How important are diversity and inclusion to our society?

Wednesday, 28 May 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Many talk about incorporating Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) programs into their organisations, but only few implement it for its value. With D&I becoming increasingly important in today’s world, visiting Microsoft Corporation Regional Director Legal and Corporate Affairs Southeast Asia Dr. Astrid S. Tuminez asserted it is essential to have this element in an organisation if human capital is to be sustained and retained. In town to address the CIMA Business Leaders’ Summit 2014, that is being held today, Tuminez in an interview with the Daily FT yesterday shared her thoughts in this regard and how issues within that can be addressed from a personal, institutional, and policy level. Following are the excerpts of the interview: By Shabiya Ali Ahlam Q: Is this your first visit to Sri Lanka? If so, what are your impressions about the place? A: It is my first time to Sri Lanka but I have only been here for a few hours so I have only seen Colombo in the darkness. However, I took the new highway to get to the hotel and I think that any country that aspires to be great needs to have a good airport and then a good road to the city. I see Sri Lanka has both, so that’s great!

Q: What are your views on Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) and why are they important? A: It is interesting that today when you look at corporations in the Asia Pacific, practically everyone has a D&I program. If you ask corporate executives, the usual answer would be that it is about competition in human talent. So corporations have to survive and thrive and if they don’t have the human talent, then their competitors will blow them out of the waters. It is very much about human talent, who has the cutting edge, who understands the market better, who has the best talent and who can sell. However, in addition to that, I always argue that it is also a question of values. D&I are important values in a sense that if you want a fairer, equitable and a more just society, it is imperative to look at this area. It is about appreciating all of the people and human capital, gender, ethnicity, points of view, perspective, sexual orientation and other aspects. And inclusion means that you can take that pool of diverse human talent, develop and deploy it to its fullest potential in an organisation or country.

"Dr. Astrid S. Tuminez joined Microsoft in October 2012 as the Regional Director of Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) in Southeast Asia (SEA), responsible for driving government relations, corporate citizenship, and business and regulatory initiatives in that region.
She is also an Adjunct Professor, the former Vice-Dean (Research) and Assistant Dean (Executive Education) of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore). Previously, at the U.S. Institute of Peace, she assisted in advancing peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Tuminez was also a Senior Advisor to the Salzburg Global Seminar, Director of Research for alternative investments at AIG Global Investment, a consultant to The World Bank and an institutional sales/research professional at Brunswick Warburg.
In the 1990’s, she ran the Moscow office of the Harvard Project on Strengthening Democratic Institutions, where she worked with leading reformers. She was also a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, focusing on grant-making in democratisation, conflict prevention, and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. She is a member and former Adjunct Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is the author of the book, Russian Nationalism Since 1856.
Most recently, Tuminez authored ‘Rising to the Top? A Report on Women’s Leadership in Asia,’ a project supported by the Asia Society and The Rockefeller Foundation. She has been a U.S. Institute of Peace Scholar, a Freeman Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Distinguished Alumna of Brigham Young University, a fellowship recipient of the Social Science Research Council and the MacArthur Foundation, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Asian Women Leadership University project and the ASEAN Institute on Disability and Public Policy (IDPP). She also serves on the board of the Singapore American School and ASKI Global, an NGO focused on training and financing entrepreneurship among Asian women migrant laborers."

Q: Are more leaders adding D&I into their agenda? A: In the corporate sector, absolutely. There is no question about that, and then again it is about that search for competitive edge. The fastest uptake in this regard is in the corporate world because everyone understands that you must compete for human talent and the consumers are also 50% or more women. So you need to find a way to connect to that market. In terms of governance as well people are realising that the voice of women is important because they bring a different perspective to the table. That’s the private sector. When it comes to the public sector, Asia has done well in terms of very visible women leaders as heads of state. Sri Lanka had its first female prime minister and president quite early. The Philippines had two heads of state who are women, so did Pakistan, India, and now South Korea. In that sense, Asia has had female leaders at very high and visible levels. There is diversity in gender. But going down that is not the case in the public sector. There is still a long way to go. Some leaders have used quotas as a tool in the public sector. In some areas that has worked but it is also noted that these are used to put women in as tokens, rather than giving them real decision making authority. So the bottom line is that there is progress in terms of leaders understanding diversity and inclusion, particularly in the private sector but we still have a long way to go to bring it across the board for leaders to really walk the talk. "There is progress in terms of leaders understanding diversity and inclusion, particularly in the private sector but we still have a long way to go to bring it across the board for leaders to really walk the talk Right now D&I is sort of a trend, a fad. Everybody has a program. However, end of the day what gets measured is what gets done At the end of the day we don’t have to be perfect. We should learn to live with imperfections. There will be times where we do great things, and there will be times where we feel it’s too much. We should not be hard on ourselves. It is a part of our journey – Microsoft Corporation Regional Director Legal and Corporate Affairs Southeast Asia Dr. Astrid S. Tuminez" Q: What can be done in the public sector to achieve this? A: The quota system is a good way of achieving this. Quotas can sometimes be controversial since people feel that it will be use to put in women who are not qualified. That is not necessarily the case. The World Bank has done a study that shows that women who are put in certain positions through quotas are not necessarily unqualified. This can help in the public sector since it is the fastest way to increase the representation of women and how you structure that is really important. The system can be there for few years to forever. Another trend in the public sector is gender responsive budgeting. What that means is that for every budget that a government puts together, it must ask ‘what is the impact on males versus females?’ and ‘who does it favour more?’ In countries like the Philippines, it ranks fifth in the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum out of 136 countries. So the Philippines to be at the fifth position is a huge and amazing achievement. One of the things that I learn from the Philippines Government is that for all of their agencies, 5% of the budget must be dedicated for gender equal measures in policies. When you think about that it is not very much, but it certainly is a great start. Q: It is observed that many well-meaning diversity and inclusion fail because organisations behave defensively. What is your view on this? A: Yes. Well-meaning diversity inclusion programs, what do we mean by that? Right now D&I is sort of a trend, a fad. Everybody has a program. However, at the end of the day what gets measured is what gets done. When you have a D&I program, do you actually change the practice within the corporate culture. First is that in terms of hiring, do you actually measure leaders where you are hiring men all the time or do you have slates where there are female candidates? Second, do you have reasonable or maybe even generous maternity and paternity leave so that both men and women can mutually support each other at home and at the work place? If the family falls apart, the workplace will fall apart and women will exit. Third is, do you reward managers and leaders who hire, develop, and retain female talents? To give an example of the company that I work for, which is Microsoft, in Thailand 55% of our managers are women. When you talk to the Country Head of Thailand, he will say that this is a central priority to have that kind of diversity. When leaders walk the talk, when they are graded for it and they are measured on their performance on D&I, the program become a meaningful thing. It doesn’t become an exercise that is for show only, or is a defensive thing where the corporate executive says that it is about meritocracy. You actually have to make it a value that people believe in and not just pay lip service to it. Q: How can the two elements be added to the goals of an HR leader? A: HR leaders in my opinion play quite an important role. Although before going to the HR leader you have to go to the CEO. No matter how hard HR leaders try to add diversity and inclusion, if the CEO or the people reporting to the CEO don’t value it, it is not going to work. If the leaders buy into it, what HR leaders can do is add D&I in all the performance management systems. In terms of leave they can support flexibility, which women will really welcome. When I speak about this topic I usually say it’s not that we have malevolent people, it is often because people don’t think about it. Here is where HR comes in. They can further train women on negotiation, building confidence, mentorship and other similar areas. While these are all really good buzz words in corporates, what is really being done under each of these elements should be questioned. That is where you can grade if HR is doing the things that are advancing D&I or not. Q: What can be done to bring more women into leadership roles? A: I would point out three things for this. The first one is personal. I think the women herself has to take responsibility for her ambitions and what she wants to contribute to the society. The personal responsibility comes with choosing a support system within your family, which is where it begins. Second is in terms of policy. There are two elements that I would emphasise. First is childcare that is dependable, reliable and of high quality. The best example for this is France. It has solved its problem by keeping women in the workforce while also encouraging women to have children. France has the highest fertility rate in Europe and this is primarily because the Government puts in place tremendous support for women in their childbearing years. They spend 2.7% of their GDP on outright cash payments for the mothers, and 1.6% of GDP on child care solutions. The second area where policy can make a difference is in elder care. This is because in Asia, we are expected to take care of our elderly people. So childcare and eldercare where we can support and alleviate the pressure that women feel so they can be good mothers on one hand and great professionals on the other. That is that constant clash. So if we can give support on those two fronts, we will make a huge headway in encouraging women to make it all the way to the top of their professions. Q: What is the situation in this regard in South Asia? A: It varies. A problem in quite a few Asian countries, especially in the poorer countries, is that they have mandated maternity leave but they are not able to implement or fund it. So there is a disconnect with what is on paper, what is legislated, and what actually gets done. Across the board for maternity and paternity leave, there is more work to be done in Asia. Sri Lanka for example ranks 55 out of 136 countries in the Gender Gap index, but in terms of leadership it ranks poorly. In terms of senior officials, legislators, and senior managers, Sri Lanka’s index is 0.32. Other thing for women is safety when going to work. In India it’s not a secret. Six of every 10 qualified women do not go to work, and part of that is due to safety. These are some very real problems and they need to be addressed. Q: What are the challenges they face when rising to the top? A: There is what is called the leaking pipeline. In most of the Asian Pacific countries the dropout rate from middle to senior management is as high as 70%. When we ask ourselves why that is happening, a lot of it goes back to the childbearing years where women really need support. In the conference hosted by SLASSCOM which I was addressing earlier today, a successful IT personality said that when she had her first and only child, her boss did not allow her to take three months’ leave. If that is the attitude, then it wears the women down. They are put in front of very tough choices. That is definitely a challenge we need to address. If we don’t address those childbearing years and enhancing support, that dropout rate will continue and we won’t be able to leverage Asia’s human capital. Q: What can they do as individuals to tackle this? A: As individuals I think it is really important that successful women become mentors ourselves. In Singapore I belong to something called Women in Business. This includes organisations such as CISCO, Intel, Oracle and Microsoft. We commit ourselves for so many months of mentoring for a selected group of high potential women. I and most of my fellow colleagues have children and most of us have gone through the struggle of work-life balance and we share that. The second is that as individuals we need to clarify what our choices are and why we do what we do. The big why in our lives need to be answered. The third is the importance of cultivating very powerful will, since at the end, to sustain a career in leadership you are talking about a 20-30 year timeframe. Most women do not hit the sweet spot in leadership until their 50s. Also, at the end of the day, we don’t have to be perfect. We should learn to live with imperfections. There will be times where we do great things, and there will be times where we feel it’s too much. We should not be hard on ourselves. It is a part of our journey. Q: What is your message to the aspiring working women out there? A: To the younger girls I would say that at this point in time we are in a globalised world. We are in a world with complex problems. So for them I would say that this is the world you are coming into. You have help in terms of technology, rising GDP, better education, so think about what you want to do and who your role models are going to be. To the older generation I would say that it is important that we look to this younger generation and give them a better pathway so that the full human potential of girls and boys can be realised in the societies that we are creating.