The Gender Agenda

Feeling proud

Hello again.  I’ve been thinking about the emotion of “pride” over the last few days.  It’s one (the original and most serious, apparently) of the seven deadly sins, it’s also said to “go before a fall”. Wikipedia tells me that “it is identified as a desire to be more important or attractive than others” – but today, I humbly beg leave to disagree, because I am feeling a huge amount of pride in PwC.

At the time of writing, the “Power of Ten” fundraising effort has raised over $3.3 million to build schools, train teachers, and provide educational supplies for 20,000 Darfur refugee children. So I feel very proud that I work for an organisation which can devise and implement such an amazing accomplishment in just ten short days of fundraising.  Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this incredible campaign. I’ll report back in my next blog entry on the final amount raised.

And an interesting thing happened to me one day last week.  I was waiting to cross the street at the end of the day, carrying my cotton PwC “What Would You Like to Change?” shopping bag.  While I waited for the traffic lights, an elderly lady tapped me on the arm and asked me for directions to the railway station.  I explained where it was and, as it was on my way, walked part of the route with her.  While we walked, she asked me if I worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and gestured towards my bag.  I replied that yes, I did. She responded:

“I thought that you must work for them because you were carrying their bag, and that’s why I decided to ask you for directions.  PwC were the auditors of my late husband’s engineering company and they were always such an honourable firm – so I knew that one of their employees would be able to help me get to the station.”

This encounter left me feeling even more pride in the firm.  And is also proof that interesting things can happen to you when you carry a PwC shopping bag!  Don’t forget to email me with your ideas about change and sustainability if you’d like to be in with a chance to win a PwC bag of your own.

I wrote last month about the forthcoming collaboration between the Tanzanian organisation SELFINA and the PwC Ulysses programme, and thinking about the great work that our Ulysses participants do in so many countries was what prompted me to start considering the notion of pride.  I finally caught up with Dyan Decker just before she left for Tanzania, and here’s what she has to say about her forthcoming trip.  Dyan, who joined PwC in 2002, is based in our Los Angeles office, and I’ll be chatting with her again later this year once she’s returned from Tanzania.

“I was admitted into the partnership in 2006 and sit in the Los Angeles Advisory practice, where I focus on the Forensic Technology practice which provides our clients with technology-enabled solutions for their dispute and investigative needs. I’ve also recently been asked to coordinate the global activities of the Forensic Technology practice.  In the Los Angeles office, I am the Advisory Diversity leader, driving diversity-related initiatives in the practice. And in the community, I serve on the board of Public Counsel, a large non-profit organisation which provides legal services to the under-privileged in the Los Angeles area.

I was attracted to the Ulysses programme for two primary reasons: the opportunity to give back to the larger global community and the opportunity to further develop my leadership abilities in such a unique environment.  I will be spending two months immersed in the Tanzanian lifestyle and helping to contribute to the growth of SELFINA, a micro-credit organization that leases equipment to entrepreneurial women, as a team with two other PwC partners from Mexico City and Paris.  SELFINA has an aggressive goal of growing from serving 9,000 customers today to serving 100,000 in five years.  We will be working with them to build a plan to enable such growth and to support SELFINA in that transformation.  My skills in the technology and business advisory areas should complement well with the assurance and transactions experience of my fellow teammates in the development of SELFINA’s strategic plan.

With the programme just about to begin, I have many hopes and expectations.  I imagine I will be challenged every day in dealing with multiple facets of diversity and with achieving our ambitious goal in the short time we have.   Each person with whom I will be interacting (between our Ulysses team, the SELFINA management team and SELFINA's customers) brings a different and unique perspective to our efforts.  I expect to enhance my cultural dexterity and communication skills in this environment.  I also hope to bring back a much greater understanding of the every day challenges of the Tanzanian people and how we can contribute to enriching their lives. 

Having time to reflect on and visualize the type of leader I want to become in the slower-paced environment is quite important to me as well.”

Thank you Dyan. Watch this space for her update at the end of the project.

And while we’re waiting – consider what has made you feel proud, lately?

Cleo

“There’s a special place in hell …”

“… for women who don’t help other women”, said Julia Cleverdon at last week’s First Women Awards,  quoting former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and being applauded loudly for doing so.  In a room full of women and oh yes, some men too, including actor Bill Nighy, we saw Julia collect her award for her contribution to the Public Sector through her work with Business in the Community. 

PwC’s own Moira Elms was pipped at the post in the Business Services category, a disappointment which was matched by nobody at the PwC table winning the lucky raffle ticket which gave a £4,000 spending spree at Selfridges.  Ah well.  At least at this event, the ladies’ toilets were open and available. PwC UK’s Sarah Churchman had a wonderful moment in the spotlight when she joined Bill Nighy on stage to present the PwC sponsored Lifetime Achievement Award to fashion designer Nicole Farhi.  And I was introduced to the inimitable Baroness Betty Boothroyd, the first female Speaker in the British House of Commons, who informed us that she was “no good at public speaking” but threw in a few mentions of “Order, ORDER!” for old times’ sake, as she used to shout at unruly MPs in Parliament.

I’ve recently joined the Advisory Board of International Women of Excellence and I attended my first board meeting a few weeks ago.  What appealed to me about IWE was both the blend of organisations who participate in their events (IBM, Volvo, BAE Systems, ING, to name but a few), the diversity of the activities (workshops, dinners, meetings, all with great speakers), and also the fact that they hold their events in both mainland Europe and the UK. Last week saw Volvo hosting a workshop in Sweden, there have previously been events in Germany and Switzerland and we’ll be in London, Glasgow and Amsterdam later this year.  Send me an email with “IWE” in the subject line if you’d like to be added to their mailing list, and receive a copy of the newsletter (featuring articles by writers such as Alison Maitland and details of future activities.  Connecting back to the FW Awards, it was good to see IWE members recognised; IBM won the Corporate Award, and Rosalind Murray of BAE Systems Submarine Solutions won the Manufacturing category.

Last week’s social whirl continued with a fascinating PwCWomen UK event on sustainability.  I’m a member of the UK firm’s PwCWomen steering group and I try to go to all of the quarterly events if I can, travel schedule permitting.  Sustainability is also one of the themes of this year’s Women’s Forum in France, and so I was particularly interested to hear more about this topic, given that Gender Advisory Council sponsor Sam DiPiazza is the 2008/09 Chair of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the UK firm, together with many other PwC territories, is developing a lot of expertise in this area. 

Andrew Smith, who co-leads the UK firm’s sustainability practice, started with the very telling words that: “… if you look into the eyes of a climate scientist, there’s a hint of panic …” and then went on to share the details of what both PwC UK is doing as a firm to be more environmentally aware and also how the sustainability practice works with clients.  I’ll be able to provide an update very soon as to how PwC’s knowledge of sustainability is connected to the Women’s Forum in France but, until then, here’s a photo showing both sides of the cotton bags which we were given as gifts at the PwCWomen event (click image to enlarge):

 

I really love this bag and have been using it constantly over the last week.  It’s small,  light and folds up into a small bundle in the bottom of my handbag, meaning that I can always have it to hand and can thus avoid taking a plastic carrier bag (which can, apparently, take anything between twenty and a thousand YEARS to decompose) when I’m out shopping.

I have THREE of these bags to give away and will send them to the senders of the best emails which contain your ideas of what you would like to change to improve your work place environment, or with stories of what you are currently doing to improve the sustainability of our planet.  I look forward to receiving your emails…

Finally, PricewaterhouseCoopers is ten years old next month – that’s when we celebrate the merging in 1998 of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand.  To mark this event, we are running a charity campaign, in conjunction with the United Nations Refugee Agency, to build schools, train teachers, and provide educational supplies for more than 20,000 Darfur refugee children.  This project is called the PwC Power of 10 - please visit the website to learn more about this vital project and, if you can, to make a donation.  The campaign runs until June 27th 2008.

Thank you.

Until next time,

Cleo

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodnight...

… Hillary Clinton.  It was great having you in the running as the first female candidate for American President.  From across the Atlantic, and on my occasional visits to the US, I watched, listened and wondered whether America was really ready for a female leader.  When I read this article in the April 21st edition of “New York” magazine, in which the writer declared that: “… Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy, and the sexism in America, long lying dormant, like some feral, tranquilized animal, yawned and revealed itself …”,  I wondered even more.  Was a country where the opinion formers and influencers could reference the anti-Hillary Facebook group set up called “Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich” and where rally attendees heckling and shouting “Iron my shirts!” was referred to as being “seemingly sexist”, (my italics) ever going to be open to electing a woman as the POTUS (the President Of The United States of America, as they always used to say in “The West Wing”)?   

Sadly, it seems not.  Amazing to realise that Hillary is the first female candidate to participate at this level of US election campaign since Geraldine Ferrarro ran as a Democratic Vice President nominee in 1984.

1984! 

We have young women in PwC, our future Partners, who weren’t even born in 1984.  We can only hope that organisations such as The White House Project and the changing weight of public opinion and demographic shifts means that we don’t have to wait another 24 years for the next Geraldine or Hillary,  from any US party.

Read Dr Lois Frankel’s open letter to Hillary on The Thin Pink Line site – it’s a great list of leadership lessons that we can take from this campaign, whatever the eventual outcome.

However, 8,000 miles away in South Africa, that country is lucky enough to have Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka as the Deputy President.  One of my earliest blog entries, back in October 2007, referenced the amazing speech that she made that week at the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France.  So imagine if you will how delighted I am to be able to confirm that she will be speaking at our Working Mother - South African Advancement of Women Global Town Hall event in two short months’ time.  What an honour to have the highest ranking woman in the history of South Africa joining us.

Back in the UK, a record number of women – 29% of this year’s intake – joined the PwC Partnership. This far exceeds the number admitted in any one year previously, so huge congratulations are offered to:

Stella Amiss; Katherine Bullock; Lesley Hill; Victoria Horrocks; Trusha Kachhela; Teresa  Owusu-Adjei; Elizabeth Stone; Honor Mallon; Jo Pisani; Madeleine Thomson; Carolyn Clarke; Sandra Dowling; Olivia Gillan; Sarah Isted; Vicky Kerrigan; Emma Schofield, and Catrin Thomas.

I also learned this week that PwC in the Philippines, led by a woman, has nineteen female Partners.

Excellent.

And seven male Partners.

Interesting!

I may need to don a deer-stalker hat and do some investigating into this statistical anomaly … watch this space.

Until next time –

Cleo

A week of updates – and the chance to be on British TV!

Hello again

Another interesting week in Gender Advisory Council land.  Over the last few days, I’ve been very involved in planning the PwC contribution to both the Working Mother conference in South Africa on 8th August and for the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France, this October, at which we will again be a sponsor.

As part of our sponsorship, we always provide a piece of research or some other input to the event.  Last year, a team from PwC’s global leadership development programme, Genesis Park including blog contributor Sandra Deltell Diaz researched and authored a very interesting report on “Women’s Economic Participation: Barriers, Enablers, Responses”, which we presented during one of the Forum’s workshops.  This year, we are considering a number of options to link in with the Forum’s theme of “Progress to Share, Future to dare” and I’ll write some more about that project once we agree the scope of it with the Forum team.  There are currently two really exciting and innovative ideas on the table – watch this space.  I had coffee yesterday with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, co-author of “Why Women Mean Business” and she told me that she will again be in Deauville, running a series of what she has dubbed “The Men’s Corner” – break-out areas for the Forum’s male participants to discuss this issue.  And WWMB is due to be published in Korean later this year!

Anne Loveridge of PwC Australia’s web profile has now gone live.  I spoke to Anne last week to brief her on the work of the GAC and she told me that the Australian firm is sponsoring one of the highly prestigious 2008 Telstra Businesswoman of the Year awards – that of Young Businesswoman of the Year.  She and a couple of colleagues from the Australian team also updated me about their two hugely successful leadership summits for women, which took place in Sydney and Melbourne earlier this month.  A total of 175 female Partners and Directors came together to engage, network and empower and were treated to after dinner speeches from leading businesswomen Margaret Jackson and Meredith Hellicar.

Still on the subject of updates … my blog-master Matt and I have added some updates to the Gender Agenda this week, too.  Under “Recommended Reading” you’ll find the details of some new book titles and, to the right, under “Other Links”, you will see a few new websites which have interesting ideas and materials on the topic of women in business.  I’m particularly keen on “The Thin Pink line”, not only because it’s the website of Lois P Frankel, author of “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” but also because it provides free daily coaching tips.  Check it out – and many thanks to Nicki of www.theglasshammer.com for sharing the details with me.

Finally, if you’re in the UK, a working mother and would like to be on TV, you may wish to consider this opportunity from the BBC:

“BBC Television is making a major three-part series called WOMEN about contemporary women's lives. The series will look at the impact of feminism on contemporary family life.

The first episode will provide the background and will map the ideology of women's liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, and evoke the urgency and passion of the early days of the movement.

The second and third episodes will be an audit of the impact of feminism on contemporary family life, and document the professional and domestic lives of women in Britain today. They will aim to assess how the reality of women’s lives compares with the hopes and predictions of forty years ago, and what the consequences of feminism have been for women, as well as for men.

Although at the moment the series is in the early stages of research, Assistant Producer Becky Lomax is looking for full-time working mothers to contribute to the series.

Within her research Becky is aiming to discover:

• How do you juggle the competing demands of work and home?
• How big a burden of responsibility do you shoulder at work and at home?
• Who does the childcare in your house?
• How involved is your husband or partner with the children?
• Are there conflicts or frustrations in your household around who takes domestic responsibility?

If you would be interested in participating in the series or to find out more information please contact Becky Lomax by email at becky.lomax@bbc.co.uk"

Until next time – by when I hope to have some news about a couple of these events and who will be speaking …

Cleo

Aussie rules

Hello again

I had a very relaxing few days off work last week, and caught up with my reading (see below for a book recommendation!), also enjoying some spring sunshine in the English countryside.

While I was away, my wonderful on-line colleagues updated the main www.pwc.com/women website with the details of the My Mentor – Challenging Women to Step Up programme, which was launched as a pilot in Australia last year, having been created by business woman and Gender Agenda blog contributor Maureen Frank.  This week, the programme was officially launched and rolled out to all of PwC Australia’s senior women at two leadership conferences in Sydney and Melbourne.  I’m due to have a phone call catch-up with the Australian team next week, so I’m really looking forward to hearing about the leadership summits.  I’ve also received a DVD of the key messages contained within the programme, so I’ll be watching that soon.  It’s very timely, as this is the point in the PwC year when we sit down and think about our objectives and ambitions for the coming months; lessons on the DVD such as Building My Career Plan and My Strategy and Taking Calculated Risks couldn’t come at a more useful time for me.

Also new on the website this week is some updated information about our continuing involvement with the International Finance Corporation’s Gender program, a division of the World Bank with whom we are partnering via the PwC Ulysses programme on a project in Tanzania this summer.  Three PwC Partners, from Mexico, France and the USA will be spending eight weeks in Tanzania, assisting micro-credit organisation SELFINA to improve their operational model to better serve women’s entrepreneurial efforts.  I’ll be contacting the team soon to ask for a blog contribution! 

Continuing the previously mentioned Blue Car analogy, as in – you buy a particular model of a blue car and then, wherever you look, that very car is everywhere – I was working on the text for the IFC programme just before I went away and thinking to myself “hmm – I must do some research on Tanzania.” And then, two days later, I opened up the Sunday newspaper and found this article from the Guardian which features an interview with Jamie Drummond, executive director of “Debt Aids Trade Africa” and a profile of the work they’re currently undertaking in … Tanzania.

Here’s a compelling figure (one of many) from the article: since 2000, when Tanzania was granted $3bn of debt relief, three million MORE children have enrolled in primary schools – out of a total of 20m more children across the African continent as a whole.  Check out the article via the link above.

Returning to the Australian update, this week the Gender Advisory Council welcomed Partner Anne Loveridge as our newest member. Anne will be representing PwC Australia on the Council now that Sue Bannatyne has commenced her role as Genesis Park site leader in Washington DC.  We’ll be putting up Anne’s profile on the website shortly, but ahead of that, here’s what she has to say about the challenge of achieving diversity in the firm:

“In my experience, whenever we have a group of women together, we have a lot of commonality in our experiences of being a minority. We have many amazing women in the firm, who have responded to the challenge of “getting noticed” or “proving ourselves” or “getting what we want”.   However, the statistics speak loudly.  Whilst we recruit 50% female talent (and have for a long time) we still only have 13% female partners and time alone will not fix this, nor will women alone fix this. Our challenge is to team with the men in PwC, to help more of us see and understand where we may exhibit subconscious bias that works against minority groups, particularly women.   Understanding this will not just help gender diversity, but also ethnic diversity.”

Finally, a book recommendation.  I must come clean and say that it doesn’t really address the Gender Agenda per se, other than that it is about the careers and lives of three women and is authored by a woman.  The title is “Girls like Us” by Sheila Wheeler and it’s about three women who came to prominence as singer songwriters in the 1970s: Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon. The subtitle is also very telling: “the journey of a generation.” I’m slightly too young to have been around and buying records (remember those? Bits of plastic?  Round and black?) back in the early 70s, and yet somehow I do have quite a lot of music by these three women on my MP3 player.  The concept of the female singer-songwriter is so well established now that I imagine that anyone could name two or three in almost any country (Tori Amos, Alanis Morrissette, KT Tunstall, Corinne Bailey Rae, Daisy Hicks, Suzanne Vega …) so it was interesting to spend the two days during which the reading of this 525 page book completely consumed me reading about a time when women were, in the words of one reviewer,  “decorative armpieces, silent helpers, uncomplaining victims".  If you’re like me and wonder about the story behind the songs, this book is wonderfully informative and provided me with all sorts of nuggets about the inspiration behind the lyrics, as well as details about relationships and the recording of the tracks.  For instance, I picked up on the fact that Mick Jagger, one of Carly Simon’s paramours, provided uncredited backing vocals on one of her most famous tracks, “You’re So Vain.”  Have a listen and see if you can pick up that distinctive accent!

So – a really wonderful book,  for anyone who was either of the Baby Boomer generation, a fan of the era’s music or who wonders, as did I, how much the world has really changed for female performers over the last 40 years.

Until next time.

Cleo