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<\/p>\nSometimes, though I hate driving, my mind turns to randomly interesting areas.\u00a0 Today, it was gender balance \u2013 and I was reflecting on how much of the development work that I\u2019ve done with senior teams puts me in a room full of men.\u00a0 When my classes are full of 50 something senior leaders, it will not be unusual for the group to be entirely male.\u00a0 This empirical observation is borne out by studies across many countries where the ratio of men to women at the top is between 5:1 and 10:1 (roughly, and excluding countries where the ratio is infinite because the number of women at the top approaches zero.<\/p>\n
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I know that in business and the professions, the numbers who enter are equal, but by the time the top is reached (say the boardroom), we have very skewed outcomes.<\/p>\n
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Most men at the top are not consciously, or aggressively predisposed to preferentially hiring or promoting men.\u00a0 We can grant that, if asked, they would say they hire on merit.\u00a0 And, being kind, let\u2019s credit men with sincere, good intentions.<\/p>\n
However, we know that bias creeps in even when people are very well intentioned.\u00a0 The\u00a0well documented and proven \u201csimilar to me\u201d bias, and the fact that men often associate \u201cgood leadership\u201d with male-looking traits tilt the odds in our favor.\u00a0 So a little creeps in against their best intentions.\u00a0\u00a0(“Little” is a hypothesis – let us see where it takes us.)<\/p>\n
Now let\u2019s run some numbers.\u00a0 If \u201cpromoters\u201d and \u201chirers\u201d are just a tiny bit biased, say 55% likely to promote a male candidate and 45% to promote a woman, then after 3 promotion cycles \u2013 the ratio becomes about 2:1 male to female.\u00a0 The mathematical nature of exponents produces a big discrepancy after a short while.\u00a0 (Let us further say that a promotion cycle is five years, although it is mostly much faster than that.)<\/p>\n
After six cycles, a thirty year career, the ratio is more than 3:1 starting with just a slender bias toward promoting men. \u00a0That is just math.<\/p>\n
Now let\u2019s take a more extreme case \u2013 if a man is twice as likely to promote a man, then after only 3 promotion cycles then ratio is 8:1. \u00a0After just fifteen years, we see the kind of distributions that we see at the top – my room full of white guys.<\/p>\n
Of course, men vary: some may even lean ever so slightly (in theory) \u00a0toward promoting women, some may achieve balance, but we can probably also agree that the \u2018twice as likely to promote a man\u2019 guy is not a rare bird.\u00a0 We can probably also find species who only promote men for dark psychological reasons.<\/p>\n
To add slightly to this argument, as we climb the ladder, the ratio of people doing the promoting becomes dominantly male.\u00a0 Further, if a woman misses a year of work (or two) because of an entirely reasonable decision to spend a year with a baby, mathematically she is more likely to miss a round of promotion.\u00a0 By itself, mothers taking time with children mathematically produces differential rates of promotion.<\/p>\n
How do we know the extent of these systematic biases?\u00a0 There is probably much research with which I\u2019m unfamiliar, but a proxy we might use is the ratio of salaries.\u00a0 Women earn between 60-90% of what men do for similar positions.\u00a0 Hiring bias probably approximates this salary bias.<\/p>\n
So who cares?\u00a0 Apart from, erm, women? (Although recent pronouncements from prominent Republican women politicians decry attempts to address the pay gaps as \u2013 go figure \u2013 condescending.\u00a0 It seems ignorance can freely cross gender lines.)<\/p>\n
There are two obvious concerns.\u00a0 First is loss of talent.\u00a0 If talent is equally distributed at the outset of careers, there is a systematic loss at each promotion level as a less talented man is promoted at the expense of a more talented woman.\u00a0 The same exponential effect applies as earlier \u2013 after six cycles, boardrooms are systematically less competent as a result.<\/p>\n
Then there is silly old fairness.\u00a0 A free-market ideologue would leave this alone, thinking that the market would address such imbalances over time (even if they agreed it was unfair in the first place.)\u00a0 However, as with wealth distributions across ethnicities, promotion and pay distributions do not start with a level playing field.\u00a0 The distribution of wealth and power in business starts skewed toward men, and (without corrective measures), the bias reinforces itself over each successive generation (promotion cycle).\u00a0 We have further shown that even if the population begins balanced, tiny biases produce large discrepancies over time.<\/p>\n
Enter governments and the law. If the market produces a sub-optimal talent pool at the top, and is systematically unfair, we can either shrug our ideological shoulders \u2013 que sera, sera \u2013 or we can intervene.\u00a0\u00a0 From my point of view, intervention is clear-cut.<\/p>\n
21st century men mean well, yet well documented psychological predispositions bias us.\u00a0 Similarly, the kind of racism that believes people of color belong (by some perverse Calvinism or Social Darwinism) in deprived circumstances are few.\u00a0 We mean well, but forces beyond our control defy our intentions to create fair workplaces and societies.<\/p>\n
Those forces, which are mathematical and psychological facts, must be balanced by corrective forces: legislation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes, though I hate driving, my mind turns to randomly interesting areas.\u00a0 Today, it was gender balance \u2013 and I was reflecting on how much of the development work that I\u2019ve done with senior teams puts me in a room full of men.\u00a0 When my classes are full of 50 something senior leaders, it will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[73,74,72],"yoast_head":"\n