In Why Women Mean Business, the book she co-wrote with Alison Maitland, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox described the broad social and economic changes, such as the growth of female purchasing power, and the increasing educational success of women, that constituted key parts of the gender revolution of the 20th century. In her latest book, How Women Mean Business, she narrows her focus to look at the very specific things companies need to do to profit from this ‘gender revolution’: Wittenberg-Cox approvingly quotes The Economist magazine in 2010 when it noted that “Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest single social change of our times”.
In her book, Wittenberg-Cox describes a four step process:
- Audit. This first step is about doing a complete analysis of a company’s current situation, including looking at what the current gender snapshot is (in employees, leaders and customers), what attitudes now exist, how the company is currently communicating on the issue, and what has (and has not) worked in terms of past attempts to address the situation.
- Awareness. This is perhaps the most important phase, whereby the company’s leadership reviews the audit results, analyses how the issue fits into the company’s broader strategy, and thus determines how important the issue is to address. Like any change initiative, leadership buy-in is essential, and it is only when a compelling case for action has been made that meaningful changes will occur.
- Align. This begins taking the awareness of gender issues into the processes and systems of the company. This includes training managers in gender issues, developing HR policies around recruitment, development and retention, and reworking sales and marketing processes to ensure the company is profiting from its embrace of gender balance.
- Sustain. In this final phase, the company attends to how it communicates its gender balance message (to both internal and external stakeholders), how it defines, tracks and measures the success of the program, and how it rewards leaders and managers who successfully communicate on the gender balance issue.
Wittenberg-Cox runs a successful gender consultancy business, and the book benefits from the practical experience and conceptual clarity that one might expect from a leading consultant in the area. Together with her earlier book, it provides a good grounding in the issue for any senior executive wanting to explore the issue further.
