Anne Rayner, Global Head of Communications for Kantar TNS, is passionate about promoting gender equality in the workplace and in brand communications. Combining her ‘day job’ with her ‘passion project’ Anne saw Kantar APAC collaborate with Campaign Asia to survey Campaign’s database of media and marketing professionals about their experiences in the workplace from a gender perspective. Kantar APAC also conducted the same survey amongst more than 3,000 of their own colleagues across the region to identify the challenges to gender equality that exist in their organisation and are currently setting up inclusion and diversity steering groups across the region to create and implement action plans to reduce inequality. While their focus is initially on gender, this is the beginning of a broader I&D agenda in Kantar globally. In this Wyse Women guest post Anne shares the findings of this research and hopes to dispel some of the common myths surrounding gender equality.
There are a lot of myths and opinions about why there is a persistent lack of women in the c-suite in many industries, despite a great pipeline of talented women up to a fairly senior level. Research we conducted with Campaign Asia this year into gender experiences in the Media & Marketing industry, however, shows that most of these are red herrings.
Let me put a few of these to bed right now. The lack of women in leadership in our industry is NOT due to:
- Dependent kids at home: The only thing having kids affected was the desire for affordable childcare, which was a common sentiment for fathers as well as mothers.
- Lack of desire: actually, 9 in 10 women are motivated to lead, the same level as for men.
- Masculine leadership traits being more valued: the top traits valued by media & marketing businesses are collaboration, communication, passion, being creative, team orientation, and multi-tasking. Not much dominance or aggression in sight there!
- Lack of access to mentors: men and women both have equal access to mentors
- No female role models: in two thirds of cases, men and women both report that their role model is the same gender as them.
Yet we know that there really is a glass ceiling. 24% of male respondents were already a top executive, vs 9% for women. Executive roles are roughly 75% male / 25% female in many of our businesses, despite women making up half or more of the workforce up to then. A typical quote from our study says it perfectly: “Top management is led by men. Women are defined and groomed to be directors but no shows of women present in the executive management group.”
So what is really going on?
Two things stood out to explain the glass ceiling.
Firstly, the current mould of executive positions puts some women off. Although 9 in 10 women are motivated to lead, only 68% of women in ANZ aspire to an executive role. We need to create leadership roles for people who do not want to meet the stereotype designed for the male breadwinner.
The second thing is unconscious bias. According to our data, men are judged for what they do, women for who they are. And remember that this bias comes from all of us – both men and women have grown up with this unconsciously ingrained in how the world works, so all of us need to work hard to overcome it.
In ANZ, 68% of women report that men have more opportunities than women in their company, and nearly half have missed out on opportunities because of their gender. 51% of women say that meetings are dominated by men in ANZ (vs 27% of the time for the APAC region overall). All of this points to unconscious bias at work. These numbers have to change!
Hardly any men observed this unconscious bias; fewer than 1 in 10 thought that men were more respected by top management compared to 4 in 10 women; in ANZ hardly any men thought that they had more opportunities than women.
So, although unconscious bias is something all of us need to be aware of, there is one thing I would like to say directly to men: just because you don’t see this with your own eyes doesn’t mean it is not happening. Make the effort to talk to the women in your organisation and understand what they are experiencing.
What can be done?
We worked with Campaign Asia to create a Mandate for Change, signed by the APAC heads of the 6 major media groups this year. It commits them to doing at least one of the following (and we are hoping for all four!):
- Create an equality action plan (currently only 31% of businesses have one)
- Implement flexible work options and conduct manager training to encourage uptake
- Support development opportunities with each member of the executive committee personally mentoring a successor of the opposite gender
- Conduct a pay equality review
What will you implement in your workplace this year?
For more information on this study, or to conduct it in your organisation please contact me on anne.rayner@kantartns.com