys, learn from personal interactions with women this should be coupled with looking at the data and leading indicators such as parental retention rates to know what actions to focus on, see what is working in the current D&I plan. Executives should hold focus groups and meet with people and engage with women inconversations, create a safe space to understand challenges and experiences (understand what is the split, when are women exiting and why for example). Policies need to be in place in a company, but the policy will only live on paper unless the culture changes, you have to focus on both equally, the culture element is something that you constantly have to have your eye on. The numbers and experience collected from those within the organization tell you where to start the work, and sometimes the policies are there but nobody is taking them up (flexible work, parental leave→ you have to ask yourself “why are they not taking this?”).
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Hi everyone! Wonderful discussion here. I just wanted to jump in and say that there is actually mixed evidence of the impact of diversity on the bottomline (happy to share the research if anyone’s keen)…and the reason it’s mixed is that studies don’t always consider an important factor: inclusion. If we have diversity without inclusion, it is likely to backfire (cause conflict, discrimination etc. rather than creativity, dialogue)…Having said that, there are PLENTY of good reasons to seek diversity!
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Great stats! What we have found, and also from talking to other companies, is that one thing is having the policies, the other is the work to ensure a culture where people feel comfortable and supported to use those policies. For example, with flexible working we found we needed to do a lot of engagement and training work with line managers to make sure employees experience of the policy was consistent.
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How brands face consumers externally can also reflect important values to which consumers will or will not respond. As part of its internal and external effort to live up to its gender equality commitments made through UN Women DeBeers has worked with UN Women on the consumer brands side to produce advertising and marketing that supports gender equality.
Making visible and positive commitments is crucial for companies because it gives CEOs and the company something to work towards that is very concrete. UN Women launched the impact 10 10 10 acceleration initiative getting powerful men in the world 10 CEOs, world leaders, university leaders a visible promise to accelerate progress gender equality; they launched an invitation to join the movement by becoming as He For She impact champion. The reason that the leaders committed was because this sounded more serious and tangible, they felt that they usually put down their name and nothing happens, they felt that this was very transparent and would challenge them and position them as role models. Examples of success include the fact that through He for She Malawi outlawed child marriage, within months the practice was outlawed and marriage under age of 18 became considered criminal offense, they also worked with communities to end child marriages in community level.
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I don’t want to be overly focused on advertising, but I while I think there’s still a lot to learn and do, the efforts of the advertising industry address issues of masculinity in brand development and advertising offer some useful experience. Companies in India, just to pick an example I’ve seen, for example that are putting out ads that challenge gender norms with regard to domestic work I believe make a huge difference.
Also nice to see so much appreciation for our HeForShe campaign. As others have pointed out, one clear lesson is that when offered opportunities to engage, lead and contribute a lot of men take it. Happy to discuss more on either of these.
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Agree with the point about paternity leave @Fabio @Chiara- it needs to be fully paid and non transferable. Paternity and parental leave as @ChiaraCondi points out is key to gender equality in the workplace and outside it. The Corporate Task Force on paternity leave aims to make employer supported paternity leave available to all employees when they become dads, and to help shift outdated social and cultural norms which discourage them from taking that leave when it is made available. The Task Force is co-convened by Dove Men+Care, a major Unilever men’s personal care brand, and by Promundo, the international research organisation working on issues of masculinity and gender equality, and also includes Women Deliver, Deloitte, Facebook and Bank of America as well as UNICEF, who has joined as a technical advisor… https://www.dove.com/uk/men-care/lets-champion-paternity-leave-together.html
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For companies that want to start somewhere UN Women has done a very comprehensive job of gathering learnings from implementation of initiatives across companies as well as creating toolkits to spark the conversation. UN Women released the He for She solutions covering how can a company achieve parity in senior leadership (answering questions that companies may be asking themselves such as how much investment is needed, what is the process to achieve this, what difference has this actually made? Companies where women are more present in senior leadership more return for shareholders is this true? How do you get buyin when men can feel that this is a loss?). Currently UN Women is looking to transform 98 commitments to turn them into solutions in the next several years. Companies can use the barbershop toolkit (developed by the Prime Minister of Iceland) to start the conversation within a community or company (it comes from the idea that men do not want to open up except in the barbershop and those conversations are not traditionally very positive about women). It gives men the tools to talk about about different aspects of gender equality; based on this toolkit parliamentarians have organized sessions, communities have talked about domestic violence (the toolkit is available online on the UN Women website).
On preventing sexual harassmen, men have a huge role to play here in ensuring that both policies and practice keep women (and men) safe at work. This is happening in many workplaces, and has been boosted by the the International Labour Organisations agreement in June this year to adopt a new ILO Convention to eliminate violence and harassment in the world of work. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_637108.pdf
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Agree @Chiara_Condi Male Champions for Change is a great example of the initiatives that can be undertaken to engage men. I also participated in many Diversity Labs about how to engage men when in my Board position at PWN Global - one of the leading global women’s networks. PWN Global has an ongoing Engaging Men programme and is seeking to achieve gender balance by all genders working together.
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Diversifying women’s networks could also be a good idea to get men engaged in the conversation. According to the interview we had with Eric Way at Volvo this may be a good way to make men understand issues as well as what it means to be the minority. Elizabeth Nyamayaro at UN Women also pointed this out as an idea for companies: companies are increasingly looking at their women’s network and thinking about expanding it to men, to make sure that men are also invited to conversation and to avoid miscommunication.
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These examples of parental leave, importance of media and public awareness - just go to show that so much of the work needs to happen in society, not just within companies. Truly progressive organizations are making those efforts - investing in education, in NGOs, lobbying governments to make better laws and so on…
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@Katie - the sessions you reference sound like a really valuable concept for other companies and organisations to explore. Can i ask, were the sessions only for men or were women also part of the conversations? Would love to learn more about the approach!