Mark Latham’s on-air attack of a group of Sydney Boys High School pupils, who put together a video in support of feminism, is symptomatic of a bigger problem facing Australia — a culture of indifference and aggression towards initiatives that tackle diversity and inequality.
Research conducted this week by LiveHire (a platform that creates pools of pre-qualified candidates for companies) shows that Latham is not alone in dismissing diversity and inequality concerns as “political correctness” gone mad. More than half (55 per cent) of men replying to an SMS survey said they did not believe that increased gender diversity would improve profits or productivity for their company. Interestingly, 40 per cent of women also did not believe that a more gender-diverse workplace would improve profits and productivity.
This is despite strong evidence to the contrary. Gender inequality is a critical economic challenge. The problem statement is simple, women — who account for half the world’s working-age population — are not achieving their full economic potential, and the global economy is suffering.
The prize for achieving gender equality is staggering. McKinsey Global Initiative research shows that in a “full potential” scenario, in which women play an identical role in labour markets to that of men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26 per cent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025.
It’s not just gender diversity that improves company performance — McKinsey also found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 per cent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
Unfortunately, big as the prize may be (for everyone, not just women), gender equality still elicits indifference, and sometimes Latham-like aggression, from many, while women are still under-represented at every level in the corporate pipeline — especially the senior level.
LiveHire in conjunction with CEB and many forward-thinking, fast-growing companies recently launched an initiative called Women in Tech to create a talent pool of 100,000 women from which 1000 technology-focused corporates can collaboratively boost their numbers of women, their diversity and their profit.
What’s urgently needed in Australia is a national discussion that highlights the problem and opportunity of increased diversity in the economy. We must educate and inform all stakeholders.
Gender equality is the right thing to do and it’ll deliver growth to a struggling economy — what reason could anyone possibly have in aggressively putting that down?
Mike Hayward is the co-founder and growth director of LiveHire.
Reader comments on this site are moderated before publication to promote lively and civil debate. We encourage your comments but submitting one does not guarantee publication. We publish hundreds of comments daily, and if a comment is rejected it is likely because it does not meet with our comment guidelines, which you can read here. No correspondence will be entered into if a comment is declined.
