Of the ones I tabled, I think sponsorship is relevant. Sponsorship is subtle. For this conversation, I think sponsorship is one of the two critical ones. If men and women are entering the workforce in roughly equal numbers, and early on men are benefiting from more senior people in organizations who really are sort of creating a path, creating opportunities, paving the way for advancement, that is a huge systemic barrier. It's also very subtle. No one is waving a red flag. These things are powerful but are often not effectively addressed.
We were stunned by some of MBA research we did on this. When we asked these MBA grads if they were getting “hot job” experience—mission-critical files significant to the organization, a big budget, a significant number of direct reports—the men and women all said, yes, they were. These were the men and women who had all been tapped as high potentials in their organization, many of them put into management training programs, who really viewed their stars as rising. We then analyzed the projects—this was for thousands of people—and were stunned to realize that men's budgets were twice that of their female counterparts, men had three times the number of direct reports, and men had significantly more exposure to senior executives.
So when I talk about systemic barriers, these kinds of things are barriers. They're just not obvious and orchestrated. They're often very subtle but very powerful behaviours and patterns in organizations that replicate themselves at all levels over time. You see the pyramid doing this....
Up until, I'd say, five years ago, the only conversation we ever had was about women not putting their hands up, women not leaning forward sufficiently, women making choices that self-select them out, women not having the confidence to go for the promotion. I can't tell you whether all of that is going on. I can tell you that we do know what's going on in organizations—systemic things that are preventing organizations from fully leveraging their talent. Those are just two examples, but I'd say they're critical examples.
With regard to sponsorship, Tom Falk, the CEO of Kimberly-Clark, just won our global award two weeks ago, and he gave an amazing speech. He said that when he took over in 2008 and started to focus on diversity and inclusion, he went across the world, met with his regional country heads, and asked them to give him a list of the people they were sponsoring, the top five. He looked at the lists they gave him and said, “You're an Asian man, and every name on this list is an Asian man”, or “You're a white European male, and every name on this list is a white European male.” He told them that when he went back in six months, those lists needed to look different.
That's the kind of leadership that will break those systemic barriers.