Bringing men on board with gender equality
Gender diversity efforts often only focus on women, both as target group and with regard to engaging employees. On the one hand, many women networks are „closed-shops“ in which men are neither targeted nor accepted as members. On the other hand, many men are not willing to actively participate in gender diversity activities, or they even refuse them. Which approaches are successful in terms of making progress on gender diversity and enable to gain bottom-line benefits? An article published in BUSINESSdigest provides answers.
Although gender-related D&I programmes are still quite often focused only on women, it becomes more and more evident, that men failing to realise the strategic imperative for corporate gender diversity, will fall out of step with global trends and developments.
However, progress in this area is happening at low speed. Projections of a McKinsey study say that women will still hold less than 20% of executive positions in Europe by 2022 if progress will keep on going with at the same pace as today. To accelerate change, discussions have to move from questions of justice and injustice to a strong focus on the strategic significance of gender-related issues for men. It’s about bringing men on board with gender equality.
The article says that one of the most inhibiting factors in this field is the myth of the zero-sum game. That means many people, especially men, think that if women win, men lose. As the word “myth” already implies, this is completely wrong. Gender diversity has positive effects on business performance and thus for both men and women. 47 studies concerned with gender issues in the recently published IBCR 3.0 show the positive effects of D&I on productivity, growth, innovation, recruitment and other business rationales.
Today’s stereotypes and biases that are keeping away women from making careers are more subtle than they were in the past; however, they still exist. A study by Alison Wood Brooks, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, showed that that both men and women have a tendency to react more negatively to women than to men in the same situation. If, for example, people are shown women and men wearing shirts stained with coffee, they tend to see the women more negatively.
Women nowadays are at the same time expected to and stigmatised for exhibiting (stereotypical) masculine traits (e.g. self-promotion and assertiveness). Men, however, experience the same problem when exhibiting feminine traits. Research has shown that there is a greater variation among women or men, respectively, than between the sexes. This is an important reason why gender diversity programmes always have to be careful about reinforcing stereotypes.
According to the author of the article, three key factors can be identified, which may positively affect men’s engagement in gender diversity: First, having been mentored by a women has been proven as helpful. Cross-gender mentoring raises awareness of gender biases and of the fact that gender diversity is a strategic business issue. Second, a sense of fair-play contributes to diversity engagement of men. According to a study conducted by Catalyst, yet a small rise in men’s sense that gender equality is about fair-play raises their likelihood to actively support D&I issues related to gender by about 300%. Third, defiance of certain masculine norms has been shown as successful for getting men on board with gender diversity. For both men and women, complete compliance with gender norms means to repress certain aspects of their personality. This results in a loss of perspectives, ideas and potential for the company and sometimes even ends up in poor psychological and physical health, especially for men.
Sustainable, success-oriented gender diversity approaches have a strong focus on redefining the „good worker“, which includes the necessity to do norm-critical work and establish a modified company culture and new modes of leadership. Gender networks can make valuable contributions in such processes if men are actively included into their work, as such extensive changes within a company will only be successful when the vast majority of employees on all levels is in- and not excluded.
The full article can be read here.
