The Missing Half - Pt. 2
Half the Lake
Roughly half the human population is female.
You might think about the economic absurdity of systematically restricting the contribution of half the available pool of talent. And yet, for much of history, that is pretty much what we did.
Women were denied:
Education
Property rights
Political participation
Access to professions
Capital
Positions of authority
We weren’t judging an individual’s ability. We were simply constraining their choices according to the category into which they happened to have been born.
We usually describe this, rather correctly, as an injustice to women. But I also consider it, perhaps selfishly, from the other direction. What did everyone else lose?
How many businesses weren't built?
How many discoveries weren't made?
How many inventions weren't invented?
How many books weren't written?
How many excellent leaders never led?
How many bad decisions survived because somebody who might have challenged them wasn't allowed into the room?
I mean, think about the few that had the courage to fight, to say “Fuck that, I’m doing it anyway” and look at what they brought us. To list a very few, each from differing fields:
Beatrix Potter, I mentioned her last week. She stamped her foot helping to establish the modern picture book for young children. The Gruffalo and What People Do All Day? exist because of her.
Gertrude Ederle, wasn’t allowed to swim as a child because she was a girl. She swam across the English Channel age 20, beating the men’s record by nearly 2 hours, and changed the opportunities of women in sport forever.
Marie Curie remains the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. Among other notable achievements, she developed mobile X-ray units for WW1 field hospitals.
Dolly Parton, who sadly died very recently, we all know as a musician. While she was one of the best-selling musicians of all time, her foundation helped school children. Where it’s methods were embraced and with the Buddy Program implemented, the dropout rate of children in those classes fell from 35% to 6%.
Jude Kelly, the poster girl used last week, founded WOW – Women of the World, believing women's stories simply weren't sufficiently represented in our culture. WOW grew into a global movement, reaching more than 5 million people across six continents.
These are all women who’ve had to think of some way to force a difference.
Unfortunately, humanity spent centuries trying to become wealthier and more productive while deliberately restricting access to roughly half its available intelligence. It's rather like trying to win the Premier League, and deciding before the trials begin, that you're only interested in players whose surnames start between A and M.
Enormous progress has been made, but echoes of that thinking remain and hold us all back.
Women still receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital. To quantify that statement – of VC funding, more than 80% goes to all male teams vs 2% to all female teams. There has to be something wrong with a system that rewards one demographic with 40 times the amount of cash.
From 9 to 5 roles and all the way to the boardroom, women remain underrepresented in many positions of corporate power and across large parts of the world, their access to education, employment, property and financial independence remains restricted. And this affects the zeitgeist in which all of us operate. When a bias persists for long enough, it stops looking like bias and starts looking normal. The person who then challenges it becomes loud, difficult, unreasonable, perhaps even crazy. And the consequences aren't confined to women. They shape the societies, economies and businesses in which all of us participate.
For businesspeople, and for those starting or growing a business, we should ask an important question:
What value are we throwing away?
Meritocracy Is Harder Than It Looks
There is an obvious danger in this argument.
If discriminating against women is wrong, surely discriminating in favour of women is simply the same mistake wearing nicer clothes? Ultimately, the answer to that is yes.
As a leader, founder, business owner, citizen, I don't want a woman appointed because she is a woman any more than I want a man appointed because he is a man.
I want the best person.
But genuine meritocracy is considerably more difficult than declaring ourselves meritocratic. If two people are running a race and one begins twenty metres behind the other, announcing that from this point onwards everybody will be treated equally doesn't make it a fair race. Especially when we're not particularly good at recognising whether the playing field is level in the first place.
Nor is merit always as objectively visible as we'd like to imagine, leading to frequent, under the breath, utterings of “Here you come again”. We confuse confidence with competence. We substitute familiarity for suitability. We favour experience over potential.
Essentially, we notice leadership qualities more easily when they resemble the qualities displayed by leaders we've seen before. And because leadership was overwhelmingly male for generations, our mental picture of a leader was inevitably influenced by men.
Perhaps this is why some characteristics traditionally associated with men became so closely associated with leadership:
Certainty
Dominance
Aggression
Decisiveness
All of these can be useful, and are often needed. But so can:
Curiosity
Empathy
Listening
Collaboration
Having the confidence to say "I don't know" and the intelligence to change your mind are elements we increasingly see lacking in leadership, and it’s not good.
None of the beneficial characteristics belongs exclusively to either sex. And that’s possibly the point.
The Missing Half
I don't invest my time in women because I think women need rescuing.
Absofuckinglutelynot!
I do it because I need them. My brain needs people who see things I don't. My decisions benefit from perspectives I don't possess. My understanding of the world, and my business with it, becomes better when it is challenged by people who haven't experienced precisely the same world as me.
Women have done that throughout my life. My mother and grandmother did it before I knew what business was. Female colleagues, employees and friends have done it throughout my career. My wife continues to do it today.
And perhaps that's the part of the equality argument we've undersold.
When somebody is excluded from opportunity because of their sex, race, background or anything else unrelated to their ability, it creates not one loss but two.
There is the opportunity denied to the individual.
And there is the organisation, economy or society that never discovered what they might have contributed.
Diversity isn't merely a question of fairness. It's a question of intellectual range. It's a question of economic efficiency. And, ultimately, it's a question of merit.
One day, I hope a summit called Why Invest in Women? will sound rather peculiar. Our grandchildren, hopefully, while listening to the great story of the great eternity, will wonder why the question ever needed asking. Why would anyone overlook half the population before discovering what each individual was capable of? Why would a business voluntarily restrict the talent available to it?
Leaders that like to surround themselves with people likely to see what they see are creating echo chambers, not leadership teams. So why would investors care more about who an entrepreneur is than whether their idea is good?
Hopefully our grandchildren won't talk nearly as much about investing in women. They'll simply invest in intelligence, judgement, ideas, character and potential.
And the question won't be why invest in women?
It will be something closer to the one that occurred to me in the first place.
Why on earth wouldn't we?
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Easter Eggs in this week’s article
“had to think of some way to” – The Grass Is Blue, by Dolly Parton
“9 to 5” – 9 to 5, by Dolly Parton
“Here you come again” – Here You Come Again (Live), by Dolly Parton
“the great story of the great eternity” – Girl Left Alone, by Dolly Parton
P.S.
Why wouldn't we?
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