Melinda Gates’ go-girl program
Women’s power and influence could be so much more, says the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In January 2010, Rosie the Riveter appeared in my mailbox, flexing her iconic bicep on the cover of The Economist. The cover story struck a triumphant tone, reporting: “At a time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: Within the next few months women will cross the 50 per cent threshold and become the majority of the American workforce.” To mark the occasion, the magazine revised Rosie’s famous call to action from “We can do it!” to “We did it!”
As much as I appreciated Rosie’s enthusiasm, her declaration of victory felt premature. American women did reach that 50 per cent threshold in 2010 but the same old inequalities have followed us to new places. We still aren’t earning as much, rising as high or having an equal voice in decision-making.
Across all aspects of American life, it is most often men who set policy, allocate resources, lead companies, shape markets and determine whose stories get told. Meanwhile, what gains have been made typically haven’t extended to all women. The women historically most marginalised in this country — women of colour, poor women, and lesbian and trans women — are still the most likely to be trapped in minimum-wage jobs, the least likely to hold managerial roles and the most likely to face sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index measures gender equality based on women’s representation in the workforce and public office, as well as health and education outcomes. According to its projections, at the current rate of change the United States is still 208 years away from achieving gender equality (compared with Canada’s projected 51-year timeline and the United Kingdom’s 74-year timeline to close their gender gaps).
Despite the frustrating pace of progress — or maybe because of it — something fundamental has begun to shift. Women are sharing their stories, marching, walking out, running for office and winning elections in record numbers. The media is amplifying their voices and asking hard questions of the institutions that continue to lock women out. Business leaders are under new pressure to demonstrate that their companies are part of the solution. Global leaders are expected to have answers.
The unprecedented attention to gender equality makes this a moment when extraordinary progress is possible — and bold, ambitious goals are appropriate. To seize this opportunity, we have to define our goals thoughtfully. I believe our goal should be to expand women’s power and influence. I use these words because they are the best way I know to describe what men in the US — in particular, white men — have long had that women have not.
Expanding women’s power and influence will require many things — perhaps most important, strategic capital and stakeholder collaboration. Efforts to promote gender equality have been chronically underfunded. Data from Candid’s Foundation Directory Online suggests private donors give $9.27 to higher education and $4.85 to the arts for every $1 given to women’s issues. If we want to see results, more philanthropists, venture capitalists, businesses and policy makers need to be willing to invest in gender-focused interventions.
My team at Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company I founded in 2015, works to drive social progress for women and families in the US. Our research suggests new investment and energy should be channelled into three high-leverage interventions.
Strategy 1: Dismantle barriers
Our analysis suggests many people believe gender inequalities in professional advancement are a reflection of women’s own choices — not evidence of an unequal system. But history demonstrates women’s choices are often constrained by their options. For example, my mother, like most women of her generation, didn’t attend college or have a career. Like many women of my generation, I did. That almost certainly had less to do with my own abilities or ambitions than it did with a law known as Title IX. This is the landmark 1972 legislation that banned discrimination on the basis of sex by federally funded educational institutions (in practice, almost all of them). Its impact is hard to overstate. Over the past five decades, the percentage of women with a college degree has more than tripled. More women are earning more degrees in more lucrative fields.
Institutions today are no longer allowed to openly discriminate on the basis of sex. The barriers women face are therefore harder to see and in some ways harder to fight. To shine a light on the most pervasive and pernicious of them, my team and I dug into demographic data, population surveys and academic literature. Our research suggests three barriers in particular block women from power and influence. Here’s how to confront them head-on.
Challenge stereotypical representations
From our televisions to our textbooks, the stories we’re told about power and influence almost always centre on men — and, most often, white men. Women in movies and TV are significantly less likely to be depicted as professionals, and female characters who have jobs are six times more likely than men to be secretaries. What’s more, we’re told that this is how the world has always been. Less than 3 per cent of the words in history textbooks are specifically about women, and only 5 per cent of all images of historical figures in textbooks are women of colour.
All these inputs shape how we see ourselves, each other and the world. One recent study found that by the time children are six years old, they already tend to guess that a story about “a really, really smart person” is about a man. If you associate smartness with men, but you’re not one, you might think certain career paths are less available to you. But studies have also found it’s possible to disrupt these norms. After being shown TV clips featuring women in STEM, young girls asked to draw a scientist are 150 per cent more likely than girls not shown the clips to draw a woman. Women exposed to ads that depict women in non-stereotypical roles are more likely to report that they aspire to leadership positions.
Tell better stories
Companies can help by waking up to the fact that telling better stories about women is smart business. Consider the entertainment industry. One measure of a movie’s treatment of women characters is the Bechdel test, which looks for whether, at any point in the film, two women have a conversation about anything other than a man. It also seems to be linked to profitability. A study released last year found that for every major budget category from 2014 to 2017, movies that passed the Bechdel test made more money, on average, than films that failed it. Moreover, every movie that has exceeded $US1 billion in revenue since 2012 passed the Bechdel test.
Other industries can address this problem in their own ways. Textbook companies can diversify the content and images in their next editions, and philanthropists and venture capitalists can help journalism organisations committed to hiring reporters of diverse backgrounds to report on issues disproportionately impacting women. The stories we encounter on the screen and the page shouldn’t reflect society’s prejudices; they should challenge them.
End sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace
Although sexual harassment, discrimination and violence are nothing new, the survivor-driven #MeToo movement has highlighted the enormous scope of these problems and their tremendous cost. As many as 85 per cent of women experience sexual harassment, and its impact is ruinous. Women are more likely to be sexually harassed if they work in male-dominated fields, which may be one factor driving women toward less-lucrative female-dominated ones. And 80 per cent of women who report being sexually harassed leave their job within two years, which disrupts the continuity that is often critical to professional advancement.
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Strategy 2: Fast-track advancement
Last year, The New York Times published an article that opened with this depressing observation: “In the corridors of American power, it can be as easy to find a man named John as it is to find a woman.” One of the investigation’s most memorable conclusions was that, in 2018, there were more men named James on the Fortune 500 List of CEOs than there were women. Although the percentage of female CEOs went up slightly in 2019, only one of the women on the Fortune list of 500 is a woman of colour. Not 1 per cent. One woman.
It’s no coincidence that America is disproportionately run by men named John and James — it always has been. Seven of the 39 signatories of the Constitution were Johns or Jameses. The system we live and work in was created by and for them. Instead of waiting for the country’s most powerful and influential industries to overcome centuries of history on their own, we must find ways to fast-track women.
To determine which industries to prioritise, my team and I compared sectors on the basis of six factors: size; growth rate; average compensation; gender gap in leadership roles; visibility (the extent to which the sector and its leadership influences public discourse); and reach (the extent to which leaders within the sector materially affect the way other sectors in the economy behave). Our analysis yielded six priority sectors: public office, tech, academia, media, investing and entrepreneurship.
Why start by focusing on just a few sectors instead of trying to fast-track women in all industries simultaneously? We believe that targeting the country’s most powerful and influential sectors will have a ripple effect — ultimately accelerating progress for women who work in other industries (or do not work at all). We need to open new pathways into priority sectors. In the not-so-distant past, industries with large gender gaps and little interest in closing them blamed the “pipeline”. We now understand that pipelines into male-dominated industries have historically produced male candidates because they were designed that way. For example, the traditional pipeline into tech works best for people who discover their interest in computer science early in life. That’s fine for boys who become interested in computing at a young age through their love of video games. It works less well for girls, who typically discover their passion for the subject later. The result: women earn only 19 per cent of computer science degrees.
As we think about how to change the face of key industries, we should be thinking about replacing traditional pipelines with pathways that create new entry points. Instead of assuming that everyone is going to naturally arrive at the same opening of the same pipeline, we should create opportunities for more people from different backgrounds to enter these fields in different ways and at different times in their lives.
‘As long as women are locked out of the tech sector, they will not have equal power and influence’
Let’s go back to tech a moment. This work is personal to me: I studied computer science in college and spent almost a decade working at Microsoft. But what happens in that sector touches all of us. Tech defines the frontiers of health and medicine, transforms the relationship between citizens and government, and enables employers and employees to reimagine the future of work. It is essential in disseminating knowledge, bringing people together and driving innovation. As long as women are locked out of the tech sector, they will not have equal power and influence.
Yet women are not only less likely to enter tech, they are less likely to stay in the field. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, in 2017 women held only 26 per cent of jobs in the computing workforce. Part of the problem is the pipeline. But women who make it into the industry tend to leave at more than twice the rate that men do. The Kapor Center, an organisation dedicated to diversity in tech, commissioned the Tech Leavers study in 2017. It found that workplace culture plays a significant role in driving turnover — especially for women and under-represented minorities. Nearly two-thirds of the 2000 respondents indicated they would have stayed in their jobs had their employers fixed their culture. The study also found that culture problems cost the industry more than $US16 billion each year.
Iris Bohnet, a behavioural economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, has worked with researchers, start-ups and established companies to identify best practices for overcoming bias in hiring, talent management, entrepreneurship and workplace culture. She and her team have compiled 10 evidence-based recommendations for businesses looking to debias their workplaces. One of these recommendations calls for using targets and transparency to close pay gaps. Another suggests allocating work more intentionally so that all employees have the same chance to participate in the high-profile work that will position them for promotion.
Those of us eager to increase women’s power and influence can’t rely on other people’s sense of ethics or self-interest. We need to amplify the pressure they’re feeling. Three constituencies — shareholders, consumers and employees — can translate their influence into targeted pressure.
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Strategy 3: Amplify external pressure
Shareholders
Shareholder activism is one area with a lot of untapped potential. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board recently used its shareholder power by threatening to vote to oust board members of companies in its portfolio with no women on their boards. Within a year, half of the 45 firms in question had responded by appointing at least one woman. Investors’ votes can push companies to enact changes to improve gender equality, such as increasing transparency about pay and promotions.
Consumers
Individuals can use their daily purchasing decisions to reward companies that are part of the solution and punish those that aren’t. In 2017, Uber lost 10 per cent of its market share in less than a year following accusations it had tried to capitalise on a taxi-driver strike and a #deleteuber campaign. If consumers start or stop buying on the basis of a company’s record on supporting women’s power and influence, corporate behaviour will change.
Employees
Finally, employees can work together to change their employers’ behaviour. Consider the recent employee walkout at Google, which was spurred by revelations that top executives accused of sexual harassment had been rewarded with generous severance packages. Some 20,000 employees in 50 cities participated in the walkouts, forcing the company to re-evaluate how it handles sexual harassment claims.
Former Microsoft general manager Melinda Gates is co-founder, with husband Bill Gates, of the world’s largest private charitable organisation.
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