Andrew Stevens

Chair of the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre and former managing director of IBM

MCC SINCE 2011

IT’S all very well having a policy that requires job candidate lists to be half women and half men but if you don’t start moving to 50/50 in your hiring, you’re not successful, says Andrew Stevens, who joined the MCC in 2011 after he was appointed managing director of IBM.

“A lot of organisations say they have the 50-per-cent short list but they don’t have the hires,” he says. “That’s how gender washing happens.”

At IBM, Stevens set about raising the company’s ratio of women in leadership positions from less than 40 per cent. When he left IBM in 2014, it had 46 per cent women on the leadership team, the board was 50/50 and the number of female interns had increased from 25 to 48 per cent.

Motivation for joining the MCC was partly personal, he explains, as he couldn’t imagine why his daughter should have fewer opportunities than his sons. But he was swayed by the possibility of learning from peers and having an impact. “If I look at what I’ve learnt from the others involved – about bias, violence, discrimination and pay equality – it’s a hothouse of development and peer pressure that I couldn’t in a lifetime of learning have replaced.”

Publicity about the group has often focused on collective action, such as the Panel Pledge. But that’s a smaller part of the work, says Stevens. It’s mostly coming up with ideas and using different tactics within their own organisations. “What defines us from other groups, male and female, is we have a community of practice that is based on research we have done, implementation and evaluation after the fact. We publish our results – so if you don’t meet the expectation you have set, you are opening yourself to ridicule.”

And if not ridicule then judgement. Some critics have pointed to a lack of major change, which Stevens admits is not as fast as hoped. But he insists the momentum is still strong and expectations are realistic. “I don’t think any of us has wanted to hold ourselves up as perfect role models – because if we were, we wouldn’t need to be there. I think we’re imperfect role models. We’re not saving women but working alongside them.”

Now Stevens is helping to establish a new MCC group. “David Thodey and I were asked by the National Innovation and Science Agenda to lead a project in the STEM sector [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] and it will launch later this year,” he says. “An understanding of the issues means a high degree of commitment to be part of the solution and make a difference.”