Workplace ethics for women: is it different?

Behaving ethically in the workplace should entail that ethics is exercised equally to all stakeholders, including fellow employees, customers, suppliers and even competitors. In terms of the key tenets of workplace ethics, this means that stakeholders should be treated honestly, fairly and with respect, and that they are not subject to any form of discrimination. But is this true for women in the workplace?

There are often ethical lapses in the workplace relative to various stakeholders, such as treating customers or suppliers dishonestly or unfairly. But, being Women’s Month, this article focuses on the ethics – and the absence of ethics – in relation to women.

GENDER BIAS

The ethical challenges women face in the workplace centre on unfairness and discrimination. Although virtually all businesses would accept that fairness and the absence of discrimination are fundamental to a productive and ethical working environment, there are nonetheless gender biases that apply to women. An obvious example is that many companies still treat pregnancy as if it is a problem, discriminating against the recruitment or advancement of young women whom the company thinks may be planning to have a family.

Another prominent issue for working mothers is the dilemma of balancing work and family, especially children. It can be argued that men also face the challenge of achieving a work-life balance, although mostly with lesser family demands. However, a Harvard Business Review article entitled “Will Working Mothers Take Your Company to Court?” by Joan Williams, Professor of Law at the University of California, and Amy Cuddy, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, found that women bear the brunt of the bias associated with being a working mother or a caregiver. This so-called ‘maternal wall bias’ translates into a 79% reduction in a woman’s chance of being hired if she has a child and a 50% less likelihood that she will be promoted than a childless woman. (The ‘maternal wall’ is a term referring to stereotypes and various forms of discrimination encountered by working mothers and mothers seeking employment.)

An innovative and effective solution to eliminate gender bias is used among concert performers. Blind interviews are conducted where musicians perform behind a screen. It is worth considering how this can be applied in other circumstances and for other roles.

GENDER STEREOTYPING

Another challenging source of unfairness and discrimination for women stems from gender stereotyping. The rules of behaviour for getting to the top are rarely the same for men and women. The same behaviour is often labelled quite differently: His ‘strong and decisive’ is her ‘autocratic and dictatorial’. Writing for the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, Marianne Cooper, the lead researcher for Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (the best-selling book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook), references decades of social science research that has repeatedly found that women face distinct penalties for doing what they need to do, and what men are allowed to do, in order to get to the top. Cooper notes that high-achieving women in particular experience a “backlash because their very success – and specifically the behaviours that created that success – violates our expectations about how women are ‘supposed to behave’, resulting in successful women leaders being considered either insufficiently feminine or too masculine.”

Efforts to minimise such stereotyping are to be welcomed. A current example is that Britain’s advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority, announced in July 2017 that new rules would be developed to ban advertising that promotes gender stereotypes or denigrates people who do not conform to the stereotypes. (The ban also includes sexually objectifying women and promoting unhealthy body images.) The regulator’s report, titled “Depictions, Perceptions and Harm”, found that existing regulations allowed “the potential for harm or offence arising from the inclusion of gender stereotypes in ads.”

GENDER PAY PARITY

Paying women less than their male counterparts has been a long standing source of unfairness and discrimination. In 1996 Equal Pay Day was started by the US-based National Committee on Pay Equity to highlight the gap between men and women’s wages, and it is recognised by many countries around the world every April.

In South Africa the Employment Equity Amendment Act (47 of 2013) supports the concept of equal work for equal pay. But, according to Anita Bosch, lead researcher at the Women in the Workplace research programme at the University of Johannesburg, on average South African women are paid between 15 and 17% less than their male colleagues.

In the UK the gender pay gap has been highlighted by the furore at the BBC when the disparity in pay between the male and female top earners was revealed last month. A senior female BBC journalist was quoted as stating that the BBC “has lied point blank to women and people of colour for years. Even when found out and challenged over blatant pay inequality they keep lying.” The problem is not limited to the BBC. British banks Virgin Money Holdings UK Plc and Schroders Plc recently disclosed that men make respectively 36% and 31% more money than women at their organisations.

In 2016 the Obama administration mandated that companies with more than 100 employees report salary data broken down by race, ethnicity and gender. But, despite President Obama’s support, an American Enterprise Institute analysis found that the average pay for women in President Obama’s administration was about 11% less than men’s.

There are various factors that can explain a pay gap. According to the US based Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a significant reason women still make 80% of what men do in the USA is that they’re clustered into lower-paying fields. For example, roughly 79% of elementary and middle school teachers are women while 80% of software developers are men.

In acknowledgement of this problem the JSE recently introduced listing requirements which encourage companies to disclose their gender equity policy effective from the beginning of 2017.

LACK OF EQUAL REPRESENTATION

The lack of equal representation at board and senior leadership levels represents another source of discrimination against women that flouts the ethical concept of stakeholder inclusion and undermines the value of diversity.

In South Africa there is only one female chief executive in the Top 40 JSE listed companies, that being Maria Ramos, Chief Executive Officer of Barclays Africa Group Limited.

Grant Thornton’s International Business Report entitled “Women in Business: New perspectives on risk and reward”, found that only 28% of senior management roles in South African businesses are held by women in 2017. Christelle Grohmann, Grant Thornton Director of Advisory Services, acknowledged that this is an improvement from the 2016 level of 23%, but noted that “it is concerning that this number has not improved beyond 29% in all the 13 years since we started doing this survey in 2004.”

This problem extends worldwide. The Women in Business research reveals that female representation in senior management in North America is 23%, the G7 economies 22% and developed economies in Asia Pacific 13%. Grohmann concludes that “This proves that companies still have not succeeded in creating an environment that is conducive to growing – and keeping - a sufficient crop of strong female leaders.”

Raising a perspective on why this is so, James Damore, a software engineer at Google, found himself at the centre of controversy – for which he was fired in August 2017 – after he wrote a ten-page memo on two internal company networks explaining that ‘biological’ factors, such as women’s supposedly greater interest in people and their predisposition to anxiety and stress at work, accounted for there being so few women in the upper echelons of the technology industry.

There are various organisations working against the low levels of women representation at board and senior leadership levels. Notable among them is Business Engage, a Johannesburg-based organisation that has developed the Gender Mainstreaming Awards to encourage the private sector to buy in to achieving more meaningful representation of women in the mainstream of business.

The view expressed by Joe Gerstandt, a consultant in the field of diversity and inclusion, summarises the essence of what needs to happen: “If you do not intentionally, deliberately and proactively include, you will unintentionally exclude.”

SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Sexual harassment in the workplace – the unwanted physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature – is another area of challenge for women. While, in theory, it is not limited to women, in practice they are the primary targets of this type of unethical conduct.

Research by the Helen Suzman Foundation into the problem of sexual offences in South Africa confirms that societal attitudes and perceptions about these offences are often not on the victim’s side. The article notes that “ambiguous notions of consent often place the blame on the victim or obviate [sic] a perpetrator altogether. Victims often feel ashamed. There are many factors that discourage reporting these crimes. These include fears about perceptions and blame, negative associations and the intimidating process of making an official report.”

Examples of sexual harassment abound. Uber, the ride-sharing company headquartered in San Francisco, California, is not the only company with a toxic corporate culture that celebrates winning at all costs. But at Uber this extended to condoning widespread sexual harassment against female employees, as revealed by Susan Fowler’s February 2017 blog that went viral, Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber. While working as an engineer for one year at Uber, Fowler’s sexual harassment complaints were rebuffed and she experienced retaliatory behaviour when her perfect performance score was downgraded for “undocumented performance problems.”

ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM

The key question is what can be done (and is being done) to address these problems, which are all especially noteworthy as they cross the line of sound ethics.

At a big picture level, the World Economic Forum is making a noteworthy contribution via its publication of the Global Gender Gap Report. The Report, published since 2006, surfaces the issues and tracks progress (or absence of progress) across 144 major and emerging economies. The Global Gender Gap Index presented in the Report aims to quantify gender equality. In the 2016 Report the top ten countries with the lowest levels of gender gaps are, respectively from 1^st to 10^th, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, Ireland, Philippines, Slovenia, New Zealand and Nicaragua.

At an organisational level, change can be achieved with leadership’s support for and commitment to building an ethical corporate culture with strong, fair values that does not tolerate unfairness or any form of discrimination. The advancement of women also warrants that this is formally included as a facet of talent management and succession-planning initiatives. Methil Renuka, the Editor of Forbes Women Africa writing in the August/September 2017 issue, emphasises that “Getting to a more inclusive world requires the strategic and voluntary commitment of leadership.”

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, offers good advice to women in her 2013 best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. She advocates that women should “lean in”, instead of derailing their careers by “leaning back” during meetings, sitting in the corner and not at the table, by questioning their capacity to lead more often than men do and by pushing less often for promotions or pay rises.

Support is also valuable. A mentor is useful to provide advice, feedback and coaching, for example, to improve workplace performance. However a sponsor can fulfil a much more impactful role since sponsors are people in positions of authority who use their influence intentionally to help others to advance. Seeking out and cultivating such relationships represent another avenue where women help themselves.

A sound overarching approach to tackle these gender-based problems lies in using workplace ethics as the prime issue against which unacceptable and unethical practices are raised - as opposed to raising them as a ‘women’s issues’. The strength and sustainability of this approach rests on the fact that when ethics shapes workplace behaviour, decisions and strategy, it offers the best bulwark against all forms of abuse and misconduct and the greatest certainty of realising a fair and just outcome, including gender justice.