The number of women in top positions is increasing. But real diversity in companies requires more, writes Monika Becker in her guest article.
In recent years – finally! – much moved in the promotion of diversity and equality in the German economy. There are legal requirements for top management: there is a minimum quota for female members for supervisory boards and, since this year, also for the executive boards of listed companies. According to an evaluation by the auditing and consulting company Ernst
But obviously a lot is also being done to promote diversity at the level of skilled workers and in middle management. It’s hard to find a company in Germany that hasn’t taken up the cause of increasing the recruitment of women. This can be clearly seen in the changed customer requirements for executive search consultations.
In my early days as a personnel consultant in the 2000s, I sometimes heard: “You don’t need to introduce a candidate to us. The manager doesn’t want women on the team.” That doesn’t happen anymore today. On the contrary – there is hardly a mandate where I am not asked to introduce women “Please bring us a woman!”.
dr Monika Becker has a doctorate in psychology and is responsible for the software business unit at the executive search specialist Hager. At Horton International, the global executive search group of which Hager is a part, Monika is Sector Lead for IT and Digitization. In 2020 she was included in the list of “40 Over 40: Germany’s Most Inspiring Women”.
Female candidates were already welcome a few years ago, but often only served as the exotic element in the selection round. A male candidate was hired with great regularity. The recruiting managers were satisfied with themselves and their cosmopolitanism and continued as before. That has changed.
Today the candidates are actually hired. Why? Certainly partly because there has been a societal rethink. Companies have realized that diverse teams actually work more successfully. Managers have understood that they will be more successful if they not only surround themselves with like-minded people, but also encourage different approaches. Another reason for the increased hiring of women is often that the managers are forced to do so via a “quasi quota”. In many companies, a diverse composition of the team is one of the goals of managers. The annual bonus and further career often depend on the achievement of the goals. In this constellation, it goes without saying that not all managers who hire female candidates are people of conviction. Is that bad? I don’t think so. Many managers who are forced to be lucky by the quasi-quota experience the advantages of a diverse team in practice and as a result will consciously make their team diverse.
For me, however, limiting the promotion of women to the number of female positions and leaving everything else as is is fake diversity. Diversity is reduced to numbers on the balance sheet and photos on the website to please management, customers and the public. However, if the working conditions and attitudes remain the same as they have always been (e.g. “the best employee is the one who has the light on in the office the longest in the evening”, “parental leave is not welcomed, especially by women and men”, “foreign-sounding surnames are a career disadvantage), little changes with the addition of a few more women. The potential will remain largely untapped. Only when initiatives for more diversity in attitudes are accompanied by structural changes in companies such as models for combining career and life, special promotion of female talent, workshops to overcome unconscious prejudices, etc. can companies use the opportunities of real diversity.
For me, an aggravated form of fake diversity is that women are hired for top positions, but their failure is consciously accepted and sometimes even intended. Women on the executive and supervisory boards of large German companies remain in this position for a significantly shorter time than men (according to older figures, women 3 years and men 8 years). Even if “personal reasons” are often mentioned, it seems obvious that the women are brought in to change things, but are actually slowed down and worn out.
When filling positions in middle management, as a personnel consultant, I often experience that a younger woman is preferred because she is perceived as easier to care for. It is believed that the ‘young lady’ will be less demanding (in terms of salary, embracing new ways of working, own career) than a more experienced male candidate, giving the department the opportunity to leave things as they are. Finally, women are often relegated to roles with less career potential, such as customer service rather than customer acquisition. This is then often justified with the natural female qualities: customer care, for example, because women have such strong qualities in caring.
How can women protect themselves from fake diversity? You should take a close look at how the company positions itself on the topic of diversity. True diversity requires support from top management and initiatives to change working conditions at many levels. In the positive case, there should be just as much to be found in the external presentation of a company as there is for attracting female talent. In addition, before being hired, women should talk to as many women as possible from the new company and find out what experiences they have had in career advancement. Of course, it also helps to ask the hiring manager what he or she associates with diversity. True conviction is very easy to distinguish from lip service. The best protection against fake diversity, however, is for women to support each other, in companies, in networks and everywhere else, in order to create a climate in which not alibi women, but strong, assertive doers are desired everywhere.
The Mission Female business network, founded by Frederike Probert, is actively committed to more female power in business, society, media, culture, sports and politics. It unites successful women across all industries with the aim of making further professional progress together.
