Читать книгу Dads for Daughters - Michelle Travis - Страница 9
ОглавлениеDespite rumors of its demise, the glass ceiling is alive and well. We’re all familiar with Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, who authored the bestselling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. And we can all name other impressive women who’ve leaned in all the way to the C-suite. Carly Fiorina was the first woman to lead a top-twenty company as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Meg Whitman served as the CEO of both Hewlett-Packard and eBay. Marissa Mayer even had a baby while she was the CEO of Yahoo! So how bad could things really be?
The leadership landscape is actually pretty bleak for women in the corporate world. Women make up almost half of the American workforce, but very few are making it into positions of power and influence. At Fortune 1000 companies, women fill fewer than seven percent of CEO positions, fewer than eight percent of COO positions, and fewer than nine percent of CFO positions. So for every Sheryl, Carly, Meg, and Marissa, there are hundreds of men filling the C-suites of America. At the current rate of change, it will take another hundred years to achieve gender equality in the executive echelons. Things aren’t much different in Britain, where there are twice as many CEOs named John than all the women CEOs combined in the top hundred companies on the London Stock Exchange.
Even at the top, women are at the bottom. Higher ranked companies tend to be the least likely to hire women CEOs. In the Fortune 1000, women-led companies have an average ranking that’s 480 places below the average ranking for companies lead by men. None of this can be blamed on lesser education. Although women run only a quarter of all colleges and universities in the US, women hold more college degrees than men and earn sixty percent of all master’s degrees. Yet women’s voices are still not being heard at the top.
This means that dads are sending their daughters into a business world with vastly unequal opportunities in leadership roles. At the same time, dads who are already leaders in the corporate world are far better positioned than women outsiders to change this reality. So as women continue to lean into their careers with skill and ambition, dads of daughters could accelerate progress by becoming inside allies and advocates. It’s far more efficient for male leaders to build pipelines for women into leadership roles than it is for women to keep banging their heads on the glass ceiling until it finally shatters for good.
Dads of daughters have more to gain by advocating for women at their jobs than just increasing opportunities for their daughters, although that’s a nice pay-off by itself. Gender diversity is also good for a company’s bottom line. Having women well-represented in decision-making roles increases innovation and responsiveness to a diverse customer base. Research and development teams that include women are more creative and identify more novel solutions to technical problems. Gender diverse companies are also a less volatile stock investment, according to a study of 1,600 firms by Morgan Stanley.
Having women on a company’s board of directors is particularly important for a company’s long-term success. Directors are the elected representatives of the stockholders. Although we often hear about individuals in the C-suite, it’s the directors who set management policy and make strategic decisions. This influential role is dominated by men. Currently, women fill less than twenty-one percent of all board seats at Fortune 1000 companies.
Dads of daughters who have taken a risk to support more women directors have discovered that it isn’t a risk at all. Promoting women onto board seats benefits companies in a variety of ways. Boards of directors with women are better at problem-solving and decision-making. As a result, companies with the most women board members significantly outperform other companies on a range of financial measures, including return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital. A study by Credit Suisse Research Institute of nearly 2,400 large companies found that those with at least one woman board member outperformed those with all-male boards by twenty-six percent over a six-year period. Female board representation also helps companies be more responsive to customers. Women directors understand that women control about twenty trillion dollars of consumer spending worldwide, and they’re often more focused on innovative ways to sell products and services to women.
According to executive coach Susan Bloch, having more women on a board of directors also makes a company more attractive to investors. Gender-diverse boards produce lower corporate debt and tend to avoid risky corporate decisions. Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards are more likely to appear on Ethisphere Institute’s list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Having more women board members also translates into higher corporate social responsibility ratings, which boosts a company’s reputation. But despite all of this evidence, many male board members still don’t prioritize adding women to their team. “In the twenty-five years I’ve worked as an international business coach,” says Susan, “I’ve witnessed business leaders suffer from the same blind spot—not enough women on their boards.”
In addition to improving their companies’ performance, men who advocate for more women on their boards of directors can also pay benefits forward to other women. A forty-three country study found that companies with a higher proportion of women board members also have more women in senior management positions and a smaller gender pay gap. The more women a company has on its board, the more likely the company is to hire women corporate officers in the future.
Even armed with this compelling data, building pipelines for women into leadership positions is challenging. Motivated by their daughters to take action, several dads have been experimenting with gender diversity initiatives in various industries, and their stories are a good place to start.
Women’s Rise at Coca-Cola
Muhtar Kent arrived in the US from Turkey in 1978 with no job and a thousand dollars to his name. What he lacked in possessions, he made up with ambition. He had an uncle in New York City who kindly shared his home until Muhtar figured out how to build his own American dream. At the time, Muhtar’s main objectives were paying rent, making his dad proud, and becoming a successful businessman. It took a few decades to add “become an outspoken feminist” to his list of life goals. But once he had a daughter, that became Muhtar’s top priority.
Growing up the son of Necdet Kent, Muhtar had big shoes to fill. Necdet was born in Istanbul, and he became one of Turkey’s most respected diplomats. During World War II, he risked his life to save dozens of Turkish Jews from the Nazis while he was stationed in France. Although he was awarded Turkey’s Supreme Service Medal for his bravery, he never thought of himself as a hero. He believed in tolerance and hard work, and he was fiercely committed to his family.
Muhtar was born after the war in 1952, while Necdet was serving as the Turkish Consulate General in New York. Muhtar spent his youth abroad, attending high school in Turkey and studying economics and business administration in London. After returning to Turkey for required military service, Muhtar finally headed back to New York to start a business career.
It took only a few weeks working at a big city bank before Muhtar became bored and restless. He started scanning newspapers for something more exciting, and he came across an ad for jobs at the Coca-Cola Company. Muhtar sent in his resume and was disappointed when he was only offered a position driving trucks. That still beat pushing papers in a bank cubicle, so he jumped at the opportunity. Muhtar spent the next nine months hauling Coca-Cola products around the country in a bright red truck. He’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. to arrive at supermarkets before they opened so he could stock shelves and build displays. It wasn’t glamorous work, but Muhtar loved being on the front lines of a national retail market. He soaked in knowledge about distribution and marketing strategies, and he was an incredibly quick study.
Muhtar’s work ethic was rewarded with a rapid string of promotions. By the early 1990s, he was overseeing operations in twenty-three countries as a Senior VP of Coca-Cola International. In 1999, he left Coca-Cola to become an executive at one of Europe’s largest international beverage companies. He was so successful that Coca-Cola recruited him back as the President and COO of its North Asia, Eurasia, and Middle East Group. In 2008, Muhtar reached the pinnacle of the international business world when he was named Coca-Cola’s CEO and Chair of Coca-Cola’s board of directors.
During most of Muhtar’s meteoric rise, he wasn’t focused on women’s equality or the role of women in business. But around the time that he took the leadership helm at Coca-Cola, his daughter, Selin, was graduating from college and forging her own way in the business world. When Muhtar saw the challenges that Selin faced as a woman trying to launch a business career, he began thinking differently about his leadership role. “I would like to see my daughter flourish professionally in a world that is more just and equitable for women,” he said.
Motivated by his daughter, Muhtar took a hard look around his company. He noticed that his workforce didn’t mirror the world—or even his own customers. Women are responsible for seven out of every ten purchases of Coca-Cola products, but there were very few women in top positions at his firm. Women held only thirteen percent of all senior leadership roles, and only two of Coca-Cola’s fifteen board members were women. Women were also in short supply in the jobs that fed into leadership positions. Only twenty-eight percent of the jobs that were one tier below leadership were filled by women, and the company had no plan to fix the problem. Muhtar was frankly a little embarrassed. He decided to roll up his sleeves.
Inspired to create a company where he would feel comfortable hiring his own daughter, Muhtar launched a Global Women’s Initiative to develop female talent and promote gender equality. To get started, he established a Women’s Leadership Council and tasked it with setting metrics for increasing the number of women leaders at Coca-Cola. The Council had four goals: recruitment, development, advancement, and retention of women.
Muhtar knew that he had to hold his leadership team accountable for results. He credits his daughter for giving him the sense of urgency he needed to make progress. He didn’t want his company’s program to just pay “lip service” to feminism. So he identified women’s leadership as its own priority instead of burying it in a general diversity campaign. He also set explicit goals for moving women into leadership positions. Most importantly, he told his managers that their performance reviews and future pay would be tied to whether they met the goals. “When we did that,” says Muhtar, “everything started to change.”
In less than four years, Muhtar increased women in Coca-Cola’s management ranks from twenty-two to forty percent. Since Muhtar began his initiative, women have held leadership positions in Coca-Cola’s finance, science and regulatory, quality control, and human resources departments. The company’s Controller, Head of Mergers and Acquisitions, and Internal Audit executive positions have all been held by women, who have also lead operations in Europe and Turkey.
Muhtar also figured out the importance of having women board members. Despite doubling the number of women on his board in his first four years, Muhtar decided he wasn’t going to be satisfied until at least half of his board members were women. To speed up the process, he advocated for setting director term limits to increase turnover and create more openings for women.
Setting term limits for board members was controversial, but Muhtar was willing to ruffle feathers to make progress on women’s equality. Muhtar shares this characteristic with other dads of daughters, who are more likely than other male business leaders to champion gender diversity in their companies. A study of forty male CEOs in Australia found that the strongest women’s advocates were more likely to have a daughter who had faced sex discrimination herself. “I could see the struggle that my daughter was going through,” said one outspoken CEO, “so there was an emotional resonance.”
While Muhtar’s mission to expand women in leadership began with a desire to see a better world for his daughter, he quickly recognized that women were an untapped resource that could make Coca-Cola even more successful. Having women in Coca-Cola’s leadership ranks kept the company more connected to its customers. Women control enough of the global spending to have an economic impact that is larger than the economies of the US, China, and India combined. So Muhtar also talked with his daughter often to make sure he didn’t lose touch.
When Selin was twenty-eight and deciding where to take her own business career, Muhtar gave her some advice. “Follow your heart,” he told her. “It’s all about being passionate about what you do.” Selin listened to her dad and became a successful jewelry designer in New York City. She sells her brand in boutiques in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo, and she’s making a big splash in the fashion world. Her work has been highlighted in Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, and her jewelry has been spotted on Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Watson, and Angelina Jolie. But just like her dad, Selin stays committed to her values, like making sure that her jewelry uses responsibly-sourced materials to reduce environmental impact. Selin names pieces from her jewelry collections after powerful women who have left a mark on their communities.
Although Muhtar stepped down as Coca-Cola’s CEO in 2017, he’s still the chair of Coca-Cola’s board of directors and is working hard to see the company meet its gender diversity goals. He also serves on the board of directors for Catalyst, a nonprofit that advances women’s workplace equality. During the 2016 presidential election, Muhtar was mentioned as a possible running mate for Hillary Clinton, so perhaps politics will be in his future as well.
Given all that he has learned from his daughter, Muhtar now proudly self-identifies as a feminist. “If you’re a male and you’re at the top,” says Muhtar, “you have to be a feminist.” When asked why, Muhtar gives two reasons. One is that gender diversity is good for economic and social progress. The other is that advancing women’s equality is simply the right thing to do for the sake of our daughters.
Empowering Wonder Women
Jason Kilar is the dad of three daughters, and he’s never hesitated to take what he calls “considered risks.” Jason has become a proponent of gender equality in the entertainment industry, where he’s an innovator in digital media and television distribution. “Life is an exercise in living with the certainty of uncertainty,” he recently told the graduating students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he applauded the characteristics of hutzpah and moxie. He urged them not to let fear of uncertainty hold them back from pursuing their dreams, which is advice he’s heeded well in his own career.
After graduating from college and earning his MBA at Harvard Business School, Jason took a risk with a little-known start-up in Seattle that was dabbling in the online distribution of books, music, and videos. Despite raised eyebrows from friends and family, Jason trusted his instincts and spent the next nine years rising to an executive position at what has become the world’s largest internet-based retailer and a household name in e-commerce: Amazon.
In 2007, Jason took an even bigger risk by becoming the co-founder and CEO of a video on demand service known as Hulu. Although Hulu was a joint venture with several industry giants, including The Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, and Comcast, it was eagerly panned as a doomed endeavor in its early days. Tech industry leaders referred to Hulu as “ClownCo,” and they ran a digital counter on a website to track the number of days until its predicted demise. But Jason forged ahead with his own brand of thoughtful stubbornness, intent on reimagining how television is delivered. “We are crazy,” Jason readily admitted of his Hulu team. “All entrepreneurs need to be.”
While Jason was building Hulu—which became a highly successful venture despite its critics—he was also helping his wife Jamie raise four small children, including three daughters. Sadie is now a high-schooler, and Ivy and Ruby are middle-schoolers. Jason admits that having three daughters made him more aware of situations where girls or women aren’t getting equal opportunities. It’s as if having daughters made his “antennae much more sensitive,” and now he sees both the overt and the inadvertent barriers that create an uneven playing field—things that he didn’t pay much attention to before he had three girls. “It’s fascinating that it took in my case having daughters to become naturally aware of this,” he remarks, “and I think that our challenge is to figure out how we can have that sensitivity and awareness even if we don’t have daughters.”
Having daughters not only increased Jason’s focus on gender equality, but also affected how he approached his leadership role in the entertainment industry. He found himself seeing everyday situations at work through the lens of his daughters, who’ve become ever-present in his analysis of the world. He’d find himself in a business meeting where women’s views were under-valued, and he’d start thinking, “Things should work a little bit differently because of Ivy, or Ruby, or Sadie.”
Jason has become more willing to speak up when he sees gender bias, and he looks for opportunities to work with people who are committed to empowering women in his industry. Sometimes he still finds himself sitting in boardrooms of entertainment and media companies where women are largely absent from the table, but he remains optimistic. He is particularly hopeful about progress that’s being made on the industry’s creative side.
Jason can’t contain his enthusiasm when he talks about the 2017 blockbuster movie Wonder Woman as an example of women’s forward momentum. The film stars the indomitable Gal Gadot, and it was directed by Patty Jenkins, the first female director of a live-action superhero studio film. Wonder Woman is one of Jason’s favorite movies, both for its entertainment value and as a dad. “I’ve run into so many fathers who have daughters who just high-five each other when they talk about it,” says Jason. He says they all rave about one scene in particular, where Wonder Woman leads the charge across a battlefield, dodging bullets as the men huddle behind her in a bunker.
The movie is remarkable because Hollywood almost never allows female directors to tell a story through the lens of a strong female character. But Jason believes that Wonder Woman’s resonance—and more importantly, its commercial success—will change things. Wonder Woman is not only the top money-making film ever directed by a woman, but it’s also one of the top thirty highest-grossing films of all time in the US. “Make no mistake,” says Jason, “whether you’re a male or female studio head, you’re going to do what commercially is going to lead to the greatest return.” So Jason is thrilled that Patty Jenkins got a lucrative deal directing a sequel, and Hollywood is figuring out that it’s actually good business to invest in strong female characters.
Jason knows that the entertainment industry has a lot of leverage in our society. It’s not just one of our country’s biggest exports, but its product can inspire, shift conversations, provide role models, and shape kids’ minds. That’s one of the reasons Jason wants to see more women in the boardrooms of media and entertainment companies.
Jason left Hulu in 2013 to tackle new challenges. He has since served on the Board of Directors of DreamWorks Animation and co-founded a subscription video service called Vessel. In thinking back on his career choices, Jason has some advice for his three daughters. “I hope that they never accept the world at face value, and instead listen to their inner voices about the way the world should be,” says Jason. “That’s when real change happens.”
Change has been notoriously slow in the male-dominated gaming industry where Bill Hornbuckle has worked for nearly forty years. Bill is the President of MGM Resorts International, a hospitality company with hotels and casinos around the world. It wasn’t until Bill’s two daughters, Lindsey and Sara, became young adults that he started thinking deeply about equal opportunities for women. “I think about them excelling,” Bill says, “and it now more than ever focuses me.”
When his daughters were seeking jobs, Bill told them to choose employers based on their track record for promoting women. That advice got Bill looking harder at his own company, which he wanted to be a place where he’d be proud to have his daughters work. “I wouldn’t be truthful in telling you I was feeling that a decade ago,” he admits. Once Bill prioritized gender equality, he increased the women in MGM’s management ranks to forty-three percent, and MGM Resorts was named a Top Corporation for Women’s Business Enterprises in 2016.
Fred Paglia is another executive who’s made the connection between being the dad of a daughter and being a women’s ally in his workplace. Fred works in the foodservice industry, which is the second largest employing industry in the US. When he became the president of the North American division of Foodservice at Kraft Foods Group, he realized that his company wasn’t a place where his own daughters would have equal opportunities to rise. “My girls are fourteen and twelve,” he said at the time, “and to be genuine with you, I wake up every day and look into their eyes before I leave for work and try to make the path a little easier for them. What father wouldn’t want to do that?”
Fred was savvy enough to know that he didn’t actually know how to accomplish his goals. So he approached Fritzi Woods, who was the CEO of the Women’s Foodservice Forum, to get advice. The Forum is an organization dedicated to advancing women into executive roles in the foodservice industry. Fritzi was so impressed by Fred that she invited him to join the Forum’s board, and they became partners in expanding opportunities for women in their industry. Fritzi said that most of the progress she saw in her industry had been the result of male leaders like Fred—dads who are “hoping to pave the way for their young daughters.”
How Dads Can Get Started
If you’re the dad of a daughter and you’re in an influential position in the corporate world, it’s time to make the connection between your role as a dad and your role as a business leader. As a father, you can begin this journey by asking yourself if your workplace is a place where you’d want your daughter to work. Is it a place where your daughter would be welcomed, valued, and taken seriously? Is it a place where your daughter could thrive professionally with the same opportunities as men? Is it a place where your daughter could become a leader? If the answers to these questions are “no,” then there’s work to be done.
After taking Jason Kilar’s advice and watching Wonder Woman (alongside your teen daughter, if you have one), the next step is establishing a concrete strategy for advancing women into leadership roles at your company. In general, a successful strategy requires setting specific goals, making the goals public to increase accountability, and linking the goals to managers’ performance reviews and compensation. More specific strategies often depend on the existing workplace culture and particular industry—a lesson that Fred Paglia learned at Kraft Foods—which means seeking expert advice on how to establish an individualized women’s leadership initiative at your firm.
An excellent resource is Jeffery Tobias Halter’s book, Why Women: The Leadership Imperative to Advancing Women and Engaging Men. This book makes the business case for gender diversity in leadership roles, which can arm dads with ammunition to convince colleagues why they should care. The book also describes best practices of Fortune 500 companies that have established successful women’s leadership strategies, so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. The LeanIn.org’s Women in the Workplace Guide also provides action checklists to help establish hiring, evaluation, and performance practices to reduce gender biases that create hurdles for advancing women into leadership positions.
Dads of daughters can also find a wealth of information from Catalyst, which consults with companies to build workplaces that advance women into leadership roles. Catalyst has worked with more than 800 organizations to diagnose barriers to women’s advancement, engage men as women’s advocates, and create more inclusive workplace cultures. Catalyst also networks business leaders to share information about successful strategies.
One focus of Catalyst’s work is diversifying companies’ boards of directors. Catalyst offers business leaders a database of experienced women candidates for board positions. Business leaders can also find or refer women candidates for board positions on theBoardList.com, which includes over 2,000 qualified businesswomen. Created by Silicon Valley executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, theBoardList.com has helped place more than 100 women on boards of directors. The Catalyst Women on Board program also links highly qualified business women with male board members for a two-year mentoring program that positions women for board membership and executive opportunities.
Dads of daughters can also take advantage of Catalyst’s MARC initiative, which stands for “Men Advocating Real Change.” Dads can become MARC Leaders by participating in workshops or executive dialogue sessions to become effective women’s advocates and break down barriers to women’s advancement. Catalyst also offers tools for dads to set up MARC Teams at their companies. MARC Teams meet regularly to discuss gender diversity, using Catalyst guides on various topics, such as tips for eliminating bias from performance reviews.
Men in corporate leadership positions can also join the Catalyst CEO Champions for Change initiative. Members take either a corporate or a personal pledge to support women’s advancement. Leaders who take the corporate pledge agree to share their gender diversity data with Catalyst to support research and accelerate progress.
Another step that dads of daughters in corporate leadership roles can take is to implement some variation of the National Football League’s “Rooney Rule.” Named after former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, the rule requires NFL teams to interview a minority candidate for all head coaching and senior operations positions. Although the rule doesn’t force teams to hire minority candidates, merely opening the door helped double the number of minority head coaches in the league.
Jason Kilar supports having a similar rule for female candidates in high-level positions in the entertainment industry. “Just getting women in the room,” he explains, “could go a long way toward disrupting the biased hiring practices that have historically favored men.” Checkr, a leader in employee background screening services, recently adopted a “Rooney Rule Plus,” which requires managers to include at least two women or minority candidates in final stage interviews for every position before making an offer. In 2017, forty-four prominent law firms partnered with the Diversity Lab to pilot a variation of the Rooney Rule called “the Mansfield Rule.” Named after Arabella Mansfield, the first woman attorney in the US, the rule requires law firms to ensure that at least thirty percent of candidates for leadership positions are women or minorities.
In addition to setting specific gender diversity goals, dads of daughters can become more effective corporate leaders just by talking with their daughters to increase awareness and understanding of the challenges that women face in the corporate world. Gail Golden is the founder of an executive development company, and she’s seen the power of the father-daughter relationship first-hand. As an executive trainer, Gail has learned that getting men to connect their role as dads to their role as business leaders can make them more effective diversity advocates. “Having a daughter changes a man’s leadership style,” says Gail, “making him more aware of discrimination and more likely to fight bias against female employees.”
In Gail’s experience, dads learn the most when they ask their daughters if they’ve ever faced sex discrimination themselves. When a dad’s own daughter faces unequal treatment or limited opportunities, the experience can shift his priorities. At that point, it’s no longer abstract statistics. It’s a feeling of not being able to protect your daughter from harm. And while many dads are deeply invested in their daughters’ success, there’s often nothing they can do to directly fix their own daughter’s unfair situation. That frustration can prompt dads to start advocating for gender equality in their own companies. “Although we like to pretend that we are ‘all business,’” says Gail, “in fact we bring our whole selves to work, like it or not.” For dads of daughters, that can be a very positive thing. As executive coach Susan Bloch explains, “Daughters are educating their fathers that they deserve a seat at the leadership table.”
