The Elephant in the Boardroom
I recently attended a local event where Alexia Hilbertidou, an eloquent and passionate young woman, spoke about her purpose — to encourage young women into STEM and transform them into future leaders. Which is a wonderful objective and given the way young women typically outperform young men academically it seems a little weird that we don’t in fact have many women leaders across all sectors of our egalitarian country. But here’s the rub — according to Alexia only 4% of CEO’s in our country are women and actually there are twice that percentage of CEO’s whose first name is John. So clearly women need some serious help in learning how to be leaders?
In a much less eloquent way I shared a book that I’ve been reading, Why do so many incompetent men become leaders? (and how to fix it) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review Press (here giving a TEDx talk on the same topic). The issue is not that women are bad leaders, the issue is that we’re just not very good at picking good leaders. We choose leaders based on their gender, their height, their confidence and charisma, when instead we really need leaders with competence and integrity.
We have useful examples of both in New Zealand’s recent political history. John Key was the epitome of a confident and charismatic leader. Known as the smiling assassin in a previous role at Merrill Lynch, he charmed his way into government and during his tenure, for which he was subsequently rewarded with a knighthood, he oversaw a failed flag referendum costing NZD26,000,000 at a time of increasing levels of poverty, shrugged off the Panama Papers implicating New Zealand as a tax haven for the very wealthy, while ignoring underfunding of healthcare and denying New Zealand had a housing crisis. He happily participated in an offensive radio station stunt and seemed nonplussed that a young woman didn’t want her ponytail pulled.
During that visit, she said Key asked her manager: “she really doesn’t like me pulling her ponytail?” to which the manager said “well…no”.
In contrast the head of our current government, Jacinda Ardern, immediately set a different expectation for the new government. Then in the face of the Christchurch atrocity drew us together with genuine compassion, shared grief, and inclusion. Ms Ardern was recently ranked the most trusted politician in Australia, is overseeing a “Well-Being Budget”, and brought world leaders together to tackle extremist online violence.
We cannot confront these issues alone, none of us can. But the answer to them lies in a simple concept that is not bound by domestic borders, that isn’t based on ethnicity, power base or even forms of governance.
The answer lies in our humanity.
In an interview in February Dr Jordan Peterson spoke to Magic Talk’s Sean Plunket. Rather than burden you with the entire interview, at the 15 minute mark Mr Plunket baits for discussion the gender quota that the Labour Party has for cabinet posts. To which Dr Peterson responds “to pick your cabinet by genitalia is not an acceptable technical move” and follows with “what that certainly means is the most qualified people were not selected”. Dr Peterson’s oeuvre clearly has resonated with Mr Plunket and his ilk. And to be fair, on this point he is correct; we should not be selecting our cabinet based on gender. What he has failed to identify is that we have been doing just that right from the election of the first representative New Zealand government in 1853. Instituting a quota is simply an attempt to address the symptom and fails to address our selection bias in any meaningful way.
New Zealand’s first elections were in 1853. Most Pākehā (European) men could vote because they rented or owned property, which was a voting requirement, but very few Māori could.
Why is it important anyway? For any business making a hiring decision, choosing the best candidate is fundamental to building a successful and sustainable business. If for the sake of discussion I look at the percentage of women in “Management, professional, and related occupations” in the USA, according to the Boston Globe the ratio in 2017 was 43.8% women to 56.2% men. It should be only a small leap to suppose those men and women provide the talent pool for the C-Suite. So it isn’t unreasonable to expect that 43.8/56.2 ratio should flow into those senior leadership positions. In 2017 just 6.4% of Fortune 500 companies had a woman in the top job. Logically there are two possibilities; either men are overwhelmingly better leaders than women (this is not true in case you were unsure) or 37.4% of those companies would be better off with a female CEO. It’s not about quotas or gender equality, it’s about choosing the best candidate.
What to do? First it’s important to acknowledge the bias and agree that businesses would benefit from any attenuation of it. Acknowledgement alone won’t fix it. Recruitment agencies are now specifically being asked to provide candidates without any gender identification for an initial shortlist, in the same way that it’s no longer acceptable to have a date of birth on a résumé. Obviously both gender and age become apparent at an interview but an interview requires two feet in the door. Instead of quotas, and in the same way that job advertisements aren’t typically allowed to specify a gender, we should legislate to require all job applications conceal gender identity and apply appropriate penalties for both employers and employees who are shown to have broken the rules. Farfetched? We already have penalties for specifying gender in job advertisements. And not when the objective is, for any given job, to employ the best candidate. It’s time the elephant in the boardroom was put out to pasture. Then Ms. Hilbertidou’s goal might have a realistic chance of success.
