ECENTLY, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak lamented that Malaysian women only made up 16 per cent of the boards of public companies, which is behind the government’s target of 30 per cent women participation. The number of women on listed boards is even smaller at 10.3 per cent.
He urged corporate leaders to do more to help women to break the glass ceiling. He said this during the launch of the Malaysian chapter of the 30 Percent Club, an initiative by business leaders committed to bringing more women onto Malaysian corporate boards.
He is putting the nation on the right track. After all, a recent McKinsey study found that advancing women’s equality can add US$12 trillion to global growth.
The latest study published by Korn Ferry and the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School’s Centre for Governance, Institutions and Organisations (CGIO) corroborates that — boards that have at least 10 per cent of their seats held by women enjoy, on average, a 3.6 per cent higher Return on Equity (ROE) and 1.3 per cent higher Return on Assets (ROA), compared to boards where women make up less than a tenth of directors.
In the larger business environment, there may still be an inadvertent bias against women because of the jobs and assignments they did before, despite promotions being based on merit.
Promotions are based on a supervisor’s evaluation of what we could call “promotability”. While individuals are promoted in part because they performed well in their current jobs, they also move up after having undertaken challenging tasks. Individuals who have had challenging job experiences tend to be viewed as more capable, more willing to make the effort, and more ambitious to reach higher-level positions.
Challenging assignments provide opportunities to learn, which are likely to result in the development of a wide range of skills, abilities, insights, knowledge and values that contribute towards effective management skills, and hence, career success.
Often, however, the underlying assumption is that individuals initiate and choose to take on such challenging job assignments. But why would that be the case?
What if such job tasks are assigned by supervisors, who are not gender blind in their assignments? Would this affect promotability?
First, interestingly, research does show that men and women differ in how they approach challenging tasks. Women are, indeed, less inclined to take up challenging tasks than men because they want to avoid failure. Men, on the other hand, are more willing to take up such tasks because they want to show what they can do.
This is a difference that could stem from upbringing — parents cheer a son when he is active or perhaps climbing up a tree; but would caution a daughter to be careful and instead come down from that tree.
Such differences in upbringing affect one’s willingness to take on challenging tasks as adults.
Of course, there are the women who are eager to take on challenges.
However, they face obstacles as research has also shown that supervisors are more inclined to allocate less challenging tasks to female employees, regardless of their ambition and job performance.
Delegating assignments to employees involves risks, and to reduce such risks, managers often delegate difficult tasks to those whom they trust to do well – specifically, subordinates who are like them, are perceived to be similar to them, and hence, more trustworthy and capable.
As most higher positions are occupied by men, they see male subordinates as more similar to themselves than female subordinates. As such, male supervisors allocate more challenging tasks to male, rather than female employees — a form of subtle gender discrimination that they may not even be aware of.
In short, we are in a situation where women may both avoid and be denied important developmental opportunities, which in turn hamper their chances of promotion and career advancement.
It is worth saying again that to stay competitive, firms must capitalise on all valuable resources, including talented male and female employees.
Women’s failure to advance can be costly and shortsighted. There may be lost productivity and high turnover rates because women feel blocked in their careers.
Particularly, we need to ensure that managers overcome supervisory gender biases. They should be encouraged to assign challenging work equally to their male and female subordinates.
At the same time, women should be made aware of their propensity to take up less challenging tasks and the adverse consequences these have on their careers.
Parents should also be mindful in how they bring up their children. Both sons and daughters should be encouraged to go for challenging tasks.
Malaysian women already have a head start. During the event, Najib revealed that the nation is on course to achieving the goal set for the 55 per cent Female Labour Participation Rate, citing that the rate had gone up from 46 per cent in 2009 to 53.6 per cent in 2014.
“This translates to around 600,000 women joining the workforce and an extra 0.3 per cent to GDP growth per year.” With those figures, Malaysia has overtaken Hong Kong and Singapore.
The writer is Assistant Professor of Management & Organisation at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary