Want to really improve diversity and inclusion? Set participation and culture aspirations as well as demographic ones

Here’s a question for you. There are close to 180 Central Bank Governors in the World. But how many do you think are women? The answer is 15. While most people will never deal directly with these institutions, they will affect their lives at some point: think about liquidity, interest rates, credit markets. Financial stability is at the core of what regulators are focusing on right now, and it is one of the most powerful methods for women and minorities to sustain themselves and thrive.

Indeed, women and minorities are more likely to feel the financial effects of the Covid-19 crisis. To give one stark example, women accounted for every single one of the 140,000 jobs lost in America during December 2020. Policymakers can be game-changers for greater inclusion within financial institutions yet regulatory bodies face a significant gender gap in representation at senior decision-making levels. 

Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women's World Banking, and Karen Miller, Global Head of Leadership and Development at WWB, recently invited me to participate in a global session they hosted with the Visa Foundation and the Credit Suisse Foundation on The Power of Investing in Gender Diverse Leadership in Regulatory Bodies.  

The panel featured Veronica Artola who has been head of the Central Bank of Ecuador since 2017. She was appointed to the role when her first child was just three months old. “Banking is a man’s world,” she said. “There is an invisible threshold that women find it hard to cross and this needs to change.” The advice she has for other women is to always be clear about their purpose: "Do not worry about not being good enough and don’t hold back on telling people about your expertise". 

I talked about the importance of building Enterprise Resource Groups and how participation and culture aspirations are as important as demographic ones. In Banking this means women must be at the decision-making table when designing products that will cater to their financial inclusion. However, as one of my fellow speakers, Marco del Rio, pointed out, 53% of total employees of banks are women but only 8% are in leadership positions.

So how do we get to a point where regulatory bodies, and other organizations, become more proactive on D&I at board level? I believe the foundations for success are laid down in a community-building process and thought-through communications practices. They will enable good programs to truly make a change if they come to the surface, and become ingrained within the culture of an organization.

But how to do it? 

A key to achieving success is that we shouldn’t underestimate the obstacles still confronting women and people belonging to minority groups when it comes to the perception of bias in the workplace. Programs fall short because senior leaders do not understand the experience of diverse employees. We need to embrace such perspectives and become gender aware instead of gender blind and remove legacy mistakes. 

To have a D&I strategy that works you need to first make it a Community Building Exercise. And then you need to break it down into key areas. Here are nine hints towards a successful D&I strategy: 

1. Articulate the business case for the organization. What are the needs to address? Get as much information as possible on your internal data and also on specific stratifications. Or, what is also called ‘intersectional gender-based analysis.’
2. Look at what is happening already in other organizations. Are there practices you see winning in your sector or is there a way you can engage other players in a discussion on what they have experienced in their journey?
3. Identify your aspirations. Make sure these are a mixture of demographic, cultural and participation aspirations. For example: a demographic goal can be having 15% more women; a participation goal could be having 20% more women in mentoring programs; a culture goal may be a 10% increase in women’s satisfaction at work.
4. Identify the issues to avoid or promote. These could be structural, such as unfair practices (to avoid) or diverse recruiting (to promote), and cultural, such as micro aggressions (to call out) or inclusive programs (to foster!)
5. Develop a full communications plan. Communicate the value of D&I and then turn up the volume dial, both within your organization and externally. Celebrate your diverse teams and shout about their successes, bring forward diverse leaders, congratulate promotions. Remember, If you can see it, you can be it.
6. Create ERGs. The power of a community and inclusivity is really important. It helps on so many levels. To give one example, people are three times more likely to be productive at work if they feel they belong.
7. Identify allies and build buy-in. Bring in the numbers, make ERGs visible, expose them to senior leaders.
8. Keep talking. Live and breathe your strategy and aspirations. Create moments of sharing, do email blasts to inform about new policies, and where (and when!) possible meet colleagues to talk about them. And don’t shy away from collecting feedback – the test-and-learn approach works, get comfortable in being uncomfortable.
9. And finally . . . Make D&I pervasive in your organisation. This takes consciousness, courage and compassion but together we really can move the dial - permanently.

Forza!