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With the percentage of women in leadership positions hitting an all-time low in 2018, the issue of female representation at the highest levels of leadership is being increasingly brought to light.
Grant Thornton’s 2018 Women in Business report saw New Zealand rank 33rd out of 35 countries for gender diversity, with the report stating that the country has taken “one step forward and two steps back.” Gender equality policies vary widely across organisations, but one thing is clear – the commercial success of an organisation is bolstered considerably by a diverse workforce, and the business case for diversity has been very well documented.
Quotas and targets have long been a point of contention, with some seeing them as a blunt but effective tool, and others questioning whether they might do more harm than good. Speaking at Insurance Business’s inaugural Women in Insurance Summit in Auckland, industry leaders voiced their opinions on the use of quotas and targets as a means of addressing the increasingly skewed gender ratio.
“A target is a percentage of women in leadership that your organisation aspires towards, and a quota is a fixed number that the organisation must deliver,” said IAG chief operating officer Melissa Cantell.
“I am personally utterly opposed to quotas, but I am comfortable with targets so long as they are managed in the right way. I would never want to be in a role, senior or otherwise, purely to meet someone’s quota – you want to be there because you are the best person for the job.”
“Equally, if we’re trying to break down the ‘boys’ club,’ the way to do that is not to create a new and tighter boys’ club where they feel like the women in the room don’t deserve to be there,” Cantell continued. “A quota environment creates an ‘A team’ and a ‘B team,’ and we don’t want to be sat around a table questioning whether someone else might have done the job better. A quota may get us to a 50/50 ratio faster, but ultimately it creates more problems than it solves.”
According to Benita Murray, senior account manager at Aon New Zealand, a quota method may be blunt, but it can bring women into the running for leadership roles that they might otherwise not have been considered for.
Murray says the effectiveness of quotas depends entirely on the intricacies of an organisation and how it chooses to implement them, and that the process must be carefully managed to avoid it becoming arbitrary.
“Quotas can be useful as a means to addressing some of the systematic problems that create some of the disparity that we see,” she explains. “It certainly is about the best person for the job, but what if the best person isn’t in contention due to bias factors? What if something in the pipeline is preventing them from being in the right place? It’s about creating a system that removes some of the obstacles women face, and ensuring that they are in contention for the appropriate roles.
“Tokenism is certainly an issue, but if diversity becomes a core value of a company throughout all levels, then it becomes a means to creating those wider changes that then allow women to progress.”
“There is also some accountability on us as women to make sure that we are strong,” Cantell explains. “That we’re pushing ourselves to do better, having the tough conversations around where we want to go in our careers, and that we’re not afraid to go up against the best guy in the organisation for a senior role.”
