Catalyst Blog

Guest blogger: Laura Liswood, Secretary General, Council of Women World Leaders, and Senior Advisor, Goldman Sachs

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I love nature and its diversity. It provides many wondrous experiences—a plethora of flowers and animals, diverse landscapes, and a fabulous array of human beings.

And yet nature is tricky, too. I’m particularly focused on two parts of nature.

One part is that nature promises to happen “naturally.” And some things do. The sun rises and sets naturally, salmon swim upstream to spawn naturally, birds migrate naturally. 

For women, we have often been told that our progress will occur naturally. That is, fill the pipeline, get into the organizations, educate and provide healthy lives for girls and women, and we will prosper and succeed naturally. Turns out some things just aren’t as natural as we thought.

For example, the World Economic Forum has published a gender gap index for five years. It tracks the gaps between resources allocated, and positions in society, for men and women in four areas: health, education, economic empowerment and political participation. The good news is that gaps in healthcare and education are almost closed in many countries of the world. Many of us believed once those gaps closed, the economic and political gaps would close naturally. Nothing could be further from the truth. The gaps in the latter two categories are staggering—only 59% of the gap closed economically (and even worse in some countries) and just 17% of the gap closed politically. It turns out we will need much more affirmative approaches to close these two gaps, and that won’t be easy nor will they close naturally.

Companies are hiring women (and other diverse groups) in higher and higher numbers. But they don’t seem to be making it to the top—women are 50% of the labor force and only 3% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies.  Nature abandoned these groups.

The second bone I have to pick with nature is the sleight of hand it has played on us in regards to diversity. There is no question that diversity of plants, animals, foods, people, or ideas is a good thing. But when organizations commit to that goal of diversity when it comes to people, they often stumble. As Catalyst points out in its extensive research, even in a simple dyad of diversity—women and men—we are baffled and burdened by stereotypes and preferences and assumptions and archetypes.

In my book, The Loudest Duck, I reflect on how the Noah’s Ark approach that many organizations take isn’t working. (“If we could only get two of each in the Ark, we’ll have our diversity.”) The workplace giraffe looks at his colleague, the zebra, and thinks, consciously or unconsciously, that this zebra is one funny looking animal and can’t possibly perform given its stubby neck, silly stripes and propensity to “talk” kind of strangely.

Our unconscious beliefs and perceptions about who others are get in the way of creating a fair and meritocratic workplace for those who are diverse. I once saw a sign that said, “We hire because they are different and fire because they are not the same.” Nature provided us with diversity. If only it had given us the tools to naturally use it.

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Laura Liswood co-founded the Council of Women World Leaders with  Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland. Liswood serves as Secretary General of the Council, which is composed of women presidents, prime ministers and heads of government. In 1997, Liswood co-founded The White House Project, which is dedicated to electing a woman President of the United States. Her work with women presidents and prime ministers was the inspiration for the Project, which seeks to change the cultural message in the United States about women as leaders. In 2001, Liswood was named Managing Director, Global Leadership and Diversity, for Goldman Sachs, a global investment bank, and today is a Senior Advisor to the firm.

Tags: diversity, Laura Liswood, leadership gap, Nature, World Economic Forum

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 10:29 am and is filed under Guest Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.