NO CHEERS FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

WARNING: This blog is a bit of an angry rant. And it could get you down. So you might want to skip it. I won’t be offended. But I truly believe it deals with the reality of the ongoing challenges for women in today’s workforce.

However, if you are prepared to wade through the Sturm und Drang you’ll find a very bright and shiny light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m sure some will think it blasphemous when I say I found very little to celebrate this International Woman’s Day. Instead of joy, I was frustrated, angry, and, in my worst moments, surrendered to thoughts of despair.

For the truth of the matter is, as things stand now, none of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes, and nor likely will many of our children. That’s the sobering finding of the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, which reveals that gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years.

When you look at the facts, I ask you what is there to celebrate!?!?

In 2015 in Canada, women made up 18.3% of board members of public companies. By last year, that had risen to 21.5%. This is not 30% and nowhere near the 50% companies say they’re striving for.

Today, women make up 55% to 58% of the workforce at Canada's six largest banks, but on average they represent only 35% of executives - including 36.8% at TD Bank and 46% at Royal Bank of Canada, according to DBRS Morningstar data.

In 2017, Canadian women controlled $1.3 trillion of personal wealth. That number is projected to skyrocket to at least $3.3 trillion by 2026, according to a 2017 TD Wealth study. Yet, according to FP Canada, investment advisers approach men to offer financial guidance twice as often as they do women.

It’s not just the financial industry where white, middle-class, and male is the default profile. Among the key findings of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project – (it reports every five years, so the next installment is due soon) revealed the rate of progress towards media gender parity “had almost ground to a halt over the past five years”.

The proportion of women newspaper reporters worldwide rose from just 26% to 29%, and only 32% of “hard” news was written or covered by women. Women were more often found reporting on “soft” subjects, such as social issues, the family, or arts and “living”.

Three years ago, in the music industry, an academic tallied up the performers, producers, and songwriters behind hit songs and found that women’s representation fell on a scale between, roughly, poor and abysmal.

The latest edition of that study, released early this month by Stacy L. Smith of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, found the numbers for women in music not improved, and in some ways even got worse.

My malaise continued for most of March until I read an article in Harvard Business Review, and a follow-up telephone interview with its author sparked a ray of hope for the future.

In her article, Professor Elisabeth Kelan at the Essex Business School, University of Essex, posed the question: Why Aren’t We Making More Progress Towards Gender Equity?

She wrote:

“Despite organizations around the world dedicating years and resources into developing women’s careers; implementing bias awareness training, and those at the top making public commitments to make their workplaces more fair and equitable, progress towards gender equality has been limited. In fact, many managers struggle to recognize gender inequalities in daily workplace interactions.”

In fact, she went on to say, many managers struggle to recognize gender inequalities in daily workplace interactions. Her research, over the past two decades, has shown one of the main reasons for this gap between awareness and action is what she called “gender fatigue,” -- the phenomenon of simultaneously acknowledging that gender inequality exists in general while denying that it exists in one’s immediate work environment.

Professor Kelan commiserated with me over my IWD depression given that little appears to have improved concerning gender equality. Yet she assured me there is also much to be hopeful about.

She pointed to the many more mobilizations around gender equality today that often speak to younger women: the recent protests in England and Australia against violence to women; the #MeToo movement in many countries; the Women’s March in the United States; Ni Una Menos in Argentina; the protests against femicide in Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa, and the demonstrations in India in response to gang rapes of lower-caste women have led to Gen Ys embracing feminism and demonstrating fresh confidence in the power of activism, particularly via social media.

Thanks to Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and hashtags, it’s as if the feminist movement has been injected with steroids. There is a new platform for amplifying the issues and through collective support, enacting social change.

I’ve recently experienced conversations with some of the millennial women our firm has hired in the last year and their bold ideas and big voices lifted my spirits. They’ve made me a believer that the torch, my generation has grown weary of lifting, can be passed down with confidence.

The future remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, Millennials more than any other generation has the tools for change, and as the tidal wave of chatter becomes a global chant, we may actually see gender discrimination end in our lifetime.

“Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it!”

…… George Carlin