Mary van der Boon looks at why there are fewer women in top positions in business, government and universities in the Netherlands than in other European countries, and suggests how we can bring about change.
Countless surveys and studies have come to the same conclusion: gender diversity in the Netherlands, particularly the streaming of women to top positions in business, government and universities, lags sorely behind other European countries.
Most parties on both sides of the Great Gender Debate would agree on the facts. The story gets murky when you ask why this occurs and what can be done about it.
There are a few popularly-held myths and beliefs around women and leadership in the Netherlands, and it might be useful to look at some of these old chestnuts from a new angle:
Shouldn’t businesses just take more risks in making appointments, in order to give women a chance?
Why are male leaders so sure that appointing women will be a risk? Since so much research points to the fact that rather than being a risky endeavour, appointing women to senior management ensures more ethical decision-making, more creativity and innovation, better business performance and better employee retention and engagement isn’t it much more risky, anno 2008, NOT to appoint women? Further, the phrase ’give women a chance’ is condescending. Gender diversity in leadership is a sound business decision, not charity.
Positive discrimination can lead to resistance in the organisation. A woman who reaches a certain position faster because of her gender will have to earn her authority (over her subordinates) first.
Consider the common occurrence of men holding senior leadership positions who owe their appointments to their gender (and have other unearned and unacknowledged privileges based on having the right last name, having attended the right schools, joined the right hockey clubs and fraternities and are the right ethnicity). Have they suffered any lack of authority issues because people consider they got to the top owing to factors other than skill and merit?
All leadership surveys say that possessing emotional intelligence, having powerful networks and being charismatic/attractive all matter far more than actual business knowledge, intelligence or acumen. How is it that suddenly women are going to have to prove they got to the top simply by being the very best available, and not because of other factors as well? No one else has ever had to.
Corporations have to make the appointments and then back their (female) appointees all the way, making it clear that no insubordination will be tolerated. Furthermore, ’sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’. Who cares what anyone says? Let the performance figures do the talking....
I don’t see any mechanism (process) that holds women back (perhaps only the resistance from middle management. This group is nervously hanging onto their own positions, and won’t easily let women through). Top managers will perhaps have to give women a helping hand by breaking through this resistance.
The concept of ’systemic bias’ is ingrained in every organisation. This occurs when certain behaviours and characteristics ¬ often those of background, ethnicity, personality, gender, age; in short, things over which people have no choice or control ¬ are encouraged and rewarded in an organisation. The preference is very subtle, but extends from recruitment approaches (where is the organisation looking for its new talent, for instance, and what kind of candidate applies?) to promotion (who is placed on the fast track and in management development programmes, and who is asked for key overseas jobs?) and leadership (what kind of diversity exists in the top 200?).
Most organisations unconsciously favour those who look, act and feel like the present leadership, and they in turn are usually clones of the leaders before them. Looking at the pictures of senior management boards of any organisation in the Netherlands there is virtually NO change over time. Down to the ties they are wearing.
It is simplistic, therefore, to assume that the problem lies in a middle-management bottleneck. The problem lies in engrained, hidden and very powerful bias inherent in every process in the organisation. It takes incredible courage to undertake the change management initiatives necessary to enact serious improvements in an organisation. Very few organisations have this courage.
17 March 2007
Mary van der Boon is principal of transcultural management firm global tmc international, President of the European Professional Women’s Network-Amsterdam and PhD candidate in Organisational Behaviour on the topic of Systemic Bias in Organisations at Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam.
[Copyright Global tmc & Expatica]
