Opinion: Gender diversity initiatives: Are they really working?

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox on why it is a mistake for law firm gender diversity initiatives to focus solely on 'fixing the women'.

In September 2009, The Lawyer magazine published an article entitled ‘Allen & Overy teaches female associates to communicate’, which sparked off a torrent of angry debate. Why? Some saw the firm’s approach to its female associates as patronising and encouraging the anchoring of existing stereotypes. As one reader commented: “Far from assisting women, Allen & Overy’s actions further stigmatise women in the profession – highlighting their ‘special needs’; reinforcing a subliminal messages of inadequacy.” Others questioned whether the firm was focusing its efforts on the right segment. “There are some women who need to brush up on their ‘soft’ skills, but there are a lot of men (99 per cent of the profession) who also need to do so (certainly with their female clients and female staff),” another reader remarked. “Since there are more male partners than female partners, if the male partners lead the trend, then it might become a pleasurable experience dealing with lawyers as a whole.”
Launching gender initiatives is, today, commonplace within organisations the world over. This is particularly true in professional services firms, where the average gender balance among partners is around 85/15 men to women. In the legal sector specifically, the average percentage of female staff at partnership level is around 15 per cent – global law firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters and Allen & Overy each have a 15 per cent female partnership; Slaughter and May has 19 per cent; and, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has a 12 per cent female partnership. And this is despite the fact that women have been the majority of law school graduates for many years. One has to wonder how long these firms will be able to defend their much-vaunted claims to recruiting and promoting ‘only the very best’ when they are increasingly promoting from a fast-shrinking minority of the educated talent pool? It is hardly a very statistically robust guarantor of quality.
Most firms are, however, trying to increase these figures. And Allen & Overy can certainly be included in this group. In fact, in 2009’s round of partner appointments, 40 per cent of the 20 lawyers promoted to partner were women, up from 18 per cent the previous year.
Firms are beginning to feel a growing pressure from their clients. Many of the women who have left law firms over the past decades have gone into corporate legal departments. As a result, they have, ironically, become clients of the firms they left. This rising number of women among firms’ corporate client base will not look kindly on an all-male team being sent in to advise them.
The attempts of many firms to address the issue of gender diversity are well-meaning, but they are also sadly inefficient. They are trying to apply a band-aid to an issue that calls for a systemic review of the business model. While partnership firms like to think of themselves as networks of knowledge workers in a service economy, they are in truth some of the most rigid hierarchies in business. The single-model career path and relentless ‘up-or-out’ cultures in these highly homogeneous business models will never become more gender balanced until the model itself evolves.
Yet nowhere else in the business world do the people who currently lead the system have less interest in its evolution. In fact, they are clearly invested in the status quo. The partnership model is based on a pyramid structure. A very small group of expensive partners have clambered up a very difficult path, largely based on 24/7 commitment to slaving away in service of a senior partner. Once they are finally appointed partner, their remuneration is entirely based on the productivity of every lawyer below them. Therefore, they have absolutely no incentive to change the system. On the contrary, that is precisely the moment that they have been working towards all those years. They have reached the moment when they can finally benefit from all that hard work and investment.
The idea of adapting the model to accommodate women is laughable… at least while they can still find men ready to do what they did.
All this, however, is unconscious. We are all, for the moment, what London Business School's Professor Gary Hamel termed the “unwitting prisoners of a paradigm”1. Most of these partners may truly believe that women aren’t making it to partner because of something they lack (time, competence or style for example). Many managers in companies believe the same. They are still asking an out-dated question: ‘Why are these women not making it to partnership?’ I would suggest that the questions firms now need to ask are: ‘What is wrong with this firm if we are not able to promote the majority of law graduates to partner?’ and, ‘what is that doing to the quality of our talent?’ These two questions yield very different answers – and lead to very different solutions.

The ‘fix the women’ approach
Too often, the first step most firms take – even before thinking about the issue – is to look at what others are doing and then craft ‘action plans’ to do at least as much. This trend is exacerbated by rating agencies and various accreditation or award bodies who evaluate these initiatives based on a list of criteria that usually involve a list of what they like to call ‘best practices’.
Internal functions like human resources are evaluated on their ability to get these awards, which usually depends on launching the kind of initiatives specified. Company after company and almost all the professional services firms are creating women’s networks, mentoring programmes for women, and coaching and leadership training for women. All are fine programmes. They are popular with most women, who are happy to have some developmental focus. And having run many of these for a number of years myself, I know just how empowering and energising they can be.
The only problem is that I’m not at all convinced they work… or at least not in isolation. The focus on women in companies leads to a host of unintended consequences. And the intended consequences (usually more women in leadership) have not been proven.
Mostly though, as the readers’ reactions to the Allen & Overy story accurately note, they deflect attention from where it really belongs and promote exactly the sort of misunderstandings we need to overcome. These ‘fix the women’ strategies unconsciously encourage women to conform more closely to the dominant masculine norm and culture. Women are very ready to agree that they don’t do enough (networking, self-marketing and so on). And the senior men who are invited to introduce these sessions as ‘supporters’ and ‘champions’ are perfectly content to acknowledge that women need a little extra help in order to be truly ready (in some distant future) for partnership. That way, firms discover, everyone is happy. The women are happy as they have a sense that they are overcoming handicaps. The men are happy because it confirms that women have handicaps.
Rather, questions should be posed to the leaders of the firms launching these approaches. These might include:

Do you really want to encourage half your work force to spend time learning and adopting the communication styles preferred by men?
Have you carried out client satisfaction surveys to see how appreciated are the different lawyers on your staffs?
Are you promoting to partner the lawyers that your clients and peers evaluate as top performers or those that today’s partners prefer for their availability and expressed ambition?

All the literature on career management is still about managing in a traditional 20th century pyramid, with everything it implies about the unwritten rules of the game and the predominance of ambition and internal competition.
Before we transform the new, still-different culture of female talent into pseudo-male behaviours, it might be worth understanding the consequences of our actions. We are at precisely the point in history where companies are dreaming of new leadership competencies, new collaborative cultures and newly innovative minds. I suspect that given the current image of the legal profession, clients are also dreaming of some shift in the style of service they are receiving. But the lag time in generalising these new ideas risks costing us the opportunity of a whole half of the talent pool whose authentic styles seem naturally aligned with these new needs.
In the course of researching for my new book, HOW Women Mean Business – A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business, I have interviewed many progressive male chief executive officers (CEOs) who have started transforming their companies in order to attract and retain the best talent – both female and male. The executive search firm, Egon Zehnder International, has managed to achieve 50-50 gender parity among its consultants in its London office. It is a professional services firm with a partnership model, similar to the law firms, and yet it has managed to make a 21st-century shift. This is driven by the passionate belief its CEO, Damien O’Brien, has on the issue of gender balance. “More and more clients around the world just expect us to field gender balanced teams,” he says. “If they look at our website and see a lot of grey-haired, white males, a lot of them would not find that very exciting on many dimensions.” The London office has managed to transform things by enabling the female consultants to have much greater flexibility, involving relatively long periods out from time to time. The other consultants rally round to enable this to happen. The result is that they get superb commitment from the women. It also creates a new cultural shift that will benefit men as well.
So, it can happen and it is happening. The future will prove the competitive edge gained by the innovators. Those who want to be ready may want to stop ‘fixing the women’. And reframe gender balance as key strategic lever to their firms ability to adapt to 21st century talent and market realities.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, publisher of 20-first.com, and co-author of WHY Women Mean Business and HOW Women Mean Business - A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business. She can be contacted at avivah@20-first.com

Reference

‘Ultimate advantage: Reinventing management for a new age’, Tenth World Knowledge Forum conference: Seoul, South Korea, October 15th 2009.