Be intolerant of intolerance to create an inclusive culture

Wed, 12th February 2020

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About the event

Sir Martin Donnelly emphasises the importance of leadership and culture in supporting gender equality in the workplace

‘Gender and other diversity issues are really about culture, both workplace and societal’, said President of Boeing Europe and former top civil servant Sir Martin Donnelly, who spoke at Oxford Saïd on 12 February 2020 as part of the Driving Diversity and Inclusion series. He emphasised that a key question for leaders is how tolerant they should be of behaviours that are not inclusive and not consistent with the desired culture.

Donnelly’s presentation drew heavily on his experience as Permanent Secretary at the UK’s Department for International Trade and, before that, at the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills for seven years. Although he supports ensuring adequate representation of women and people of colour in senior roles and the need for role models, he stressed that this focus on the top jobs was not enough. ‘Unless you’ve got a system that produces people from a range of backgrounds who want to do those jobs you will find it doesn’t work over time...Unless you create a culture where women at every stage of their careers are given genuinely equal opportunities to move up, you don’t have effective gender diversity – you’ve just fiddled the figures’.

The idea that many women and men are uncomfortable with competitive, macho, and long-hours working cultures is not new. Nor are the traditional solutions: job-shares, flexible hours, part-time working. But, as Donnelly pointed out, they do not seem to be leading to enough progress. There is still a gender pay gap, still a minority representation of women in top jobs, and still an acceptance of the assumptions that female-friendly working practices are not suitable for senior roles, and that women do not always want to apply for those roles anyway.

Sir Martin Donnelly's Talk

Unless you create a culture where women at every stage of their careers are given genuinely equal opportunities to move up, you don’t have effective gender diversity – you’ve just fiddled the figures.

Donnelly’s experience showed that it is down to leaders to insist that these practices are accepted. He described an occasion when a senior woman dealing with a crisis situation told him that she could not continue to work in the evenings while one of her children was preparing for an important exam and needed support. Donnelly agreed, and told the minister that they would be working with someone else for a while. ‘But she is very good!’ said the minister. ‘Yes, she is,’ said Donnelly firmly, ‘and so is the new person you will be working with.’

It is also the leader’s responsibility to ensure that an inclusive and equal culture is not destabilised by tolerating people and behaviours that conflict with it. ‘In almost every organisation that I have worked in there were people who thought, “I’m very good at making money, or talking to ministers in the right way; I’m smart, I’m clever, tough, decisive, and if I shout at you it’s probably your fault. I’m going to get to the top,”’ he said. ‘And almost every organisation that I have worked in until recently has tolerated that. And when you tolerate that behaviour you send a very clear signal that … successful people don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else. Not until you challenge [that idea] do you start to make a difference by winning the trust of women and men across the organisation that you really mean what you say.’

He concluded: ‘Gender equality is part of wider inclusion – it’s worth the effort, and it feeds into how you support minorities. But don’t forget that women are not a minority, and gender is not a minority issue. People who start from that position are going to get it wrong.’