Lately, I've been reading a lot of articles that go something like this:
"But we asked women to join the club and women still didn't join the club. Our conclusion? Women don't want to be in the club."
I'm using metaphor here. The "club" can stand for anything in this case but at Secretariain't, the club is business. The problem with this conclusion is that it is too narrow. It does not get to the root cause of gender imbalance in business. It does not ask "why?" Companies want more women and believe that women in their executive ranks is a good thing. They make promises and goals to increase these numbers and yet, continuously fall short of them. If companies want to further a constructive dialogue about achieving gender balance in the business world they will have to utilize a systems approach to understanding the lack of balance. When you do, it becomes clear that women "not wanting to join the club" is actually a symptom of a larger issue and not the root reason for the imbalance.
Systems thinking is challenging because it is complex. Humans tend to oversimplify, which causes us to lose site of the root causes for the huge systemic problems we want to solve (the complexity of climate change is a good example of this). The result is poorly designed ineffective solutions or no solution at all. The same thing happens when it comes to solving women's issues. Even calling them "women's issues" is oversimplifying, since limitations on women also create limitations for their families, which include men and sons. When you expand your gaze from families, you see that limitations for families create limitations in society. "Women's issues" further oversimplifies because it does not adequately express or capture the wide spectrum of impact that gender discrimination has when accounting for experiential differences due to race, class, sexual orientation, age...the list goes on.
What's the real problem?
One story I heard recently was about a tech start-up that tried to hire two women who declined because they didn't want to take on the risk. In that individual instance, the women very well could have been risk averse for various personal reasons, yet "risk aversion," in this context, was offered as an explanation for why there are few women in the tech-sector. But this conclusion oversimplifies and plays into an age-old stereotype that women are too soft for business or too risk averse. In reality there really are no differences between male and female entrepreneurs. Plenty of men turn down start-up job offers every day because they don't see the venture being profitable and consider it too risky. Yet in this example, all women were generalized when two turned down the offer. I wonder why the founder of this start-up chose to generalize all women instead of considering the declined offer as a reflection on the strength of his business model?
These kinds of generalizations about women happen all the time in the business world. But, they don't really explain what the problem is and so they don't help male leaders to attract female business partners. In this instance, risk aversion could have been fueled by many things that are not related to what has been ascribed as innate qualities of gender, but the systemic impact of gender discrimination:
- women on average make less than men in their careers and cannot afford to take the same kinds of financial risks
- women take time out of the workforce to care for children and parents, which impacts their retirement savings, so a failed venture could have worse financial consequences for a woman
- tech start-ups tend to be all-male and those all-male environments can feel unwelcoming and non-inclusive to women
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