Companies that try to close the gender gap by focusing on uplifting women are doing it wrong, believe two top female executives at networking giant Cisco.
Championing women over men makes the men feel unappreciated and creates an atmosphere of discontent rather than a unified workforce, say Gerri Elliott, Cisco’s chief sales and marketing officer, and Fran Katsoudas, chief people officer.
Only 23% of technology jobs in South Africa are held by women, according to WomeninTechZA, but the pair argues that specifically focusing on women is not the right approach. It sounds counter-intuitive, but they believe the best way to create gender equality is by supporting diversity in all its forms.
“I think companies have been doing it wrong for a long time. When you focus on a particular group it doesn’t serve all of our people well or serve the company well,” Katsoudas says. “In companies that focus on women, what ends up happening is that the men feel excluded and isolated, and that they are on the losing end, and it creates a very different dynamic, but when you say you want the best for all, you change the discussion.”
Cisco has had a long-running commitment to achieving gender equality, but five or six years ago it reached a stage where the numbers were no longer rising.
“It improved when we started talking not just about women, but about wanting every single person to be successful,” Katsoudas notes. “Once Cisco started to say we believe in full spectrum diversity, it meant we were looking for diversity in everything – gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, veteran experience and style – and that started to signal that everyone is incredibly valuable and that we can help one another be seen for our strengths.
“It changed the tone of the conversation. From the point when we pivoted to full spectrum diversity, we started to see our diversity numbers improve in everything.”
Cisco’s executives are currently 50% women, which is unique for the IT industry, including the CIO it appointed in April, Jacqueline Guichelaar, and chief marketing officer Karen Walker. There are female role models in almost all disciplines, including finance and engineering, and it recruits a high percentage of females for entry-level jobs. The highest gender gap comes in the middle tier.
“What we need to do now is take the top and the entry-level and just permeate that throughout the company. That’s something we are incredibly focused on.”
One way to address that is through implementing pay parity. Women are often paid less than their male counterparts simply because of their gender, and that often becomes more marked the longer they stay or the higher they climb.
Pay parity
Cisco has been running pay parity reviews globally for three years, tracking the levels of experience within different geographies to see if anyone is falling behind. If someone’s salary isn’t fair, they are given an increase, whether they are male or female.
Typically, a company offers a new recruit a decent increase on their previous salary, but that can simply widen the existing sexist skew. “The biggest factor we see is when we hire people from the marketplace and they come into Cisco with these differences already in place, so we have had to change that,” says Katsoudas.
“What we do now in the US – and we’re going to roll it out globally – is that we don’t ask what their salary was at the old company because we want to pay them fair to market. They feel incredibly respected and valued because we look at their expertise and who they are versus how they have been reviewed historically.”
Another way Cisco is broadening its diversity and helping people to advance is through its employee-led groups. One of the newer groups is Men for Inclusion, run by men who actively champion their female peers.
Other more traditional groups that help women develop their ICT skills and careers include Connected Women, Women Rock-IT and Girl Power Tech, which sees Cisco staff help run school projects where girls connect with their peers around the world through Webex conferencing sessions.
About 28 000 of Cisco’s 70 000 employees belong to one of the 30-plus employee resource organisations, says Elliott.
“It makes a big company feel small in terms of finding folks that have like minds and want to make some changes.”
Once Cisco started to say we believe in full spectrum diversity, it meant we were looking for diversity in everything – gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, veteran experience and style.
Fran Katsoudas, Cisco
The two women were in South Africa for the Cisco Connect 2019 conference held in Sun City earlier this year.
The opening event was a session for women in IT, where the audience was told that of all the students being trained in Cisco’s global Networking Academies, a third are female (more than half the global population is female).
Katsoudas says that skew is still partly caused by the entrenched stereotype that IT is a career for boys, plus the general lack of encouragement for girls to study at all in some countries.
Elliott notes that achieving gender equality “takes a village”.
“No one person or even one organisation can do this alone. It’s about everybody leaning in. You could be the most junior person in your organisation or the most senior person, and if you reach out to someone behind you and bring them up with you, we will all make progress.”
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