Why must women still be overlooked?
I’M EMBARRASSED at how few women I’ve interacted with professionally in the course of covering African’s tech and innovation scene. It’s got me wondering why such a stark gender imbalance has persisted in Africa and in other more developed parts of the world – even in places that one might expect to find a more progressive state of affairs.
Recently, Silicon Valley tech giants, not least Uber, have been taken to task for failing to create an inviting and enabling environment for women to operate in and lacking the commitment to ensure that women can work without being harassed.
At the recent World Economic Forum on Africa hosted in Durban I caught up with two senior executives serving at two leading global tech firms to get a sense of what they make of the progress being made, or lack thereof, in addressing gender inequality within tech.
When asked to sum up the issue, Charmaine Houvet, the public policy director for Africa at Cisco, quoted views published in the Harvard Business Review that hold that gender equality is not a women’s issue, but rather a political, economic and social opportunity.
Houvet said that while she had observed more and more corporate leaders bump gender equality up on their list of priorities, we aren’t all the way there yet in convincing the industry that diversity was a key ingredient for ensuring business success.
She cited the McKinsey Women Matter Africa 2016 report, which makes a strong business case for greater gender diversity in senior leadership positions, stating that companies with more women in executive positions tend to be more profitable – by as much as 20 percent.
Michelle Davadoss, the acting vice-president of marketing communications at Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa, told me that male business leaders who are content to maintain the status quo need to be sold on fact-based transformation strategies that steer clear of emotive and anecdotal reasoning.
She went on to cite research by the McKinsey Global Institute that shows that if women were to participate in the global economy equally to men, as much as $28 trillion (R379trln) could be added to the annual global gross domestic product by 2025. To put that into context, that figure is roughly the combined size of the economies of the US and China.
Davadoss is convinced that the world is slowly coming to the realisation that persistent gender inequality carries with it large economic costs.
Many believe that despite all this, if left to their own devices, corporate interests won’t act to change the status quo.
It’s widely thought that legislative or regulatory measures, however inconvenient, are an unfortunate necessity if we are to see any progress on this issue. Charmaine Houvet argues that in countries where legislative or voluntary targets are in place, representation of women in key roles is higher. She is quick to point out that if we are to see sustained results, organisations need to commit to transforming the way they think and act about gender equality, by initiating co-ordinated corporate efforts spear-headed by committed chief executives.
Drastic push
It’s difficult to criticise Houvet’s position when, as Davadoss points out, according to the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2015, Rwanda beats the US and France in gender equality. In a drastic push backed by the country’s president Paul Kagame, Rwanda has put in place policies to help encourage women to join and stay in the workforce.
Unlike in the US, for example, women in Rwanda now benefit from three months’ paid maternity leave, making it much easier for them to stay in the labour market once they’ve started a family. Meanwhile, the US remains the only major developed nation in the world not to mandate paid maternity leave.
That is in large part thanks to quotas put in place following the genocide, stipulating that women must make up 30 percent of parliamentary positions. Compare this to the US where it’s been predicted it will take no less than 500 years for women to achieve levels of fair representation in politics alone.
While Rwanda is doing a lot to debunk the archaic notion that women are less capable than men, and while the example being set by high-profile international tech executives like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo’s former chief executive Marissa Mayer help to make the same point, some sobering PwC research has revealed that only 3 percent of female students consider a career in technology as their first choice to begin with.
That statistic hints at broader cultural issues that continue to influence the roles and responsibilities societies around the world, not least here in Africa, consider appropriate for women to inhabit in both the domestic and the professional context.
Now, I often catch myself questioning the seriousness of some of the more prominent women-focused development initiatives being driven by tech biggies like Google, IBM and others on the continent these days. After declaring my cynicism, I asked both Charmaine Houvet and Michelle Davadoss which African programmes they are most excited. On cue, both ladies cited campaigns backed by their own organisations.
Davadoss told me that Ericsson is putting their staff through unconscious bias training to help them overcome all the implicit people preferences formed by their socialisation, experiences, and their exposure to others’ views about various groups of people.
Meanwhile, Houvet highlighted Cisco’s role as a founding signatory of the Equal Pay Pledge – a pay parity framework the company has co-designed to ensure that all employees are treated fairly and paid equitably.
It is, however, Vodafone’s global initiative to re-employ women who may have previously stepped out of the formal workplace to care for their families that excites me nearly as much as it does Davadoss.
Vive la femme!