When I was growing up, my mother would tell my sisters and me that we could accomplish anything we wanted. In school, classrooms had an equal ratio of women to men. In my 20-plus years as CEO of a publicly traded company, I have worked with professional women and men.
While that sounds ideal, it doesn’t accurately represent the reality. In fact, I have witnessed inequality firsthand in the insurance industry, where the lack of women is striking at the senior level.
Is it simply a coincidence? Or do a lot of women choose not to pursue a career in insurance? That sounds unlikely, and it also wouldn’t explain the seniority issue.
For logistical reasons, things seem to change for women when they start a family. Suddenly, their options are narrow. If they keep their jobs, they’re stretched trying to excel at work while raising a child. If they decide to quit and become full-time moms, they are out of the workplace. The result for women is a steeper road to top management, and for employers, a smaller pool of experienced women to choose from for top positions.
As a former CEO of an international company, I noticed that the dialogue was not as robust when the team lacked women or if it were too homogenous. So, I decided early on that hiring the best person for the job is the way to excellence, regardless of gender or origin. Our annual gatherings included a diverse, executive team of 80, among which 30% were women and a whopping 90% representing various religions and continents, with 30 nationalities in total. This brought different voices to the table and provided unprecedented depth and insight into doing things differently.
In the 21st century, industries are evolving fast and the old ways need to be left behind. What can we do to reduce inequality in the workplace?
While there are several ways to go about it, introducing quotas is a double-edged sword and is not necessarily the answer. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see organizations make suboptimal choices just to fill their quotas. Rather, simply choosing the best person for each job has accomplished greater results in my experience, while being much easier to implement.
— Mark E. Watson III, Founder, Aquila Capital Partners share
Positive change is underway. As a society, we are in a better place today to measure and appreciate the importance of diversity, partly because there is more diversity than before. For instance, the emipirical benefits of women in the workforce are an increase in productivity, higher wages for all regardless of gender, and more economic growth.
Today, good leaders and organizations are already gender neutral and determined to include women in senior roles and on boards.
The digital adoption and the shift toward a more flexible work schedule, which began years ago, is another way to bridge the gap. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated this trend and is helping steer things in the right direction. It is true that flexible and remote work are not applicable to all industries and positions, but they remain a driving force for change.
All that being said, what can we do, as a society, so that women do not have to choose between family and career? We need to create more options that allow women to do both without sacrificing one or the other.
We need to build a more robust societal infrastructure.
Addressing the lack of childcare will certainly decrease the number of women who choose not to pursue their career. In much of the world, there is little-to-no paid maternity or paternity leave. In a post-pandemic world, this can be partially compensated by our modern collaboration tools and ability to maintain a distributed team, allowing for more mothers to work remotely and be in the workforce.
Tackling societal matters is hard and requires bold action at the national level, but as some countries have shown, it is possible to build a modern and fair societal structure that supports parents.
As for mentalities, some old-fashioned ways of thinking persist, with a negative outlook toward productivity of mothers in the workplace. Soon enough, these will erode as they face the sweeping wind of change that has been blowing for years.
Progress starts at home. While our generation is better than our parents’, our children’s will be even better than ours. Following in my mother’s footsteps, I encourage my daughters and son to think of how they want to contribute to the world, while constantly reminding them that they can achieve whatever they want.
