In an essay about leadership in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman wrote: “Because our desire for a coherent vision of the world is bottomless, our hunger for leadership is insatiable too.” Women share that hunger, both for good leaders and to serve as good leaders.
Since at least the time of the Etruscans – and there are doubts about them as well – biology, history and geography all have viewed the male as the standard and thus correct and the female as different and thus intrinsically wrong. We swim in a soup of hidden bias, stereotypes and assumptions. I have them. You have them. Go ahead and Google “Harvard implicit association” and test yourself.
Women entering the workplace face assumptions about their abilities and about how motherhood or other family obligations will affect their work. They encounter informal practices that give interesting, demanding work to men. They go home to cultural norms that give them a disproportionate share of family and personal responsibilities. They often lack mentors and champions and access to development opportunities.
We can start to change this by telling different stories about women and about other workplace minorities.
Changing how we see and hear is also important. There is the power of one. I recall how odd it was the first time I saw a woman newscaster on television. By the second or third time – quite quickly – my eyes and ears had grown used to it. That is the power of one. And then there’s the power of many. Studies have shown, for example, that one woman on a corporate board is better than none, but that you may need two or three or more for them to make a difference.
Changing the rules is sometimes necessary as well. A friend used to play on a lawyers’ hockey league here in Vancouver. To encourage more women to play, the rules were changed to require each team to have as many women as men. The result was that faster men treated slower women a bit like pylons, skating around them to score the goals. So there came another rule change – every second goal had to be scored by a woman. Here’s the magic: the men and women began to work together to ensure both could succeed. The game was just as competitive and challenging, but it was meaningfully different. A real-world example of this kind of inclusion could be ensuring a team making a presentation includes women – and that they hold the floor half of the time.
We can change the narrative at a personal level. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent two-month paternity leave set a high-profile example to men around the world. When a judge in Ontario plucked me ahead of others in a courtroom queue many years ago, noticing that I was very close to nine months pregnant, he not only reduced the risk of having a baby born on the floor of the courtroom, he sent a message that the important work of the court should make room for women. Judges and others in similar roles should be encouraged and empowered to ask, for example, whether any of the counsel appearing in front of them have a hard stop time to pick up kids from daycare, and to adjust a hearing schedule accordingly.
Another example is set by leadership in board and hiring practices. Have a look at two of the boards on which I serve, Simon Fraser University and the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, and you will see women represented in a manner reflective of the world we live in.
Elsewhere, we are seeing movement toward a “ comply or explain” approach to support board gender balance, requiring companies to indicate annually whether they have increased the representation of women on their boards, and if not, to provide a rationale. We need to ask companies to have in place formal policies for how they will include women, and we need to ask them about their progress toward making these policies a reality.
Female leaders bring a new set of skills and perspectives. In a world of challenges and tough problems, having female leaders at the table makes good sense. ç
Anne Giardini is a Vancouver-based lawyer, author, board member and chancellor of Simon Fraser University.
