Loving Sheryl Sandberg. And Wishing She Would Lean In
The blogosphere is alive with the sound of the sisters dissing Sheryl. TIME magazine’s cover invites us “not to hate her” because she is successful. Not to mention the fuss over Marissa Meyer’s reverse flexibility order at Yahoo and the harm she is doing to American mothers. So what’s up? We don’t hate these ladies. We [...]
Where Both Parents Can “Have It All”
I was taken aback when I saw the Vigeland sculpture park in Oslo, one of Norway’s most popular tourist destinations. Then I was shocked by my shock. I realized it was the first time in my life that I had ever seen depictions of fatherhood in art. Here, all around me, were depictions of masculine [...]
Women Don’t Need to “Lean In” More: Powerful Men Need to Reach Out
Seventeen percent of Davos attendees are female this year, and Sheryl Sandberg was one of them. Her explanation for the dearth of women in leadership positions is that they don’t “lean in,” also the title of her upcoming book, due out in March. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking [...]
Can You Push Diversity Without Creating Resentment?
Sometimes the biggest issues aren’t even part of the conversation. I was speaking at The Economist’s Diversity Summit last month in London where most of the talk was about gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and scorecards. A typical syllabus among Heads of Diversity. But a far cry from the diversity issues I hear preoccupying the executive [...]
3 Diversity “Best Practices” That Hurt Women
The issue of gender balance in corporations often seems unnecessarily complicated. A lot of the trouble has been caused by the legacy of a couple of decades of well-meaning but ineffective solutions. These solutions are still too often presented as ‘best practices’. Yet they don’t work, and their repeated application makes many managers incredibly gender [...]
Are Middle Eastern Businessmen Less Sexist Than Europeans?
OK, I must admit, getting invited to the Middle East to work on gender balancing seemed a stretch. Landing in Dubai, I was already steeling myself for a muscular session. I’d just been totally grilled by a Southern European Executive Team the week before. I wasn’t feeling like another assault of skepticism and denial of [...]
Gender in the Multicultural Corporation
When Paul Bulcke was appointed CEO of global food giant Nestle in 2008, he put the issue of women and gender at the top of his Executive Committee’s agenda. He saw gender balance as a lever for accomplishing his broader goals of making Nestle a more flexible, and modern corporation. Until his appointment, Nestle had [...]
From Pyramids to Pomegranates, with Gender as Accelerator
A lot of my clients are working to shift their corporate cultures from top-down, hierarchical pyramids, to flatter more networked and web-enabled pomegranates. Many are introducing internal facebook-like tools to encourage teamwork, collaboration and communication across external borders and internal barriers. As one CEO put it to me recently, he is trying to move from [...]
Will Macho Cultures Gender Balance More Easily?
Will Brazil prove less resistant to shifting gender roles than Anglo-Saxon countries? Paradoxically, I’d suggest that macho cultures and gender balance can actually mix… beautifully. In the 2012 Grant Thornton survey of the gender balance in senior executive roles, Brazil had 27% women and 73% men, compared to the US with 17% women and 83% men. Is Brazilian business already more gender balanced in leadership than the US?
20-first Launches Four New Key Country Research Reports
Looking at our Global Gender Scorecard’s in-depth focus on key Western countries reveals stark differences and remarkable similarities. First the differences. By one measure, the anglo-saxon countries, the UK and US, seem to lead the group on gender balance. Only a small minority of these countries’ TOP 20 companies have NO women at all o [...]
Natural Resources: Balance in Some Unnatural Places…
Natural resources is not a sector that people automatically associate with gender balance. In fact, most people assume that oil, mining and mineral companies would be ‘naturally’ male dominated. And so it is. Half of the 24 companies in our 2012 Gender Balance Scorecard, Focus on Natural Resources survey have not a single woman on [...]
A Tale of Two (Gendered) Cities
I spend an inordinate amount of time on the Eurostar, going back and forth between the two cities that i now call home: Paris and London. Every single time, i am bemused and delighted by the extraordinary contrast between these two cities. As a gender balancing consultant to business, i can’t help but see it all as Masculine London to Feminine Paris, on almost every level.
CONNECT WITH US