What helps women advance in the workplace? Male allies
- There is a growing realisation among businesses that there is a need to get men involved to help women achieve parity in the workplace
- A stronger focus on language and communication is needed between men and women, rather than simply putting in place targets and training seminars
When Jane Horan visited a global Hong Kong bank to conduct a mandatory training session on unconscious bias, she was met with a harsh rebuke from a male employee attending the course. He accused Horan of wasting his time and because of that, losing the company money.
The accusation rattled Horan, a consultant on leadership acceleration and workplace politics. It also underlined one of the key challenges facing women’s efforts to secure fairer treatment in the workplace: getting men to buy into those efforts.
In the 2018 Global Diversity Study by the Boston Consulting Group, which surveyed 16,500 employees from 14 countries including China and India, 97 per cent reported that their company had a gender diversity policy in place. Yet, less than a third found these policies effective.
The report said that a key impediment was men age 45 or older. They commonly lead decision making in corporate environments, underestimating the obstacles to women’s advancement.
Mandatory programmes and training sessions simply don’t work, said Horan. “Organisations that are more advanced are building male allies as sponsorship mentors and bringing these groups together. The shift I’m seeing is a move away from women’s only programmes to programmes that include both men and women, and building leadership, because we both have things we can learn from each other. If you go down on one path – women’s only programmes – then we [women] are speaking only to ourselves.”
