Good morning. I’m delighted to be at Alcoa today to discuss how you can apply diversity principles in your workplace and get the best out of your teams! A recent US report “New Frontiers for Diversity” has identified ‘diversity’ as much more than simply race or gender issues. Rather, the survey’s researchers report that diversity in business today is about “every human being able to fully contribute, being fully engaged and creating that reciprocal relationship between employee and customer that is good for business”.

I could not have said that better myself! At EOWA where I have been Director for the past two years, our mission is to help business get the most out of its workforce – we help Australian companies to put in place principles and processes to ensure that every working person can fully contribute. More specifically, our mission is to ensure that women’s talent is neither overlooked, nor suppressed. However, it is our view that promoting equity for women workers is not only good for women, it is good for men, it is good for society as a whole. And it CERTAINLY is good for business!

And yet, when I am introduced at functions as Director of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency, I am often met with the common response: “But I thought we had smashed the glass ceiling? I thought women were treated equally? I thought we had fixed that?”

When I then ask them: Where are the women in your organisation? How many women do you have in key decision-making roles? What percentage of your customers are women? And what percentage of women works in your organisation? (and so on) it soon becomes apparent that things aren’t entirely fixed at all.

Yes, we have come a long way since the 60’s when women had to resign from Govt jobs when they got married … but, we STILL have a long way to go. Recent research has calculated that, at the pace of change we are currently making, it will take 177 years to achieve equity for women! Right now, official Government statistics, for example, show that women are earning … on average … only 84% of what men earn … for doing the same job! Furthermore, Australia still has the most gender-segregated workforce in the world, as well as the lowest percentage of women in management in the industrialised world*.

The picture is not entirely gloomy, however! After two years of re-modelling the agency and renegotiating our relationship with business, I’m delighted to report that Australian employers now see the Agency’s diversity work as ‘adding value’ to their business bottom-line, and we are seeing positive shifts in business attitudes across Australia. Here are some examples of what businesses around Australia are doing to manage their diversity issues:

• At Esso … we improved the retention rate for female engineers to 80%, in line with the male peers, after introducing contemporary HR practices, developing managers to ‘walk the talk’ and building a workplace culture inclusive of diverse needs;
• At Westpac … initiatives such as paid maternity leave, etc, resulted in savings of SIX MILLION DOLLARS to the bank’s bottom-line, with retention rates jumping from 50 to 90%;
• At Hewlett Packard, it has been encouraging to note that the CEO recently thanked his senior HR adviser on-stage at a national forum for transforming the culture within his organisation from “unconsciously incompetent” about managing diversity to “consciously competent”. By doing so, the CEO showed a commitment to his diverse work population!
• At the legal firm Blake Dawson Waldron with its 1,683 employees nationwide, the typical ‘workaholic’ culture has also been dramatically transformed with the CEO and senior management committing to a wide range of work/life initiatives.
• And now your own (Alcoa) CEO has personally invited EOWA to consult to him as to how his company can improve the pace of change to capture the benefits of a diverse workforce.

Like many business leaders here and overseas, he is aware of the growing body of research regarding women and business success. A recent US study informs us, for example, that when women sit on boards, those companies tend to enjoy greater profits than when they are run by men alone! It’s exciting to note that big business is beginning to realise that attracting and retaining the best talent - be they women or men - is good for their bottom-line!

For example, when 400 senior executives from major global companies were asked what factor they considered the MOST critical to the success of their respective businesses, what do you expect these global leaders said?

“Quality people” was the overwhelming response in a poll conducted by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, underlining the very strong belief many business leaders have: that in a world of breathtaking speed, ever-changing technology and the fresh challenges of globalisation, the one thing you can aim to keep ‘fixed’ is … good people! … And that means men and women of every colour, religious persuasion, disabled, young or old. The challenge for organisations is to capitalise on this diversity.

The question then is – if the valuing of diversity is so good for business, why is it so difficult to achieve?

Let’s start with workplace culture. Professor Amanda Sinclair, an Australian economist and social commentator, recognised in her Trials at the Top2 study that Australian organisational culture can be classified into four stages:

Overhead: Amanda Sinclair/Workplace Culture Stages

Stage 1: Denial – No problem. These employers do not believe that the absence of women from senior management is a problem.

Stage 2: ‘The problem is Women’. Women’s differences are seen as the problem and these organisations believe that the solution lies in women learning to adapt.

Stage 3: Incremental Adjustment. The organisation recognises something is wrong when senior women keep leaving, but they look to other women to solve the problem.

Stage 4: Commitment to a New Culture. The exclusion of women is recognised as a symptom of deeper cultural problems and senior executives take personal action for change.One of the major challenges for business, in my observation, is that although all the policies may be in place, it remains a struggle to get significant numbers of women into management roles. You can provide the best business case in the world, piles of booklets on how to work flexibly, employee help lines, employee assistance programs, training for women on how to negotiate - and these are all important - but they are not enough.

The truth is, we are not seeing enough change in the way work is done. We are not seeing the attitudinal shift that is required of managers and the challenging of organisational assumptions about what commitment means. Managers are still assuming that commitment to the job equals the amount of time you physically spend in the office where, typically, MEN are the decision-makers.
To help business do better, EOWA was a partner in a conference called Catalyst for Change, held in early 2000. Catalyst is a US organisation that works with Fortune 500 companies to advance the cause of women. Its researchers asked 325 CEO’s and more than 10,000 female executives the question “What holds women back from advancement?” and not surprisingly, the response differed markedly between these two groups. If you’re wondering what it is that creates that mythical ‘glass ceiling’ in some companies, here are a few pointers.

Overhead: Catalyst/ Barriers to Advancement (1)

• 52 percent of the female executives said the main issue was male stereotyping and preconceptions
• 49 percent added that exclusion from informal networks was an issue, and 47 percent stated lack of significant general management or line experience contributed.

Overhead: Catalyst/ Barriers to Advancement (2)

• By contrast, a staggering 82 percent of the CEO respondents stated that the most pressing barrier to women’s advancement was the lack of significant general management or line experience
• This was followed by 64 percent of CEOs believing women had not been in the pipeline long enough and
• Only 25 percent of CEOs stated that male stereotyping and preconceptions formed a barrier.

This research reflects my own experience that what women say - and what CEOs think – often can differ significantly!
It is true to say that women are not getting the experience they need in the more strategic, general management roles that ultimately lead to the positions of power that men enjoy. And it is often due to the issues the women cite - male stereotyping and exclusion from the informal networks.

What we now know is that to inspire commitment to diversity change, certain key issues need to be addressed, including:

Overhead: Baytos Model

• Structure – eg. HR policies and processes
• Leadership – “walking the talk”
• Culture that will support an inclusive work environment
• Macro environment – eg. Competitive, regulatory & socio-economic factors.

It may be useful to look at how a world leading company like IBM has tackled diversity. We can then discuss some Australian examples.

IBM realised that their future competitive advantage would come from niche markets such as the female business market, the gay market, and so on. To capture these markets, the company decided to hold a Global Diversity conference so that it could tap the needs, aspirations and ideas from its diverse workforce. After listening to the input of employees, senior executives were made accountable for specific strategies arising from the diversity conference input.

Overhead: 4 KEY IBM ISSUES

The conference identified 4 key issues:

1. ownership at senior levels of diversity issues;
2. universality of work/life issues (and this does not pertain to women only);
3. the lack of women on what the Americans call ‘slates’ (or promotion lists),
4. and the need for women leader and mentoring programs.

It is my view that these issues are mirrored in the Australian workplace. Most critically, the issues of pay equity, career development for women and flexibility (in my opinion) are what need to be addressed in order to take women forward!

The courage and vision of a brave new leader helps enormously to make a positive difference, as this true story I am about to tell you illustrates.

After arriving at AMP from the United States in the early 90’s as the Australian bank’s new CEO, chief George Trumbell swiftly discovered that there were remarkably few women in senior management – and he wondered why. He then invited 10 senior women to lunch and asked them to name the 10 most sexist men in the company. The women came up with a list. He then took the 10 most senior men to lunch and informed them that five of them were on the list. He gave them a choice - stay and change their behaviour, or leave. “You could have heard a pin drop in London,” he said. One of the men on the list was later fired, while the others left of their own accord.

(Pause) Capturing the benefits of diversity is not purely idealistic of course – it’s also about economics. It’s about the Business Case. It’s about creating a sustainable diverse workforce that in turn makes more money for your business.

Organisations can, and do, make significant savings to their bottom-line through implementing effective diversity practices. For instance, organisations benefit from reduced absenteeism and lower staff turnover. Let me give you a couple of examples:

• At Deloittes & Touche, one of America’s largest accounting, tax and consulting firms, the CEO realised that too many of the company’s talented women were walking out the door – not to raise families as they had previously assumed, but because they had weighed up their options in Deloitte’s male-dominated culture and found it wanting. Through the CEO’s personal drive, women partners went from 5% to 14%, the highest in ‘the Big 5’, AND saved over US$250 million in hiring and training costs.
• In Australia, at Tiwest, a titanium minerals production and processing company, management made a business decision to focus on selecting the best person for the job, including actively head-hunting female engineers who were on maternity leave. As a result they have achieved excellent recruitment outcomes for women, with almost 40% of applications from females for engineers in more non-traditional areas.

These examples show a direct link between effective diversity management practices and reducing expenses. But what about the indirect costs, the subtle ways in which the market perceives your organisation and your people management? By aiming to provide a workplace that is inclusive for all employees, organisations gain a unique position as a Best Practice Employer in the marketplace, as well as an enhanced corporate image.

Further, your customers’ perception can be just as important, if not more so, than your prospective employees. Making women visible at the top can provide a competitive edge in selling services and products to the growing number of female customers, who advertising agencies target as those with the purchasing power.

“Winning the war for talent” means that companies are recognising the need to have a diverse workforce reflecting the diversity of its customer base. Today’s diverse customer base needs to be reflected in a diverse organisation in which employees can fully contribute and are more committed and motivated.

Diane Grady, a non-executive Director of several public companies including Lend Lease, Woolworths and MLC, believes that the problems start very early on in a woman’s career. “Women”, she says, “are not being given career-making opportunities in their first, second or third positions ... they’re not assigned to the most critical clients ... they don’t have an opportunity to make a name for themselves early enough in their career”.

Similarly, the Deloittes’ task-force found that women perceived they had fewer career opportunities than men, but no one could pinpoint why. They ran a series of workshops and discovered that, as one woman put it, “women get evaluated on their performance; men get evaluated on their potential” . Everyone knew that the high-profile, high-revenue assignments were the key to advancement in the organisation. But the process of assigning these career-defining accounts was largely unexamined, often based on male partners’ unconscious assumptions about what women wanted.

Businesses who fail to consider diversity and equity issues for their female staff may find themselves in a similar position to that of law firm, Hunt and Hunt where a staffer was awarded a total of $95,000 in compensation for lost earnings as a result of the company not having considered practical solutions to address a female staffer’s absence on maternity leave.

Ms Hickie was appointed a contract partner with the firm while pregnant. After maternity leave she returned to work part time, to find her practice had been reduced. She claimed indirect discrimination in that she was required to work full time and not take any period of maternity leave, this being a condition that more men could easily comply with, but she could not.

The truth is that while there have been many advances for women in the past 30 years, the challenge is greater now because discrimination is less overt, more subtle, sometimes almost invisible. However, the impact continues to be HARSH! Quite often ‘lip service’ is paid to the concept of EO, but in reality … well, it’s a different thing.

In many ways, the challenge for women, and managers, and HR exponents, is to find the courage (what Margot Cairnes calls “heroic leadership”) to speak out when the organizational culture is not inclusive.

Overhead: What one manager can do

Here are 10 things that YOU as a manager can do:

• Demonstrate ‘zero tolerance’ for discrimination
• Make sure more than one woman is involved in & promotion interviews
• Participate in regular gender issue meetings - and share stories
• Assign proportional representation to task forces
• Participate in diversity workshops for inspiration
• Discuss gender diversity with external executives
• Join a committee or organisation where you are a minority
• Create work social events that female management can comfortably attend

To conclude, I would like to leave you with a quote from David Pottruck, CEO of a Fortune 500 US company, Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab recently opened offices in Australia. In the United States the company is considered one of the country’s ‘Top 10’ most innovative businesses, and No. 2 in all of America in terms of an organisation to work for. I hope these words from the company’s CEO inspire you as you meet the challenge of walking the HR/Diversity.

“To garner the cultural benefits of diversity we have to want them badly enough to not just tolerate diversity but to embrace it, to demand it as part of our culture as part of our competitive advantage. And once we do, we have to adopt the policies, practices and personal discipline it takes to get the most from it.”

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