THE CORPORATE ‘boys’ club’ culture is holding back Australian business and inadvertently driving smart women away from corporations and into small business, recent research has found
THE CORPORATE ‘boys’ club’ culture is holding back Australian business and inadvertently driving smart women away from corporations and into small business, recent research has found.
And despite there being even greater numbers of women in the workforce than ever before, women continue to be under-represented in senior management.
The Hudson research paper found that although Australian women’s representation at the management level in the public sector is on par with other similar countries, there has been no evidence of improvement in the private sector. In fact, there has possibly been a decline since 1986.
As a result, the research says that “a growing number of women in Australia and New Zealand are opting out of positions in corporations to start their own businesses”. In Australia, 31 per cent of total self-employed people are now women, up from 11 per cent since 1996.
“Gender diversity has direct consequences for a company’s bottom line and future competitiveness. From a risk management perspective, HR managers should be pushing this kind of cultural change at a board level,”said Anne Hatton, CEO of Hudson Australasia.
“Corporate Australia can no longer afford to ignore the benefits of gender diversity in the workplace. Those companies which don’t address this issue are at real risk of falling behind at a domestic and international level.”
Hatton said that the ‘leakage’ of talented women from the corporate sector had serious implications for the long-term competitiveness of organisations.
The findings from the Hudson research support the recent Equal Opportunity for Women Agency (EOWA) Census of Women in Leadership, which found that although there has been a gradual increase in the number of Australian women in senior positions, it’s still poor relative to North America, where 86 per cent of US Fortune 500 companies and 62 per cent of Canadian Financial Post 500 companies have at least one women in executive management positions.
Hatton said increased gender diversity is critical for business success because it enables an organisation to address changing workforce and customer demographics.
“Gender diversity has a powerful impact on a company’s corporate profile, and in turn, its status as an employer of choice,” said Hatton.
“It’s imperative to be able to attract and retain top talent in today’s tight job market. Plus, research has shown that those organisations that embrace gender diversity experience higher levels of profitability.”
A Standard & Poors study recently found that businesses committed to promoting minority and women workers had an average annualised return on investment of 18.3 per cent over a five year period, compared with only 7.9 per cent for those without such policies.
The predominantly masculine organisational culture in Australia is one of the key barriers to the success of women in the workplace, according to Hudson’s research.
Some of the reasons women find it difficult to progress in a male dominated environment include: a lack of easy access to informal ‘boys’ networks’; a shortage of appropriate mentors; a lack of workplace flexibility; poor job design; and an inability to navigate the political maze.
In order to sustain and support women in the workplace, the research found that employers should: provide strong formal support and encouragement from organisational leaders; introduce flexible and family friendly work practices; increase access and use of formal and informal networks; adopt International Labour Office (ILO) maternity leave standards (ie 14 weeks’paid maternity leave); embrace organisational values that accurately reflect employees’ lives; and develop and implement mentoring and coaching programs.
The research found that international best practice in gender diversity is characterised by a CEO and executive team that are committed to supporting diversity, particularly gender diversity. Clear and explicit messages should be communicated to the organisation about the benefits of an inclusive, diverse workforce.
The research recommends “the CEO and executive team should make a public commitment to the appointment of women to senior decision-making positions, and to the support of women in these positions once they have been successfully recruited”.
Hatton said it was essential that any strategies introduced to initiate organisational and cultural change be supported by the CEO and top management, otherwise any such strategies would just become rhetoric.
