Spent a summer flight reading The Loudest Duck, a book that promotes “Moving beyond diversity.” I was looking forward to this, as I’ve been a proponent of bucking the diversity approach for more progressive perspectives for some time.
It starts promisingly, saying that the “old ways of thinking about diversity are just that – old.” It cites a study of US companies that showed that diversity training actually led to a 7.5 % drop in the number of women in management and concludes that “we now need to move beyond diversity.” So where does the author, Laura Liswood, a Senior Advisor to Goldman Sachs, suggest we move to? To an analysis based on the in-power and the out-of-power. That all this is not so much about diversity as it is about trying to make the dominant majority more sensitive to its … dominance.

Marshall McLuhan said that the media is the message. In gender issues, it’s context that rules the roost.

For too long, women have been a footnote to the main theme. Although we can thank the 20th century for moving us from oblivion to footnote, the 21st century needs to understand that gender balance may actually be the key to the main plot. A lever to finding solutions not just to war and peace, but to everything in between.

Women of Green is a podcast and community with a singular purpose. To turn up the volume of the feminine voice on behalf of our planet and future generations.

We will know a critical threshold has been reached when every magazine asks of every news story, “What does this mean for women and girls?”

One year ago, BP’s most senior woman left the company. Vivienne Cox was the head of the company’s renewable energy business. A lifelong proponent and pusher of sustainability issues, she was one of the many women to leave the company after the current CEO Tony Hayward took over from Lord Brown, something 20-first.com reported on at the time. Watching the current debacle and the culture that created it, one wonders had she and the other women stayed, would BP be in its current mess?

Of the top 10 companies in Italy, only four companies (40%) have at least one woman on their Executive Committee. The majority (60%) have none. So among the 90 people at the Executive Committee level of Italy’s top 10 companies, only 5 are women (5,6%). 2 of them are in line / operational roles, 3 of them in a staff, or support, function.

I participated in a panel with the heady title The Future of Capitalism this month at the OECD’s big annual Forum . The entire discussion was set to the frame of The Road to Recovery, the title of this year’s conference. As though simply recovering to the way things were is the ultimate endgame.

The gentlemen on the panel each gamely gave their analysis of where we stand on a historical – and sometimes numerical – continuum. I suppose that is normal, as I’m beginning to understand that men experience history differently than women.

Quite a month! While Europe went through raging economic turmoil, I travelled to India and Brazil where the only thing raging is growth. While Christine Lagarde, France’s Minister of Finance, wrote in the International Herald Tribune’s OpEd page of the need for women to protect us from future economic crises, Costa Rica elected a woman President, Brazil’s Lula appointed a woman to succeed him as head of his party, India voted quotas for 30% female seats in its Parliament, Barack Obama pushed Elena Kagan’s candidacy to gender balance the US Supreme Court and the world celebrated the 50th birthday of the contraceptive pill.

Well, one thing that all the hundred of thousands of passengers blocked in the world’s airports can be glad about is the disappearance of the advertising campaign: “Do you have what it takes to be a tiger?” It was one of those tag lines that made me gag. The global campaign for consulting firm Accenture that decorated many an airport, was so replete with macho heroics that, like most women, I just rolled my eyes in embarrassment at the unconscious alpha male grand-standing. Something I gently warn my son against. Tigers may be animals facing extinction in the annals of corporate ideology.

This month I had the pleasure of spending a morning with a handpicked group of HEC MBA students, talking about careers, choices and life. Looking around the room, at a group made up of 9 nationalities, 50% men and 50% women, it struck me. This isn’t “diversity” — this is the new normal.

The underlying meaning of the current use of the word “diversity” in business labels certain groups as diverse, something different from the norm. The norm being homogeneity.

But that norm is long gone in global business. And continuing to call the resulting, extraordinary, delightful mishmash of peoples “diversity” is misrepresenting a basic 21st century reality.