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Is it men’s responsibility to make gender equality at work a reality

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Dr Neil Wooding, Director of Organisational Capability and Performance at the Office for National Statistics, often feels responsible for the unequal representation for women at work. Here he explains why he’s underwhelmed by what he sees as the failure of other men to take responsibility for “misdemeanours of their sex” and says men must lead a personal transformation in our own behaviour if women are to achieve their full potential in the workplace.

 

Having many spent years working with organisations to promote equality, I am perennially troubled by the lack of sustainable progress to get women on to Boards and into more senior positions generally. I was 15 when the Sex Discrimination Act was introduced in 1975 and now at almost 55 years of age I wonder what has really changed and what we might have differently if we could re-run the last 40 years.

On so many levels, we continue to rehearse the same economic arguments, justifications and moral philosophies to argue for change. Occasionally we win the fight but I am not so sure about the battle.

As an example, within my home town, the local council has recently established a community trust to run all leisure and cultural services throughout the city. Nine white men and two women have been appointed to the Board as trustees – representing a population of more women than men with a rich ethnic and cultural mix. It reminds me of the old days when men with some degree of divine authority empowered themselves to decide for all others.

My complaint to the local authority has gone unheard but my local MP has responded by saying he’s not responsible for such decisions. I am generally underwhelmed by the response of other men to own and take responsibility for the misdemeanours of their sex.

Jobs for the girls 

Notwithstanding such examples of enduring sexism, on broader reflection, it seems that with the help of national campaigns and endorsement by high profile figures we have managed to make a seasonal change to the general trend of jobs for the boys. But it has often been ephemeral and come at a cost. When the champions go home and the lights go off something creeps back into the cultural shadows of the workplace and once again men ascend.

Like many men, I have often felt responsible for this pattern of enduring inequality. Convincing myself that if I am not part of the solution then I am definitely part of the problem, I have relentlessly challenged beliefs and behaviours while wearing the team shirt. Like a military campaign, I have chosen my moment, rehearsed my case, planned my attack and meticulously (sometimes surgically) taken apart the defence of the enemy. In many respects, adopting the tools of the male trade in pursuit of a virtuous outcome. But the challenge is relentless……….

So what have we learned that in the future will help us to ensure women achieve their rightful place in public life?

Making gender equality work 

Gender inequality is an adaptive problem. It requires a transformational solution to create a lasting impact at a deeper and more profound human level than in the past we have fully appreciated. We need to change the meaning of gender inequality to be as deeply intolerant of it as any other transgression that injures or physically harms members of our community.

To achieve this, we need to be prepared to do things in a radically different way from the past. All too often, we treat gender inequality as a technical problem for which there is a transactional solution……. a bit like mending the plumbing or replacing something broken on the car.

Within organisational terms this means revising JDs, changing selection processes, softening the edges of the requirements placed on candidates, providing training and development to impart key skills and generally trying to be encouraging of those less confident.

These kinds of activities are about widening the gates but not really changing the nature of the game once people enter the playground. And while they have merit, the ‘leaking pipeline’ suggests they are only part of the solution.

Changing the rules of the playground 

Recently, I have observed how some women who are in leadership roles and extremely competent at what they do, struggle to engage with the boys in the playground. They dislike the games of competition in which the biggest and most powerful thrive even when they may be wrong and the ‘I’ and ‘U’ ‘double-dare’ adversarial culture that advocates defend or attack as the only games in town.

They feel uncomfortable with the idea of transaction without trust, hubris before humility, solipsism instead of social responsibility and the intolerance/oppression of difference that generally accompanies a pack mentality.

This isn’t to blame every man for behaving in this way or to suggest that women are not sometimes guilty of these tactics themselves. It is to suggest that in future, we must deepen our understanding of leadership within organisations to appreciate the complex relationship between gender and human behaviour.

The value of rethinking the rules of the play ground is that we, as men, lead a personal transformation in our own behaviour and take responsibility for the role we play in helping women to achieve their full potential.

Dr Wooding will be speaking at the “Men on our Side” discussion in Wales hosted by Women Making a Difference on Thursday 12th March. For details see the Women Making a Difference website.

See Also:

 

 

 

 

 

  • CitymanMichael

    I would feel like a fool trying to make apples and oranges equal.

  • Nigel

    Dr Wooding the answer to some of your questions are in hidden in your own piece. You correctly point out that confidence is an important and that repeated research demonstrates that this is key to the outcomes you seek. The same generation as you I too have seen and lived through a slew of positive action and positive discrimination to advance women. This has in fact worked in sme areas of life such as school and university education
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11452589/Have-young-men-become-the-new-educational-underclass.html
    For a couple of decades now there has been no Gender Pay Gap until women leave work or change work due to childbearing. So why,given the advantages conferred on women by the educational system, and the slightly better than equal start this gives young women in work , do they not “rise ” in such numbers. Here of course the old EOC research projects identified the looosening of ties to the workplace and employer with the onset of childbirth and rearing as crucial(hence just befor its demise it focussed on shared responsibility for children and childcare as its policy drives). Put simply fewer women than want to disrupt a balance in their lives to achieve employment success than men(indeed this choice for men is still pretty difficult). Dr. Hakim’s Preference Theory. Research in Sweden which addressed directly this question “why so few Swedish women in business leadership roles”, because Sweden has a very gender segregated workforce and surprisingly low number of women in leadership roles outside politics. This research found that Sweden’s generous provisions for women to have time away from work was crucial as this made it easy to achieve a work/life balance particularly in the state funded sector (which is of course a very substantial part of the economy). Thus the very encouragements to work in a balance undermined the consitent work history and confidence building necessary to achieve a hierarchical success. As de Bouvoir perceptively observed not working and caring for children should be made difficult, because if not too many women would choose it. Interestingy the Swedish policy response to this research was to offer and quickly make compulsary paternal leave. Creating a real problem because the highly competative Swedish private sector(that bankrolls the public sector) needs to stay inernationally competative to continue to lay that society’s particular golden eggs.
    Of course this also helps explain another conundrum. The fact that in terms of women in leadership, in the productive sectors, the leaders are countries with little or no maternity leave etc. including emerging nations such as China and India.
    So being of your generation and in my younger years equally infected with some notion that women in business would usher in a softer kinder form of business, a kinder captalism. I invite you to consider the evidence you yourself present.
    If, as you say, doing the same things repeatedly without achieving the desired result(or doing so fleetingly) for 40 years is not working. I suggest you re-think. More quotas and appeals to make capitalism more cooperative are very old wine now. After all keep doing the same things and expecting a different result really is a good definition of madness. The confidence gap can only be made up by being successful in the job, and the bad news is that you have keep on doing the job to build the confdence. Either the progress of males,despite the loaded dice in their education and shedload of positive action,is because they have some innate seat of confidence and competativeness within them that carries them forward or these attributes can be gained by simply emulation of successful people(of whatever sex). Frankly in economies facing the full force of globalisation while dragging an ocean of debt, being less competative isn’t going to cut it.
    So put aside a pose of being “one good man” and suggest working hard and long,taking calculated risks and being competative are all things that can be learned ,on the job.
    You see Gender Equality does need people to deal with reality and be much more open to taking on new responsibilities. Where I would agree with you is that men should be more central to their children and this requres them ,and their female partners to let them, to build up confidence in a realm seen as the domain of the mother.

  • Darren Ball

    There’s no pay gap for full-time workers under 40. The so-called “pay gap” is because more women than men are working part-time. It’s unlikely that you’ll get to a senior position if you’re working part-time.

    In order understand why there are fewer women at the top, we need to understand why more women than men are working part-time. I suspect that it’s mostly because women are more likely than men to be the primary carer of their children, and the reasons for that are: maternity leave being much more generous than paternity leave and mother’s personal choices (see the UK social attitudes survey). We should not forget also that at the end of a relationship, the default custodial parent is the mother.

    Instead of yet another article blaming men for being competitive and doing things in ways that appeal to their natural inclinations, imploring them to work in ways that are sub-optimum for them, why not fight for fathers to be equal parents? Women will not be equal in the workplace until fathers are equal in the home.

  • nigel

    Well done Darren you said what I wanted to say but so much more succinctly. The really annoying thing is that your conclusions had been reached by the Equal Opportunities Commission following a series of research reports it commissioned a decade ago. So there really isn’t any need for ust to still be wobbling with such nonsense in the 21st Century. The Swedish research was very intersting as it tackled head on their assumptions about women in leadersghip. The central problem being that the Swedes have a self image as in the forefront of gender equality and yet their “success” at getting women in senior roles is far behind apparently much less “progressive” nations and is pretty middling even among northern european nations. The answer to this blow to their pride was, it turned out , that the generous family friendly employment policies effectively cemented females into a looser relationship with the workplace. With even “full time” workers actually being part time when all the leave was taken in to account. The policy response was to increase fathers leave and make it compulsary in an attempt to make sure men took similar “time out” . Of course the non policy issuefor this to be truly effective as a strategy is that children and childcare have to be seen as shared (rather than a set of duties men discharge on behalf of mothers who remian responsible). As you rightly point out the barrier to that is the deeply ingrained attitudes of women and men that effectively give men fewer choices (unless very assertive) than women to effectively be the “breadwinner”. Frankly one strong drive in my particular climb was the practical need to earn more to support three children growing up. Their later teenage years and college/Uni. were particularly eye wateringly expensive. I suspect a lot of this mysterious “confidence” that is supposedly rarer amongst females is simply that men are more likely to feel they have to climb the greasy pole in order to provide. Not so much confidence as desparation!
    Oh dear having complimented Darren on brevity I have produced another screed.

  • http://JohnAllman.UK John Allman

    First two sentences:

    “Having many spent years working with organisations to promote equality, I am perennially troubled by the lack of sustainable progress to get women on to Boards and into more senior positions generally. I was 15 when the Sex Discrimination Act was introduced in 1975 and now at almost 55 years of age I wonder what has really changed and what we might have differently if we could re-run the last 40 years.”

    I don’t know whether this conspiracy theorist is the simpleton he feigns to be, or a knave in simpleton’s clothing.

    In 1975, one of the possible reasons for a sparsity of women on boards (sex discrimination) was outlawed at a stroke. It is sheer paranoia not to conclude that the other reasons for there being few women on boards that appertained in 1975 also appertained today.

    The premise that more women on boards amounts to “progress” per se, is so arbitrary, so random, that it beggars belief that anybody seriously makes that mental equation.

    Repealing the Sex Discrimination Act is what is needed, to get more women onto boards, though why anybody should want that baffles me. That would allow the recruitment of inferior female candidates, discriminating against better qualified male candidates, boosting artificially the proportion of board members who were female.

    This man clearly has an agenda. He considers that getting more women onto boards would be “progress”. His agenda needs to be justified. He hasn’t justified his agenda. When he tries to do so, if he rises to the challenge (which I do not expect him to do) I predict he will expose a morass of bigotry and flawed thinking that has, for forty years, bolstered an entirely unwarranted assumption of his that he should never have bought into in the first place.

    What is the “right” proportion of board members who are female? Whatever percentage is found in practice, after the abolition of sex discrimination.

    Economic forces would have eliminated sex discrimination without the need for legislation. Appointing an inferior candidate of a favoured gender, missing out on the best candidate of the gender one doesn’t favour, is not the sort of decision successful business people take.

  • http://redpilluk.co.uk William Collins

    This is standard One Good Man fare, the telling bit being, “Like many men, I have often felt responsible for this pattern of enduring inequality. Convincing myself that if I am not part of the solution then I am definitely part of the problem…”. This is the guilt trip which is laid on men by feminism to manipulate them into compliance with their agenda.

  • Nick

    This article reminds me of the temperance movement. I’m sorry to say your ideological approach does not sit in reality and is also patronising.

    I wonder if you are blinded by your own sense of shame as a male and why you feel it is your duty to support females? Are they not capable of supporting themselves? Can they make their own choices and decisions? Did it ever occur to you that perhaps women have made their own decisions already? Just that those choices and decisions don’t tick your boxes and statistics?

    What happens when feminists and men carrying this shame wake up and realise women are individuals who en-masse are rejecting what you want them to be because they are all ready good enough as they are. A woman’s version of life is not totally wrapped up in being an economic unit. That is ultimately what this agenda is about.

    • Darren Ball

      Hi Nigel,

      Stay-at-home mums do complain that their lifestyle choice is criticised as being a cop-out. Being a breadwinner is still more highly respected than parenting, I opine. However, let’s not get hung up over that as it’s not central to my thesis, Feminists, and women generally, do often complain that endeavours traditionally performed by women are less valued than those traditionally performed by men. We do not need to concern ourselves here with whether or not they’re correct, but simply that they believe them to be so. This is another example of a feminist issue that is all about respect.

      I do not know why it took me so long to come to this realisation as it’s all in the name: that’s what patriarchies are. Women are patronised (disrespectful) and men compete for respect in a hierarchy.

      • http://redpilluk.co.uk William Collins

        @Darren: “Feminists, and women generally, do often complain that endeavours traditionally performed by women are less valued than those traditionally performed by men”. Err, no. Feminists themselves believe that endeavours traditionally performed by women are less valued than those traditionally performed by men. This is why the feminist goal has always been to winkle women out of the home and into work – into jobs with as high a status and salary as possible. The rest of us don’t have this biased view of the relative merits of the domestic versus paid work, it’s specifically feminist.

        As regards “We do not need to concern ourselves here with whether or not they’re correct, but simply that they believe them to be so”. I reject this entirely, in whatever context it appears. This is the post-modernist denial of truth. We absolutely need to be concerned with what is true, and if people’s belief system is at odds with the truth them their belief system needs to be re-aligned with reality, not the other way around.

        • Darren Ball

          William,

          You too have missed my point. My point is that everything that feminists campaign about is an issue of respect. For instance, the pay gap. If women are being paid less than men because they’re women, that would be disrespectful to women.

          We don’t have to concern ourselves here with whether or not feminists are correct in believing that there is a pay gap – that’s a subject for another day. All I’m saying is that the pay gap is both a feminist issue (real or imagined) and matter of respect for women’s work. Every other feminist issue (real or imagined) is also about respect.

          As for parents. This comment stream started with Nigel who argued that mothers are given more respect than fathers. I responded by saying: yes, but only in their capacity as being parents. If the father is a good provider, he will be more highly respected than a stay-at-home mum. What I neglected to say is that our attitudes are in a state of flux. Go back fifty years and the father was most certainly the head of the household. I’m trying to get a handle on the underlying basis of where we’ve come from and where we’re going whilst acknowledging that societal attitudes are changing.

          My argument of two sides of the same coin of respect is where we started from pre-1970s. Social attitudes are changing to the point that eventually the coin may disappear completely.

  • Darren Ball

    Re-posting due to truncation:

    William,
    You too have missed my point. My point is that everything that feminists campaign about is an issue of respect. For instance, the pay gap. If women are being paid less than men because they’re women, that would be disrespectful to women.
    We don’t have to concern ourselves here with whether or not feminists are correct in believing that there is a pay gap – that’s a subject for another day. All I’m saying is that the pay gap is both a feminist issue (real or imagined) and matter of respect for women’s work. Every other feminist issue (real or imagined) is also about respect.
    As for parents. This comment stream started with Nigel who argued that mothers are given more respect than fathers. I responded by saying: yes, but only in their capacity as being parents. If the father is a good provider, he will be more highly respected than a stay-at-home mum. What I neglected to say is that our attitudes are in a state of flux. Go back fifty years and the father was most certainly the head of the household. I’m trying to get a handle on the underlying basis of where we’ve come from and where we’re going whilst acknowledging that societal attitudes are changing.
    My argument of two sides of the same coin of respect is where we started from pre-1970s. Social attitudes are changing to the point that eventually the coin may disappear completely.

  • Darren Ball

    Sorry everybody, I have managed to cross-pollinate two different threads. My recent debates with Nigel and William belong to the thread about men and women campaigning together on gender equality. Oops!

  • Nigel

    And just to thank you for some thought provoking articles. My point was precisely that there are (and I suspect always have been) a variety of “coins”. I do suspect that the particular journey will result in the dominant coin being equity through simple effect of the practical realities. Perhaps revealing my pre- “end of history” analysis based on the dialectic with the material. Economics, Automation, Birth Control, longevity and (hopefully) peace (well the absence of huge wars) will all tend to reduce the effects of any natural sex differences and I can’t imagine any going back to any former Paternal society. In some sense what I see at the moment is a damaging lack of patience driven by ideology, in effect hastening the trends already well established by trampling over people (men as a “class” and of course women still wedded to older coins), real people in real lives who deserve better.

    • Darren Ball

      Thanks Nigel,

      I always enjoy our conversations.

      I don’t know if it’s just that I’m looking in different places than I used to, but I am starting to see evidence of feminists taking interest in men’s issues. Whether or not this was influenced by MRAs, I don’t know, but hopefully things are starting to change. Let’s see.

  • Nigel

    You could well be right. Though in the seventies, the era of my radical youth, there was a strong strand of “liberation” . That both sexes had gains to be made from freedom from pre determined roles. Perhaps stronger in the USA (after all one male role there was the draft and the Vietnam war!). It long perplexed me why Warren Farrell got such brickbats as his books weren’t different from some other prominent “feminists”. Though this was when I was busy with work and family and had time to find out more. So when I did have time I was really surprised at the vehemence of opposition to Farrell and “Equity Feminists” and Rosy Boycott and others suggesting their sons needed options too .And some odd things like hostility to shared care of children, which would have been a core principle of challenging rigid “mother” roles. It appears to me that many feminists following through on that notion of liberation from gender for both sexes appeared to be sort of silenced by an “essentialist” brand simply anti all males. So perhaps this is just the cowed feminists re-finding their voice, or younger people re-discovering some of the variety of thought I experienced . My view is that this silencing was done by appropriating domestic violence and sexual crimes as sort of totems, symbols that it wasn’t gender roles that needed to be challenged but males per se. Making any opposition appear misogyny.