Simple awareness is often curative. And so it has proven since the Australian Stock Exchange mandated full disclosure of women on our boards. Numbers of women have been progressively rising, where just three years ago they were in decline. So far this year women have made up a third of new board appointments.
I noticed that the tally up to today (August 30) is 12.9 percent of directors on the ASX200. You can track progress in realtime on the website of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
But shaming our corporations into appointing more women is only half the battle. Running “diversity programs” is also achieving little, as Sasha Scott of Inclusive Diversity in the United Kingdom has found. “We've been doing it for 10 years and it is not really getting us anywhere,” she says. Many UK organisations are coming to the conclusion that it may be time to try something different – so they have started to look at the role that “unconscious bias” is playing in their inability to drive forward.
Unconscious or hidden beliefs are attitudes and biases beyond regular perceptions of ourselves and others. And as the idea implies, we are totally unaware of our biases – even when we think we’re doing the right thing and carefully monitoring ourselves.
In any case, it’s not a matter of good people doing the right thing or bad people doing the wrong thing. It’s a matter of awareness, or consciousness-raising.
At Johnson, we are completing individual surveys to uncover our hidden biases and understand the impact of these biases on their behaviour and decision-making. It’s scary.
And over the past three two years, we’ve presented diverse candidates in 71 percent of all assignments, and placed diverse candidates in 31 percent of instances.
Through our Diversity Planning service we're committed to helping organisations improve their performance.
Comments
Post has no comments.