The Snitch

I’ve got sex on my mind.

I’ll explain.  I just came back from  a very interesting roundtable lunch hosted by ipac financial planning. The topic revolved around gender in the workplace and had keynote speaker Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, author of Why Women Mean Business. (Plug: I did a video interview with Avivah on Wednesday and will post it later next week on this blog!)

As discussions go, Wittenberg-Cox talked about more female graduates coming out of schools these days, how women are now becoming consumers that businesses want to target, and how it all translates to the workplace and positions of leadership.

We also talked about maternity and paternity leave (remember that the proposal to add more paternity leave days was struck down by the government last year) and how governments such as Sweden have made it such that either parent can stay home with the child.   One participant then brought up a personal anecdote about how his company gives fathers five days of childcare leave, and yet as a father of two, he has never taken utilised any of those days before.

The argument against sexist workplaces has long been documented.  When a workplace subscribes or favours a certain gender construct, whether it is believing that women tend to be more family-orientated compared to male employees or that male employees are better at operations roles and women are  better  for  support functions, the company inevitably suffers from a lack of diversity,  poor employee retention rates, a lack of women talent, a smaller hiring and talent pool, yada yada yada.

You might think that it’s solely a women’s issue, but workplaces that favour a certain gender construct will hurt male employees too.

If the company culture has built up a gender construct by promoting certain gender traits, employees of either sex that do not abide by the norm will find it hard to succeed.

For instance, if the company has a very gung-ho, alpha male type culture where the men are supposed drinking after work at the pub on Fridays, what if there are male employees who don’t want to go drinking? How does this affect them?

And as in the case of the participant today, while the idea of men taking five days of leave to look after their children was all fine and dandy on policy. But if nobody else was taking those days off,  this would send a organisational message that it’s not okay for men to take those days off — because that’s just not what men do at work.

So really, sexist workplaces with reinforced gender stereotypes isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s a gender issue.