June 2021
The sixth episode of our ‘In Conversation with…’ series features Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first, one of the world's leading global consultancies focused on gender balance. Avivah highlights the business opportunities of gender balance for organisations, the focus on female leadership traits as a result of the pandemic, the rise of “conscious capitalism” and the role government and policy have to play in shaping demographic change.
In Conversation With…Avivah Wittenberg-Cox
Series 1: Podcast 6
Lucy Lewis: Hello, and welcome to The Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation With…” podcast. I'm Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin's Employment Team and in this podcast series I'm hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspectives on what the future of work holds.
The pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic and technological trends giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to rethink who, how, what, and where we work. And today we're going to explore one of our key megatrends, demographics, and specifically in relation to gender.
So we know that automation and advancement in AI technologies alongside the disruption caused by the pandemic is changing the nature of jobs; it's changing the demographics of the workplace and I'm going to be considering what that means for gender balance in the future of work with our guest speaker today, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah is the CEO of 20-first and 20-first is one of the world's leading global consultancies focussed on gender balance as a business and economic opportunity. So welcome Avivah.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Thank you Lucy, lovely to be with you.
Lucy Lewis: So I was going to start by asking you just to tell us a little bit about yourself, but also tell us what 20-first does, you know,
gender balance
how and why gender balance is a business opportunity as we look forward to the future of work.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, my name's Avivah Wittenberg-Cox which reveals a little bit of my different national accents and balances, so I am Canadian, French and Swiss and I founded 20-first now 15 years ago to address what was then a kind of obvious emerging trend was the rise of women into labour forces; talent pools, consumer bases and 20-first was created to accompany organisations that wanted to harness that trend and use it to enhance performance and an ability to reflect and build on the available talent pool and connect with the emerging consumer base. So that's what we've been doing for the last 15 years across the world and I've worked in more than 40 countries on this topic to date.
Lucy Lewis:
20-first
And tell us a bit about the 20-first name and how you came to that?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well the idea was to help companies move from the 20th to the 21st century while keeping them first and accompanying these major trends that were happening so we've done a lot of work on gender balance which was one of the big shifts. We've also done a lot of work on nationality balance, and increasingly on age balance, to address some of the issues about longevity challenges and ageing populations.
Lucy Lewis: And you talk about gender balance as a business opportunity. I think that's a really nice framing of it.
Gender balance in the workplace
Can you share a little bit more about why it's a business opportunity?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Absolutely, because it was very obvious to me through all these years that I've been watching this topic that women were emerging, not as an interesting minority or evolving group, but as the majority of the educated talent pool - 60% of university graduates globally are now women and they were just an ever expanding share of consumer bases and customer pools, whether or not organisations were actually measuring that reality, women were making and are making the majority of decision, purchasing decision-making in an ever expanding range of sectors and learning how to connect with female customers has been a non-obvious challenge.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, fascinating, and you talked about the name and you talked about moving to a 21st century and of course when we think about the 21st century we're not going to be able to do that without looking back and reflecting on the impact of the pandemic. We know the pandemic is overlaying new challenges on top of long-established challenges for women. So, we've heard lots said about things like women taking the brunt of and increased caring responsibilities, home schooling. We know that women are more likely to be furloughed, have their hours reduced, be made redundant because they're in higher concentrations in sectors that have been really impacted by the pandemic. But it isn't all negative is it, and
Future of work challenges
I'm really interested in what you think the pandemic means for 20-first's message and the future of work. What the legacy of the pandemic will be for that?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I couldn't agree more that it has been both a positive and a negative so the negative I think you've described very well. We know that unlike the last financial recession of 2008 where men were in the sectors that got really hit, this time round women have been dominant in all the front line sectors involved in the pandemic - whether they're in health, education, cleaning services, they've been really affected and stretched by the demand. They've become essential workers overnight which is a, I think, very useful reminder, of how essential a lot of these sectors dominated by women are and I think that one of the big shifts that you were seeing coming through this is the enhanced flexibility and embracing of technology to power flexibility so that it's no longer 9-5 in the office that determines our workforces but much more about output instead of input. And this is something that women have been asking and lobbying for, for, you know, decades and I always suggest that look, we've kind of seen the Berlin wall fall between the personal and the professional sides of life with the fact that now both men and women have done so much work with the visibility of their personal life so much on display has I think accelerated a shift in one year that nobody could have dreamt of.
Lucy Lewis Yeah, really interesting and agree completely, it's one of the things we've been talking quite a lot about - that move towards flexibility.
The other observation that I've had is it's given a platform I think to female leaders. I think my favourite COVID statistic is that countries with female leadership suffered six times fewer COVID related deaths.
Female leaders coronavirus
Do you think there's been more of a platform for female leaders?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I think what's new, what I find really interesting about this idea of evaluating female leaders. Right because there’s obviously a certain fear in many quarters that the emergence of women affects quality or women aren't quite ready or they're not quite good enough or they're not quite committed enough and I think what this crisis has shown, it's kind of like the very first time we've ever had a global report card on male versus female leadership in full view of everybody with the data and the data was the ultimate data - life and death, right.
And so I think what we've seen, and I wrote about this in an article in Forbes that went viral to eight million people, that if you actually measure, it does seem to indicate that women-led countries outperformed male-led countries by a long shot. And I think that's only the tip of the iceberg because there's a growing amount of data on leadership and leadership competencies. They're also beginning to skew in an interesting way, right, that show that women are perhaps actually outperforming on an ever expanding range of these leadership competencies. This is all new and what's nice about it is it's all data driven.
So I think I have always said that data is a girl's best friend. I think I'm going to be proved more right than I ever believed.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, I'm really pleased to hear it and actually that takes me to your point about action that I wanted to talk to you about because I think lots of people listening, they want to be leading an organisation which is gender balanced. They just don't know how to achieve that and I know when you've talked before, you've talked about some of those 'go to' steps. Some of the things that businesses do to try and achieve more women in leadership positions and, you know, I mean by that things like female mentoring, internal networking groups. They're not going to move the dial quickly enough
Importance of gender balance
so I'd love to hear from you what you think can work, what should work and what companies can be doing to effect action.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, I think the first step is, I'll go back to your very first question is how do you actually think about this topic, and I think one of the challenges we keep fighting is that most companies frame this as a 'nice to have' - right, oh yeah, and ethical as well. You know, we've got to be fair, we've got to be nice to the ladies, right, and I think that underestimates what we're actually talking about.
This is a millennial shift in gender roles, in what men and women do and in the economic opportunity that women are now the majority of many labour forces, power pools and customer bases which means that for a lot of organisations this is not a 'nice to have'; it's do or die. This is your future talent and your future consumer, customer, stakeholder, legislator, regulator, decision-maker; and any company and leader that doesn't yet understand that and really is skilled in how to connect with that reality will underperform in the future and I think the challenge that we have is that too many organisations still are fiddling at the side lines.
To me the issue of gender balance was kind of like the issue of digital or AI. It's not that you need a little department or group taking a look at your digital strategy, right. It's not like you need a little women's network talking about are you being nice to women. It’s if gender balance doesn't completely traverse all of your business functions and areas including, by the way, digital, then you're probably programming an old, obsolete view that has biases and imbalances baked in which just won't be future-ready. So the idea of how this should be seen is as a strategic priority, as it is in all the countries and companies that have gender balance, it's up at the top of the CEOs agenda, not down in the diversity departments to do list, but up on the CEO and Exco's list of priorities, accountabilities. They're measured on whether or not they've managed to gender balance their divisions and teams and they get a performance kick out of that and they're skilled at knowing how to build that balance. They've become what we call gender bilingual. They're actually skilled at working across and leveraging the potential of gender differences just as most organisations have become culturally competent and globalised, they've become very skilled at working across cultures and markets, the same is true on gender.
Lucy Lewis: One of the things that we talk quite a lot about as employment lawyers particularly, on this question of change and how you effect change is what role should policy-makers have in that. You know, should policy makers, should the government be taking targeted interventions to overcome barriers and by that I mean things like just totally rip up and restart, remodel shared parental leave; push forward on initiatives like, for example, all jobs should be able to be advertised as flexible.
Gender policy
Do you think that is the role of government and policy-makers, that we do need to see more of a policy-related shift?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well I think it depends what kind of outcome you want and how quickly and I think again we have a report card globally now on this kind of question because we have countries that have legislated and we have countries that have not so it's really interesting to compare where they now stand so there are I think now seven countries in Europe that have introduced quotas about gender balance on boards. France was one of those countries. They are now I think at 45% women, 55% men on boards, a decade after that legislation, which was introduced, I think by Norway which is also balanced. The UK put in kind of a voluntary guidelines of what they would like to do with a much lesser goal actually which was 30% women and, you know, they've achieved that but just recently and with a bit of fluctuation around that number and interestingly I just wrote another piece recently in Forbes how France legislated just last week that they will now follow Germany in legislating quotas on gender balance on executive teams and leadership pipelines.
Well now we're opening up a whole new kettle of fish here because they've found that the progress has been too slow. So do I think policy is useful and regulation? If the private sector doesn't adapt in the timeframes that most governments have been talking about this, you know, suggesting nicely that it's an issue introducing legislation like some of the pay gap stuff, I think yes, a policy alignment between public sector and private sector in driving change, I think is absolutely essential to get it done and even we're seeing America which is, you know, not always been pushing on the regulatory front with the Biden commission coming in with a gender policy unit that reports directly into the President, that's new, right. And it just shows I think that in a number of pretty significant countries this issue of gender balance is rising up the strategic agenda.
Lucy Lewis: Now in the time we've got, I wanted to take you back a little bit, widen the lens a bit because one of the things that we've been talking about on this podcast series is how the pandemic is going to impact business models. You know, how is it going to impact capitalism? We had a really fascinating discussion series in collaboration with the RSA looking at that. Looking at whether actually we're going to see the pandemic as a catalyst, so moving beyond shareholder value and start focussing on humanising business, responsible business. And I know that 20-first have talked about that.
Conscious capitalism companies
I know that they've talked about this idea of conscious capitalism as a model for the future and I'd love it if you could share a bit about that and what you think that really means.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well I think conscious capitalism is giving up on a really tired, thirty years of Milton Friedman's economics. The only thing that counts is shareholder value, I think that led, especially the Anglo-Saxon world, down a very narrow rabbit hole of one measure of success.
We have the same challenge at the country level with GDP being the only measure of national success which means, you know, we can sell nuclear arms and have fantastic improvement on GDP but that doesn't necessarily reflect what's best for the greatest number.
But I think conscious capitalism is inviting companies to be more involved in the world in which they now operate. They can't ignore employee rights, shareholder rights but also stakeholders in every market where they operate, whether it's employing people or taking out precious resources. We're seeing that very much going on in the discussion with the pharmaceutical companies now and this whole how globalised can we get these vaccines to be. I think conscious capitalism is doing to both CSR Corporate Social Responsibility used to be a little bit like women - off on the side lines and we're now seeing that unless it crosses and is transversal and it talks strategy to every part of what companies do, they're probably not going to survive very well in a world where everything is going to become more transparent and accountability on these measures is increasingly important to an ever expanding range of stakeholders. So yes, we're moving into much more challenging times, much more transparent and I think democratisation of who's going to evaluate the performance of the company and I think that's going to be a really good thing.
Lucy Lewis:
Conscious capitalism
And presumably that the model of conscious capitalism is a model in which gender balance becomes more important, more critical, more urgent?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I think gender balance is always both an output and an input, right. I think it's the easiest way to achieve, to reach change and conscious capitalism is if 50% of your employee base is gender balanced, right, 50/50 or 40/40/20 if we're talking about multiple genders, and you're serving customers that are equally balanced. That's when you're going to have success.
Lucy Lewis: Fascinating. Thank you.
Future of work
I've got one more question to ask you and it's a question that I've asked all our guests on this podcast series and it's about what you personally think is going to be the biggest and most radical change for the future of work. What's the thing that we're going to take forward with us from the pandemic?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I do think that the thing that will be most noticeable and affect us most is the technology enabled ability now generalised. It used to be true for just the senior people. A lot of people have been able to work wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted for some time but it used to be just the very top of the pyramid. And now it's been generalised to an ever-expanding range of sectors which I think is going to give globalisation an extra kick. It's going to give gender balance an extra kick and I hope it's also going to give sustainability issues an extra kick which is in my view what I've always been preaching is the four W's that are interdependent and the big shifts we're looking at:
Web;
Weather;
World; and
Women.
Technological change, sustainability priorities, globalisation and the rise of women. These are all being incredibly accelerated by this crisis and if we get the good side of them coming out, they're going to power us through into much sunnier days.
Lucy Lewis: That is a very uplifting finish. Thank you very much and thank you for such a thought provoking discussion Avivah. It's been really interesting.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: My pleasure Lucy, any time.
Lucy Lewis: If anybody would like to find out more about Avivah and 20-first, please do go to their website which is: www.20-first.com. Thank you.