Author: Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

Does anyone else find it strange that the debate heating up in the US around gender imbalances in the workplace is overwhelmingly a conversation among … women? This constant frame of gender as a “women’s issue” is one of the big obstacles to progress — in both countries and companies.

Is there any doubt that women are where they are today in part thanks to the male partners — at home and at work — that accompanied them throughout the last half century’s revolutions? I have rarely met a successful woman who was not developed and promoted by at least one enlightened man.

The challenge is that progressive men are not always highly effective leaders on gender issues, in part because they have not been particularly involved in the conversation. It is high time they were. And high time more women invited them in.

In my experience working with companies, there are three main reasons that progressive men hesitate to speak up for gender balance:

1. It’s a no-brainer. The first group consider the case for gender balance so obvious that it doesn’t require elaboration or argument.

The challenge is that these leaders don’t think they need to convince anyone of the benefits of balance. They don’t think anyone needs to hear any kind of business case anymore — that is yesterday’s battle. They assume their teams are all aligned behind them, and all they need to do is communicate a target. They usually launch enthusiastically into the fray, overcommunicating their goal and underestimating the incomprehension that usually meets their efforts. They end up frustrated a few years on at the lack of progress. These leaders often waste precious years and goodwill on ineffective approaches (usually targeted at women, rather than at the entire organization). Essentially, they charge out of the closet — and into the frying pan.

As a result, these leaders often take overly aggressive approaches with unrealistic timelines that then create a backlash. They usually revisit the topic with more appropriate resourcing after a few years of unsatisfactory progress, or their successor quietly shelves their efforts.

2. It’s not worth fighting for (or being identified with). A second group are quiet supporters but don’t want to make it a big deal. It’s kind of like religion; something to be practiced quietly at home or in their own teams, but not preached about in public.

This is probably the attitude of most progressive men I’ve met. That majority status makes these men absolutely crucial to changing the cultures of the companies and countries where they work. Moreover, they are currently developing, promoting and financing tomorrow’s talent. This requires the skills and engagement to be proactively leading on gender. Yet in many of the sessions I run, it is the nay-sayers that are loud, assertive and argumentative. The progressive men hold back, occasionally suggesting a caveat to a reactionary’s voluble bluster. It takes a lot of courage for men to stand up to other men on the topic of gender balancing.

And yet too many progressive men are taken aback by some of the reactions and often decide that gender is not priority enough to be worth fighting for. They let the louder voices dominate the debate.

3. It will happen naturally. A final group of leaders are the ones who already have gender balanced their teams. They argue that it is a simple case of meritocracy: recognizing and promoting the best people. They assume that since the pipeline of colleges, graduate programs, and entry- to mid-level jobs are full of high-performing women, that merit will win out and eventually women will start to make it in real numbers to the senior levels.

In doing so, they underestimate their own skills and “gender bilingualism.” They don’t recognize that their own abilities to recognize talent equally well among both men and women is an unusual skill that not all managers possess. They are usually reluctant to spend much time and effort in equipping others with the skills and awareness that they themselves take for granted. This blind spot has much the same effect as the others — ineffective leadership on the issue.

If you’re reading this and recognize any of your own impulses here, there are specific actions you can take to have more influence on this issue. First, learn how to lead on gender or learn how you already do. Ask for feedback from your team, about how your management style may differ from others they have experienced. Know the data relevant to your sector and company. Second, recognize that your colleagues may not buy the idea of equality. So sell it. Third, recognize that even if your your colleagues like the idea of gender balance, they may not know how to get there. Teach them what you know. Finally, if you’ve decided to make this a major initiative at your firm — bravo! — just don’t appoint a woman to lead the charge. Male majorities buy the business case for gender balance better from a man.

“I think multinational companies like to recruit women in China,” an ex-pat female senior executive in Beijing explained to me recently. “They are more likely to have the language skills, a cooperative management style, and are enthusiastic about working for foreign firms which are more likely to promote them.” That may be why the leadership team I was working with last week was the reverse of what I see in most countries: women outnumbered men.

Some of the research confirms this impression, putting China way ahead of the US and making most Western countries look like a bastion of backwardness. An example is the latest Grant Thornton report, which puts China’s senior management at 51% female, which would make it the first country to have a majority of female executives.

Now, some of this data has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, especially since last year’s report from the same survey had just 25% of Chinese senior managers as female. Even China can’t possibly change that fast. (Asked about this, Grant Thornton agreed they would have to review their criteria.) Yet it does seem to reflect the reality of what I have seen in many multinationals’ statistics. Foreign firms are tapping into a vibrant pool of high-performing female talent in China in greater numbers than they do in most western countries. This is also true in a number of other emerging countries.

International companies are discovering that they can often cherry pick the very best female talent in countries where the local firms still discriminate against women. They also discover that the best male talent would often rather work for local firms which may offer better long-term prospects and tempting job roles without having to leave the country. So the choice, as one manager put it to me, is simple: “In terms of local talent, it’s between first-rate women or second-rate men.”

Smart, highly educated, ambitious women are increasingly learning to prefer the opportunities that global companies offer them over the sometimes-stodgy cultural norms of local firms that are reluctant to promote them. And interestingly, the result is that multinational companies end up with better gender balance in new markets than they ever managed to get at home.

Female executives are also more loyal than their male counterparts, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s work on the female talent pool in China has found. In China’s red hot, hard-to-retain talent market, that should be soothing music to recruiters’ ears. “88% of women are loyal to their current employers,” she found, “And 76% are willing to go the extra mile.”

The World Economic Forum has found that China has a gender gap that favors women at “professional and technical” levels (where there are 1.08 women for every man) and in university education (where there are 1.1 women for every man). China has a 74% female labor force participation level, the highest of all the BRIC countries.

And yet it’s not all good news — according to the WEF, only 17% of “legislators and managers” are female, a number the OECD data (shown at right) agrees with. Now, this merging of private and public sector is not very helpful, as it is clear that women are hugely under-represented in the Communist Party’s senior echelons (where many may argue the real power lies).

So what’s going on? Is there a new “gap” we can start to name the Mature Market Gender Gap, where western companies will increasingly gender balance in growth markets while remaining unbalanced at home? And where local companies in growth markets perpetuate a male dominated model?

If this is true, it will certainly make for some interesting future analyses of the competitive advantages of gender balanced workplaces. In the meantime, expect to see a lot of global companies start to move their senior Chinese, Russian and Brazilian women around to improve their overall gender balance. As companies strive for more senior executives that are both women and from growth markets, they may find that they can, if you’ll pardon the pun, get two birds with one chick.

“While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace,” writes Cisco CEO John Chambers in a leaked email, “my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade.”

This awakening is the result of a meeting with Sheryl Sandberg and reading her just-published book, Lean In. If this is the impact of Sandberg’s book, I will be applauding. As she writes in the book, there is a “chicken and egg argument” about which comes first: fixing organizations or fixing women’s “internal impediments.” She admits to focusing on women, and leaves others to focus on organizations.

As someone who has spent her career focusing on this other part of the equation, I offer a few suggestions for John Chambers on how to make this initiative really work:

1. Sell the “why.” Why does Chambers want to gender balance Cisco? For it to work, he needs to make sense of this goal. He says that “the result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.” But does his team buy this? Many leaders don’t think they need to explain the why of gender balance. To them, it is a very obvious benefit to their businesses. But most of Chambers’s (predominantly male) colleagues probably don’t share this belief. And until they do, or he has convinced them of it, he can push all you like but will be unlikely to improve balance more in the next decade than in the last.

Companies that successfully attain gender balance do so because their leaders believe it will improve quality, culture, performance and the bottom line.

2. Focus on men… Chambers admirably admits that he is after culture change. “I believe we — together — need to drive a fundamental culture change and it is up to us as leaders to make this change happen. What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.” He also has the courage to publicly admit that while he thought he was enlightened, he was doing the wrong things.

The challenge ahead is this: the real obstacle in most companies is not women. It is the existing leadership mindset, culture, and styles. This means most of the focus needs to be on changing the male majority, not on changing women. Chambers will need to get all his leaders to share the discovery that he has just made: that the environment they think of as a meritocracy may not be quite as fair and equitable as they thought. But he needs to be careful: realizing this shouldn’t lead to blaming men. That’s asking for backlash.

3. …but don’t blame them. “Without realizing it, we operate every day with gender stereotypes and biases, many of which we do not realize.” While this is true, I’d suggest it’s a highly demotivating and unnecessary way to launch the change.

Accusing men is a great way, in my experience, to shut them down. Instead use another approach: reframe gender balance as one of the century’s most obvious business opportunities. This isn’t a hard case to make, and it lets a company get everyone aligned and focused on what everyone wins from gender balance. By contrast, framing imbalance as a problem caused by their biases is setting ourselves up to fail. Most of Chambers’s male colleagues are probably convinced and committed to equality of treatment. They believe they practice it in their management. So asking them, as he does, to come up with changes, will not be understood until they have gone through some phase of building understanding (see below). Reading a book may not quite do it.

4. Stop fixing women… Framing the problem as Chambers did in his letter, his managers will inevitably look at what more they can do for women, and start launching box-ticking initiatives aimed only at women. This seems to be what he is asking for, when he writes that he’s “ordering each of my top managers to come up with new women-focused initiatives and put them into their development plans.”

This always leads to more “women’s” programs — networks, coaching, assertiveness-training. This is the challenge that Sandberg’s book presents: reinforcing the assumption that male leaders will think women still need fixing and empowering. This is not the problem. The world has never seen a more ambitious, educated and skilled wave of women entering the workforce. Women just need meritocracies — and managers skilled in leading across genders, who understand that the differences they bring to the table aren’t to be fixed. They’re to be celebrated — and used.

5. …or making them a diversity demographic. Who ever came up with the idea of positioning 60% of university graduates and 80% of consumer purchasing decision-makers as a “diversity” demographic? Chambers repeats this mistake by telling his leaders that if they need help coming up with ideas, they should contact his (female) Diversity Officer. By the way, it doesn’t help gender balancing that he has women in all the stereotypical female functions, HR and Diversity… why not add some men to those functions and have more women in finance and strategy?

Pull gender balancing out of its diversity ghetto. Is it fundamental to your business success over the next decade? Then get a high profile male leader to lead the charge. Make it a business issue, not a diversity issue.

6. Get all leaders skilled at managing across genders. Cisco will need to spend a bit of time and money building skills among their leaders and managers. It is very hard to manage across genders when people don’t really understand what the differences are and how they affect the workplace. The challenge here is not to treat everyone equally and the same (most managers think they already do), but to treat everyone equally and different, with a deep understanding of what those differences are.

You don’t manage Chinese employees or customers the same as you would an American employee or customer. You learn their language and culture. Cisco has probably spent a lot of time and money getting Cisco to understand the Chinese. For this gender initiative to really work, they’ll need to build the same competencies for their managers, both male and female, to understand the differences and opportunities of gender. That takes rael money budgeted towards it.

7. Make it strategic, sexy, and fun. What most surprises my clients is how much fun this topic can be. Every man and woman on the planet today is facing gender issues at home and at work. Helping them to understand and navigate one of human history’s biggest revolutions doesn’t have to be an accusatory man-bashing exercise. It can be an opportunity to share and learn about one of the great mysteries that science hasn’t yet even begun to explain: How do we better understand each other?

The more strategically leaders can frame the issue — as a lever to achieving existing goals (growth, customer centricity, globalization), rather than a politically correct addition to their already over-burdened agendas — the more enthusiasm they’ll generate. Gender balanced companies have better performance, better talent and better customer and stakeholder relationships. But John Chambers will need to say it, show it, prove it — and then deliver it to actually get everyone to believe it.

If Cisco runs this as a women-focused diversity initiative, in ten years they’ll be right where they are now. Run it as a key driver in keeping the company in tune with 21st century talent and customers and they may just make history.

Speaking to a group of very international young business students in Switzerland, the room was a good balance of men and women, with a slight preponderance of women. I asked the men to raise their hands if they expected to have the lead career in their relationship. Almost all of them put their hands up. I then asked the women how many of them would be ready to be the secondary career to their partners. None of them raised their hands.

There lies today’s dilemma. Both men and women are looking for something that is rare, and perhaps increasingly so: the partner who will support their career.

A lot of young people today think that “gender issues” are a little bit passé. That Generation Y has a different, more progressive attitude. This is not my experience in speaking regularly at some of the world’s leading business schools. On the contrary, I find these students steeped in stereotypes and expectations that success requires a sort of extreme machismo.

The next ten years will be crucial for accelerating gender balance. I think after that that it will get much harder — not much easier, as many assume. The current generation of leaders running organizations are baby boomers who have been educated and trained in male-dominated companies and environments. For many of them, gender balance is actually a pretty unemotional no-brainer. They may not be overly familiar with professional women, but many of them have daughters, and they all have an eye on the education statistics that are dramatically feminizing. They see the stats on talent, on customers, and they start to move.

One of my key challenges is to get these top guys to understand that balance is less obvious the further down the existing hierarchy you go. They will each need to invest time and energy getting all their managers to buy the need for balance. One CEO was sure his team was aligned behind him — until we ran a session with them, and he made them publicly state whether they believed balance would improve results. Only half said they did. He was stunned. He thought it was so obvious it didn’t even require explanation.

But for today’s young men, it’s a whole different story. They have been to female-dominated universities. They have had girls out-performing them in schools their entire lives (the OECD Pisa studies show girls outperforming boys at almost every grade level, in almost every country). They have a deep understanding of the potential competition they face every day from the ladies. If they find that today’s male dominated corporate cultures give them a competitive edge, I think it is wishful thinking to assume they will be big promoters of balance. They will, like most ambitious men before them, be big promoters of themselves.

These young men have trouble understanding the business case for balance. Only a fraction of men in these talks “gets it.” That running a gender-balanced corporation might actually be better for business, for their companies, for their customers. They are mired in personal perspectives, in ideas about who has children, in their own preferences for wives who will take care of life while they shine professionally. Women, of course, love the business case, but usually discover with a certain degree of horror how retrograde their school chums reveal themselves to be.

What’s to be done? Use the present moment. Many of today’s CEOs are pushing hard on gender. We need to accelerate the pace, and help them do it better and more effectively. Time is short, and Gen Y may not be as progressive on gender as they think — and we hope — they are.

Most of the women I meet in the US are torn between familiar female twin guilts — not enough time with their kids, and not enough time for their work. Men are increasingly sharing in this guilt. Much of the Anglo-Saxon debate about “women in leadership” is framed as an issue of women’s “choices.” The implication is that women “choose” to gear down their careers in favor of work-life balance. This is nonsense. The reality for most women — indeed most parents — is that there is no choice. And a growing number of voices are now, thankfully, saying so.

There are three levels at play here, which are often unhelpfully confused with one another. I call them the three C’s: countries, companies and couples. And there are some short-cut metrics at each level to evaluate how we’re doing. The three are interdependent, but they each require specific actions and the involvement of different players.

1. Countries — Public Policy. What is the public policy context in your country? Has it recognized, like Norway, China or France, that 21st century parents both work and that infrastructure, day care and tax systems ought to recognize this basic fact? Or has it, like the U.S., ignored the consequences of women’s massive arrival into the labor force and framed the issue of dual incomes and childcare as a matter of individual “choice”?

The problem is, of course, that in many countries there is no real choice. As Stephanie Coontz wrote recently in the New York Times, “Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences.”

Given no way of conciliating work and parenthood, people feel like perpetual failures. They somehow can’t live up to a rather normal human goal of being able to both earn a living and procreate, which is recast as some kind of ridiculously utopian myth of “having it all.” Yet in other countries, policies have adapted more quickly to the consequences of women’s massive educational and economic rise.

Key Metric: birth rates. Countries that facilitate and recognise the need for parents to work enjoy higher birth rates. Those that don’t see their birth rates fall below replacement ratios and their populations shrink, as in Germany and Japan.

2. Companies — Corporate Culture & Policies. The national frame affects how business leaders perceive female ambition and motivation. In countries without policies that facilitate conciliation, managers overwhelmingly think that women “choose” family commitments over work. When companies in these countries seek to gender balance, they often over-focus on this analysis and ignore the bigger issue that underlies the challenge facing the private sector: That the dominant group in companies is men, and that this group sets the rules, the norms and the expectations for how leaders look and behave.

Anne-Marie Slaughter points to this issue of the still-unquestioned dominance of historical male norms in an Atlantic article. “Until we change the norm itself, learn to reshape our workplaces and our expectations around a different image of what normal is, those differences will still be penalized.”

This is, I would argue, the problem with many current diversity approaches to gender. “Diversity and Inclusion” efforts focus on making the various “out” groups comfortable by organizing them (or allowing them to organize themselves) into affinity groups or employee resource groups. That way they can talk to each other and feel better. They are happy and feel cared for. And the “in” group feels happy too, as they are being nice and “inclusive” of the “out” folk.

The real issue is to develop the corporate leadership skills to manage a feminizing talent pool and a feminizing customer base. This requires managers who are fluent and familiar with the differences between genders and able to manage both. These skills are still scarce. And diversity training that focuses on ‘self-awareness’ and ‘inclusion’ isn’t enough. This isn’t about being nice, it’s about being skilled. You need to learn something about the Chinese to work with them. And you need to learn something about women to be able to work effectively with them too.

Key Metric: the ratio of men and women (and nationalities) on the Executive Committee is the clearest indicator of a company’s openness to 21st century realities. More than the much-publicized debates around boards, the executive team is the result of years of talent development. Today, most companies are still far from any level of balance at this level. (See our 2013 Global Gender Balance Scorecard.

3. Couples — Personal Priorities. There is an irreconcilable conflict between the personal and professional in countries that have not built the infrastructure to manage the products of our unions: children. This is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon and German omission. Coontz’s article presents an embarrassing graphic showing that the US is the only developed country on the planet with no paid maternity leave, let alone more modern European innovations like parental leave for both parents. No wonder American parents are increasingly unhappy.

So why is this always framed as an issue of personal choice? For our species, having children is about as much of a choice as breathing is. Survival is more the issue. Most women in the U.S. don’t have anything like what your average European woman would call a choice (without even getting started on whether men do — see my earlier post on Norway). Judith Warner starts her book on American motherhood, Perfect Madness, with the line, “I used to live in paradise and I didn’t even know it.” She was referring to the working woman’s pleasure of having children in France.

Focusing the blame on women is so common it isn’t even conscious. That’s what Sheryl Sandberg does writing books telling women to “lean in.” That’s what companies do when they focus all their gender initiatives on “fix the women” programs (networks for women, conferences for women, training for women), reinforcing the idea that the reason there aren’t more women in senior roles is because women aren’t trying or wanting it enough.

This creates an enormous amount of individual guilt, something that is remarkably absent in countries and companies that have addressed the issues above. It causes conflict in couples who then need to battle it out over who does what at home and whose career takes precedence at work. Yet this is not a personal problem. It’s a political, economic and social one.

It seems essential in 2013 to recognize the difference. When 60% of university graduates are women, does it make any sense to make the majority of the educated talent feel guilty about leveraging their skills in the economy? We need to stop blaming women and start designing policies to create more sustainable countries, companies and couples.

Key Metric: the divorce rate. If the divorce rate is too high in a country, it suggests there is still a lot of stress being put on individuals. It can also be too low, suggesting that women don’t have a choice of leaving (the majority of divorces are initiated by women).

It would help all of us, men and women, to recognize the need for good policy design at each of these levels. The objective of every life is to work and love. That shouldn’t be a cause for guilt. It should be our shared mandate for change.

I was taken aback when I saw the Vigeland sculpture park in Oslo, one of Norway’s most popular tourist destinations. Then I was shocked by my shock. I realized it was the first time in my life that I had ever seen depictions of fatherhood in art. Here, all around me, were depictions of masculine men tenderly embracing tiny babies, teaching toddlers their paces, or tossing teens in laughing play.

Thank God for the Nordics. The Economist has just written a hymn of a Special Report, full of rapt wonder at “probably the best governed countries in the world.” But they hardly mention that it’s also the region that boasts the most gender-balanced governments in the world, as though that’s not really a critical factor in the success of its ‘pragmatic’ approach to governing.

“[T]he new Nordic model is proving strikingly successful,” says Adrian Wooldridge. “The Nordics dominate indices of competitiveness as well as of well-being.” It’s no accident that these countries have legislated gender balance deep into their political and economic fabric, using quotas if other means weren’t effective. Pragmatic indeed.

Nordic countries’ progressive gender policies have deep cultural roots. Cross-cultural analysts like Geert Hofstede have said that the biggest difference between the Nordics and other countries are their highly ‘feminine’ vs ‘masculine’ values. Masculinity in this analysis is defined as “a preference for achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material reward for success. Society at large is more competitive. Its opposite, femininity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.”

It is hard to imagine The Economist arguing that “cooperation and modesty” may be an effective engine for competitiveness and growth. Yet it is inconceivable that one of the most distinctive features of the Nordic countries — their highly progressive approach to gender balance in all things social, political and economic — has not significantly contributed to countries that are now, at the dawn of the 21st century, healthy, wealthy and wise. For a skeptical world hungry for data-driven proof of everything (see David Brooks on “The Philosophy of Data“), the Nordic model should also be proof that approaches driven, defined and underpinned by the complementarity values and perspectives of men and women deliver huge benefits — as can be seen nowhere else (yet) in the world.

The Nordic executive team (mostly men) I worked with this week were fascinated by the Hofstede research. They suddenly understood why their own leadership styles may have been less impactful with their Anglo-Saxon headquarter colleagues. They were behaving in a more “feminine” way than their peers would be comfortable with, and my comments on the difference between male and female communication and leadership styles suddenly took on an entirely new significance.

They all had wives who worked, and they all knew that in the Nordic operations they ran, fathers were just as avid to bond with their new babies as mothers. In all other developed countries (with the notable exception of the United States), it is now more or less acceptable for women to take paid maternity leave, but in many countries and companies, men are still harshly judged as unambitious if they take more than the parsimonious amount of paternity leave a few governments have timidly allotted them. But in the Nordics, the governments’ enlightened policy-making has forced employers to make parental leave as equally (and gender-neutrally) available to men as to women. For instance, in Sweden, new parents can take up to 13 months of leave (at 80% pay) and divide the time up however they like between them.

Women will only become leaders in greater numbers when men become fathers. As the Nordics have so beautifully shown, happy families are the rock on which healthy — and sustainable — economies are built. Gustav Vigeland knew that, and carved it in stone, back in 1940s Oslo.

Seventeen percent of Davos attendees are female this year, and Sheryl Sandberg was one of them. Her explanation for the dearth of women in leadership positions is that they don’t “lean in,” also the title of her upcoming book, due out in March. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” she writes.

It’s sad that so influential a woman couldn’t see — and seize — an opportunity to influence the business world to become more gender balanced. She could have used her position as one of the most powerful women in America today to argue to the men at Davos — 83% of the attendees — that women represent an enormous opportunity for business. That they are the majority of the educated talent on the planet, and the majority of consumers and end-users in an ever-widening array of sectors, including her own. That gender balanced leadership teams correlate to superior corporate returns.

Instead, she does what too many successful women before her have done: blaming other women for not trying hard enough. But women in the US now represent the majority of college graduates, the majority of MAs and the majority of PhDs. How much harder do you want them to “lean in”?

It hasn’t proven as natural as we all thought for women to break into the leadership ranks of the corporate world. All the companies I work for have learned that gender balance is a result of highly proactive management pushing, not a complacent declaration that outsiders can succeed in the existing system by trying harder.

Sandberg does not serve other women well by pretending that companies are a meritocracy that just requires individual effort. She herself was sponsored and propelled, like almost every successful woman I have ever met, by a powerful man, in her case Larry Summers.

It’s tough to lead externally on this subject if you can’t make progress internally in your own company. Sandberg is the only woman on Facebook’s Executive Team, and the only woman on the company’s board (where she was added months after the board’s formation), despite the fact that women represent the majority of Facebook users (57%).

Nick Kristof wonders in his New York Times column if she isn’t “blaming the victim.” She is. Unfortunately, her argument carries clout. Every resistant man on the planet will be able to quote her. Women must simply become more ambitious, more assertive, more… male. Then maybe we can promote them.

In the meantime, the most gender balanced companies on the planet are mostly led by men, who thankfully seem to believe more in reaching out to women than Sandberg does. This is what smart women really need. Companies and leaders who believe in them and give them a seat at the table, even if they don’t bang on it.

“Pakistan is a highly complex and ambiguous country,” Ehsan Malik, Country Manager for Unilever Pakistan, told me. “The media projects Pakistan as conservative, but there is a large segment of society that is liberal and broad minded.” (Disclosure: Unilever is a client of mine globally, but not the Pakistan branch particularly.)

“My predecessor at Unilever Pakistan was a woman who went to run L’Oreal Pakistan. My wife runs a business and both our mothers and sisters have always worked, as do many in our families and friends. So for me Unilever’s gender balance drive is not something extraordinary.” Two of the people on Malik’s six-person Management Committee are women, and he sees the possibility that his successor could be female. “There are three senior women who have been listed as high potential so we could have a majority female Management Committee in the foreseeable future.”

“We aimed to set an example and become a model on gender balance. Now, virtually all our competitors are doing the same… In Pakistan, despite the bad press, when it comes to gender, employers are progressive.”

How do the men react? “There was a debate two or three years back, around a concern that we were favoring women. We made it very clear: between two equal candidates, we said we would pick the woman because there is an imbalance that needs to be corrected.” In Pakistan, as in a growing number of countries, women perform better academically. “Medical colleges are 70% women but less than half of them continue working beyond a few years of qualifying, partly because of family reasons but also due to working conditions,” notes Malik.

In many companies I work for, some of the greatest openness and action on gender balance is in emerging market operations. I have found managers in Brazil, India or Malaysia more enthusiastic and convinced of the business case than their Western colleagues, in much more challenging contexts. And ready to go to much greater lengths to adapt to women’s needs.

Like Pakistan. Unilever Pakistan has achieved its gender balancing targets internally (ahead of most Western countries), which Malik considered “relatively simple,” yet by doing things that might appear inconceivable elsewhere. So, for example, to recruit female engineers in its remote factories, Unilever provides security-guard staffed housing for the women next to the facilities, ensuring their safety and reassuring their families. Flexible working from different locations — home, distributor premises, or ad agency offices — is another step that benefits all managers. However, he observed, “some female managers prefer coming to the office — there is a day care center to look after their children, they want to get away from extended families that many in Pakistan live with, [and] they can escape the power cuts that plague large cities.”

These seemed like obvious investments to Malik who is now setting his sites on “a much bigger agenda” with gender as a competitive advantage with consumers, and a condition for working with suppliers.

Unilever’s global strategy is to move increasingly into the beauty business. In Pakistan, where Unilever has been operating since 1948, two thirds of the population is still rural. The villages are much more conservative than the cities, and women don’t interact with men and are more reluctant to shop for beauty products. In a twist on the Avon model, Unilever has been recruiting village women and training them for three months in the basics of beauty care and vocational business basics (e.g. How to open a bank account, blow dry hair and apply bridal makeup). When they return to their villages, they are positioned to offer both sales and services to the locals.

Over time, Malik is preparing to partner with other companies, so that these women become business hubs for their villages. For example, telecoms companies might make their Pay As You Go cards available through the same location.

For the moment, there are 900 women who have gone through the training, and Malik is planning on increasing this to 7,000. “The rural population’s bank is usually a couple of villages away. So we are finding that not only do other women come for beauty advice, they also start coming for advice on how to open bank accounts and start a business. And it seems the men are starting to come too, looking for the same guidance.”

“Where government fails,” concludes Malik, ” global companies can fill the void by building concepts that become platforms for change and progress.”