The Gender Agenda

Trailer: “Closing the Gender Gap: Challenges, Opportunities and the Future”

As promised …. here’s the trailer to the new PwC film, "Closing the Gender Gap" – just click on the link on the right, make sure you have the sound enabled on your PC - and enjoy.

It’s a short (two minute) taster of the main film but will, I hope, provide a sense of the main themes and it also highlights a few of the participants.

The interviewees are, of course, all captioned on the main film, but on the trailer, in order of appearance and voice, you’ll see and hear:

Our global CEO (and the founder and executive sponsor of the GAC) – Sam DiPiazza; 

Dr Kedibone Letlaka-Rennert of the International Monetary Fund: I met Kedi in Johannesburg and we filmed her at the Working Mother event in August;

Dr Lynda Gratton of London Business School: filmed in September, here in London;

Haifa Fahoum Al Kayalani, Chair of the Arab International Women’s Forum: we were connected to Haifa by Elham Hassan, one of our role models, who is the Country Senior Partner of PwC in Bahrain.

You can only hear the voice of R (Gopal) Gopalakrishnan in the trailer, talking about how “a woman at the top acts as a lodestone”, but he’s in the main film in a number of places.  He’s an Executive Director of the huge, Indian-based conglomerate Tata and we caught up with him earlier this month, on a Sunday afternoon at his hotel in London whilst he was in transit.  Again, our GAC connections brought us to Gopal, by way of GAC member Bharti Gupta Ramola who approached him and asked him to talk to us about Tata’s many initiatives for women.

Alison Maitland – co-author (with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox) of the now best-selling book “Why Women Mean Business”, as previously mentioned on many occasions here on the Gender Agenda.

Maureen Frank of Emberin Consulting – Maureen is a very good friend to PwC in many offices and countries - and in the film she talks about the issues facing women in business in both Australia and India.  As she says on the trailer: “Why wouldn’t you [change?]”.  We also filmed Maureen in South Africa, in PwC’s offices in Johannesburg.

Kevin Daly is Goldman Sach’s European economist, and we met when he was on the panel for our London book launch for “Why Women Mean Business” in January.  He was the very first person who we filmed for this project, and eagle eyed watchers will see that we helpfully shot him with a backdrop of the London Eye to assist with that global look and feel...

Later this week, I’ll share a link to the main film, and you’ll also be able to download a copy of the companion guide, which tells you a little more about the film, why we made it and who’s in it.

Until then
Cleo 

Learning survival skills in Paris

Hello – back in the blogging saddle today, after an extremely busy and hectic schedule last week.  Monday 24th March saw me boarding the Eurostar and travelling to Paris in order to participate in the pilot English language version of a training event entitled “The Women’s Survival Course”.  This was originally designed and run by PwC France, with the support of GAC member Agnès Hussherr and earlier this year my colleague Dale Meikle kindly invited me to participate in the first English version. You’ll be learning more about Dale in a future blog entry, by the way ….

Eight of us, from various European PwC territories, arrived to be the English language guinea pigs and we spent a fascinating day learning how to change our behaviour and reactions in order to “Change the Company”.  The tutor, Thierry Roland, explained that this was part of a Trojan horse approach to creating an evolution (or perhaps a revolution?) from within.  Much of the day was spent learning about and from each other – how did we respond under certain circumstances?  What cultural norms impacted our behaviours?  What are the “key illusions” that we all hold about ourselves, and how can we flex these?  Thierry provided us with 15 golden rules, some of which I had heard before and some of which were new to me.  The concept of “not always being 100% available” created the most debate - I wonder how many of us are trying to apply that principle this week?

Dale is currently organising a second pilot event for the end of April, after which the course will be rolled out across Europe.  I hope that the other participants found it to be as useful and thought provoking as I did.

One of the other women on the course was Wanda Eriksen, an Assurance Partner who also represents Switzerland at the Eurofirms’ Women in PwC events and who has had a fascinating life to date. Having joined the New York office from university, she then moved to Switzerland in her mid 20s and became a Partner a few years later.  I took the opportunity to interview her whilst we were both in Paris and her profile will soon appear on the Role Models section on the main site.

I’ve previously referenced that one of the major GAC projects on which we have been focussing over the last few months has been a study of our key female leaders around the world – who are they, what are their stories, what can we learn from them, what messages can we take away about the “push and pull” aspects which enable women to succeed?  Last summer, we interviewed 79 senior women in seven PwC territories – and on Thursday, the report of our findings was made available for download from PwC's main website. As both the primary author of the report and the person who undertook nearly half of the interviews, I feel as if I’ve been living with the interview scripts and the report for quite a while now... so it’s great to have it finally concluded and available to share.  Let me know what you think.

Finally, I posted last month that I would welcome blog entries from readers who had a story to tell about their views on life in PwC.  I’ve had some amazing entries and I found it too hard to just pick one – so I’ve actually chosen three articles and will be posting those over the coming weeks.  Congratulations to Paula Holt from PwC UK, Dale Meikle, based in Brussels with the Eurofirms, and Blanka Dubrokova from the Czech Republic, all of whom will be published here and receive a copy of “Why Women Mean Business” - www.whywomenmeanbusiness.com - as a thank you.

And mentioning WWMB – I’m off to Toronto later this week as the book is launched in Canada on Thursday.  My next postings will come from either Canada or New York, as I’ll be attending the USA book launch, going to the Catalyst Awards and meeting up with contacts from The Glass Hammer and Working Mother.  I also hope to interview a few more great PwC women for the Role Models section, as that area of the site consistently receives strong feedback and I really enjoying talking to inspirational women such as Wanda and sharing their stories.

Until next time,

Cleo

Why is it wrong to aspire towards improvement?

The continuing debate around the use of targets continued this week, at an internal PwC event hosted by PwC UK’s Female Partners and Directors Network.  The external speaker was Jacey Graham, co-author of “”A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom.”

Jacey is also a partner in Brook Graham, a strategic diversity consultancy who are currently working with the UK firm on a reverse mentoring project, whereby middle management staff mentor their more senior colleagues.  At the event,  she described the research underpinning the book and referenced the recently launched female FTSE report published by the Cranfield School of Management, which indicates some small improvements in the number of women holding directorships in the UK’s top companies.  However, whilst this is undoubtedly good news, it remains clear that the glass ceiling is a long way from being cracked, and she included the UK, in geographical terms, in the middle band of countries that are making only limited progress on this front.

I’m always keen to learn more about what’s happening elsewhere in the world, so later on I flipped to page 197 of the book and saw that research from the European Professional Women’s Network divides Western Europe into three groups, dubbed thus:

Trailblazers: companies have 14-22% female directors in Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Middle of the Roaders:  6-10% female directors in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and France.

Slow going:  2-4% female directors in Denmark, Spain, Belgium and Italy.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century,  these numbers seem more than a little depressing – particularly given that there is clear cut evidence that the reason that Nordic countries do “well” (in relative terms) is due to their stating and monitoring of targets.

Jacey concluded her presentation by asking – “why is it wrong to aspire towards improvement?” – and whilst it is never explicitly stated that it IS wrong, it’s hard to conclude otherwise when so many organisations shy away from having targets around this issue.

I’ve just finished writing a piece on PwC Sweden’s use of targets and that will be up on the website soon – keep checking the home page at www.pwc.com/women for a new feature called “Spotlight on Sweden” for details. 

Cleo

The Swedish word for “women” is “kvinnor”

Last week, I hit the road again and spent a couple of days with my colleagues in PwC Sweden, at our office in Stockholm.  The purpose of my visit was to research and write up a feature on PwC women in Sweden, which will be featuring on the main part of the website shortly.

Although many of our territories are very creative in terms of how they both recognise and then tackle the gender issue in general, and the retention and promotion situations in particular, I was particularly keen to find out more about the Swedish model once I discovered that PwC Sweden actually has targets for female participation at all levels: graduate recruitment, retention and promotion at every grade.

As mentioned in an earlier posting, targets seem to be something of a hot potato at the moment, with some organisations viewing them as a mandatory way to both invoke and measure progress (“what gets measured gets done”) and others seeing the word as completely interchangeable with the word “quota”, which is in turn generally agreed to be A Bad Word and no way at all to increase the proportion of women in this or any other organisation.  So, the discovery that PwC Sweden has been an active participant in the EU sponsored Women To the Top programme since 2004 and has subsequently established their own targets, saw me flying to Stockholm on a very cold Sunday morning and preparing to spend 48 hours being offered reindeer, herring and rye bread. For breakfast.

My sense was that Sweden as a country is very advanced around working women, workplace flexibility, the provision of nurseries and so on – would this prove to be true?  Has Sweden developed a model which would work elsewhere?  What lessons can we learn and how can we deploy them elsewhere?

On Monday morning, I walked to the office and saw an image of a baby girl, wearing an obviously false moustache, on a billboard on my way in – go to http://www.folksam.se/spelarroll/ and scroll down to see the picture in question.

Further enquiry led me to the website of the company in question, which was of course in Swedish but which was kindly translated for me by my helpful colleague Lisa.  The gist of the message was focussed on a survey by an insurance company which had discovered that, in order to be a leader in a top Swedish listed company, it was helpful (in statistical terms) to be a man named Goran (as in Sven-Goran Eriksson, football fans). They then turned these findings into a series of advertisements, all illustrated by images of baby girls disguised as the opposite gender, and captioned with wording around the theme of: “Is her name Ulrika?  If you want her to succeed as an adult, you’d do better to rename her Bjorn or Anders.”

Quite aside from this being visually very eye catching, it was also thought provoking to me on two levels:  one, I read from it that the current Swedish status quo is by no means as positive in terms of numbers as it may appear to be at first sight; and secondly, that this is both recognised within Sweden and challenged by way of these advertisements, which don’t resemble any campaigns that I’ve seen elsewhere.

My two days with my colleagues were both enjoyable and enlightening.  I learned a lot about the annual flexible hours contract available to all staff, the recently launched mentoring scheme, our participation in Women To the Top and the establishment of the “Women on the Board” external networking group.  I interviewed six female partners, including the recently appointed Assurance leader, Catarina Ericsson.   

I’ll be writing about these initiatives on the Women at PwC website later this month, including role model profiles with four of the female partners and details of the PwC programmes. I flew home (and yes, I’d eaten both reindeer AND herring) feeling very aware that a combination of employer-led interventions can make a difference to the number of women in the workplace

And finally … the list of books I referenced in my previous posting is now available on the link to the right – Recommended reading.  Let me know what you think, particularly if you can recommend additional titles.

Cleo

Women matter

When I was in Deauville, I referenced attending a really interesting session at which McKinsey launched their “Women Matter” research. If anyone is interested in reading the (English language) copy of the full report, then here’s a link to it via the Women’s Forum site:

http://www.womens-forum.com/ifiles/Women_Matter_McKinsey_EN.pdf

It’s an interesting read (with a PwC quote on page 21) and it’s great to have such solid, unarguable diagnostic data available with which to argue the case for change and diversity.