Clear case for promoting women

Canadian employer says his Scottish firm now has the best gender balance

IAN Smith, CEO of Canada’s Clearwater Seafoods, said in the nine years he had been attending the Brussels expo much had changed regarding female participation, with more women working in seafood rather than handing out samples at booths.

Taking part in a Women in Seafood seminar, with an all Canadian panel, Smith said there were even now some female CEOs in the industry, but they were very few and far between.

‘So we’ve come a long way, we’ve made progress, and we have so much work to do,’ he said.

Nova Scotia based Clearwater Seafoods, which bought Scotland’s Macduff Shellfish for nearly £100 million in 2015, is one of North America’s largest seafood companies.

It employs more than 1,900 people in a vertically integrated business, owning fishing quotas, vessels and processing facilities.

Smith said: ‘We are committed as a company to having a workforce and a work place that is free from discrimination and values all types of diversity.

‘Fundamentally, we need to be representative of the communities that we serve- the communities we operate in but also our customers, our suppliers, our employees and our shareholders.

‘We do that in a number of different ways. We are conscious and focused on the systemic barriers to employment and advancement of women in our company.

‘We want to achieve a workforce where women are equally represented and we have specific policies around that.’

Smith later told Fish Farmer that the gender

balance in Macduff was now better than in the Canadian operation.

It had been possible to start with a clean slate and make sweeping changes in the company’s culture when Clearwater took over the Peterhead based firm, he said.

Smith added that he had an overblown sense of fairness about diversity and he admitted he shook things up and ‘now they have changed their culture’.

He mentioned Lee Malcolm, who came in as head of HR but who he then promoted to director of operations.

‘When you find women with talent in your company and support and help them to develop, they continue to be strong performers and they have a higher retention rate than the men,’ said Smith.

He told the audience at the seminar that his company was sponsoring Women in Seafood out of both fairness and competitiveness.

‘I grew up mostly raised by my mum and she had to go to work. She worked as a secretary in an insurance office and worked really hard and tried to work her way up.

‘I saw first-hand how she worked for men who were less competent and less knowledgeable than her and how she was routinely passed over for promotion.’

Later on, when he served in the military in the 1980s, things had changed a lot but the lack of diversity and gender discrimination was institutionalised.

‘So I had a lot of first-hand experience of what not to do, and how it was very unfair.’

As for competitiveness, he said: ‘We want to win and we’re only going to win if we have the best talent, and we’re not going to win the war on talent unless we address diversity of all kinds but, in particular, gender diversity.’

The statistics are very clear: ‘Diversity strengthens our capability, improves the bottom line, unlocks innovation, drives customer satisfaction and boosts our brand and our brand reputation.

‘We address that, we have very clear policies in the company, we have metrics (you can’t manage what you don’t measure), we focus on making sure that our human systems are tied to our policies and principles on how we want to achieve gender diversity in our company.’

Laura Halfyard, general manager of Sunrise Fish Farms of Newfoundland, said the number one reason women engineers leave the profession is for family reasons, because their careers do not allow them the flexibility of a family.

‘What about the cost of training that woman and then, because she wants to take a few years and have children, you would sooner go out and search and retrain another guy, than try to hold on to her and value her more.’

Smith said they have husbands and wives who work for his company and when there is a birth of a baby it really is a family event.

‘But it is tough. If you have equivalent leave for husband and wife- we’re not that big a company that we don’t miss husband and wife both taking a significant amount of time off at the same time.

‘I think we always need to think about how we support families and how we have to come up with strategies that address the needs of families, not only when they have young children at home but also husbands and wives taking care of elderly parents.

‘I don’t think there are any silver bullets, it’s more about the mindset, recognising that these are challenges that exist within the organisation and that you have to try and address them.

‘I also don’t think it’s a situation where you can simply write policy, not one size fits all.’

Halfyard said: ‘Going forward, we have an ageing population and recruitment challenges, so if we say we’re only going to recruit from 50 per cent of the population it hits home.

‘It’s simple maths – you’ve got to have both involved in the workforce to progress forward. It’s not only a nice thing to do, it’s an essential thing to do.’

“We need to be representative of serve” the communities that we