ASX chief urges businesses to take a pitch pledge of including women to counter bias

Executives should adopt a “pitch pledge” demanding suppliers or consultants wanting their work have women on their teams, says ASX’s boss.

ASX chief executive Helen Lofthouse.

Company executives should adopt a so-called “pitch pledge” to ensure suppliers or consultants who pitch to them for work have women on their teams.

ASX chief executive Helen Lofthouse has told a roundtable that organisations were requiring gender representation on teams pitching to them for business.

Ms Lofthouse, who became the first woman chief executive of the ASX in August last year, was speaking at the roundtable run by the Champions of Change Coalition to discuss the impact on gender equity of power dynamics in the workplace.

The “pitch pledge” has been developed by the coalition’s property group and those who adopt it “pledge to increase the representation, visibility and contribution of women on both sides of leasing and capital transactions for the duration of the deal”.

It is similar to the “panel pledge” which some people have adopted under which they promise not to be part of any all-male panels. Both pledges are designed to challenge unconscious gender bias.

Ms Lofthouse said she had heard of a recent instance where a company had turned away an accounting firm vying for its audit work when it used an all-male team to pitch for the work. The accounting firm did not get the work.

“Really? They couldn’t find a single woman in their team to show up?” she said.

Ms Lofthouse said a similar approach should be taken by executives in other companies, including the finance industry.

“For an organisation in an industry like finance, where there are networks and relationships built on trust, requiring that diversity (on teams of suppliers), is the kind of lever which can be impactful and can have amplifying value as well,” she said.

Ms Lofthouse said company leaders needed to “embed” practices to hire and promote more women, and this should be the case regardless of whether the company was facing specific pressures or crises at the time.

CBRE chief executive of advisory services in Australia and New Zealand Phil Rowland. Picture: Michele Mossop

“All of us have intense jobs with a lot of demands,” she said. “(Promoting more diversity) shouldn’t be an afterthought.”

Ms Lofthouse said the finance industry had been traditionally male dominated, with areas such as trading floors still predominantly male. “There’s a real issue in (female) representation (but) it needs people in power to actively want to change things,” she said.

She said the increasing educational levels of women was helping boost the role of women in the workforce, but more was needed to be done by the leaders of organisations.

“It (education) creates the raw materials for addressing the situation, but it is not going to change without active and thoughtful efforts (by business leaders) who concentrate on trying to address those factors,” Ms Lofthouse said.

“You’ve got to have people in power at least thinking actively about how to draw in people who have talent and could be suited to a role and create an environment where suddenly people are seeing themselves represented in a more equal way.

“Once you have achieved that, then you can have something which is self sustaining but things have to shift a quite long way before you get to that point.”

She said developing trust was a key issue in the financial sector.

“It’s about who you are dealing with and if you have the confidence that they are going to deliver. There are many decisions which people make about who gets to develop those networks and who gets to develop trust.”

CBRE chief executive of advisory services in Australia and New Zealand Phil Rowland said the property sector was taking action to widen its talent pool of women. This involved taking the “pitch pledge” to make sure there were more women included in teams pitching for business or who were working on key assignments such as big capital transactions.

“It can create an opportunity for women, particularly young women, to break down the ‘expert’ power barrier, where you’re not allowed in the room because you are not an expert,” Mr Rowland said.

Ensuring women were included in key teams pitching for business allowed them to “get into the rooms of power and engage and learn”.

“The sector is very male dominated, and the ranks of CEOs are particularly male,” he said.

“It is often reinforced by male-orientated settings or settings which suit men. It relies quite heavily on long, stable, trusted relationships which people have built up over 20 and 30 years.

“That power is strengthened by a continual, uninterrupted presence in the market which creates a high level of market intelligence.”

This can count against women or men who take time out of the workforce for parental leave.

“You spend 15 or 20 years building up your client base or building up your pipeline of business, and if you step out of it, it’s gone, and you have to start from zero again,” Mr Rowland said.

Making sure women were included in key teams, even if they did not have the same level of experience as the men, was an important way of opening the doors of power to women.

Organisations needed to drop the idea of people only being allowed into key teams if they had years of study or experience. It was important for more junior staff to be “given permission to get into that room of power”.