Is ambition really the problem where gender pay gaps are concerned?

Responding to news of a persistent gender pay gap in the UK, Romi Savova, CEO of PensionBee, told BBC’s Today programme recently that the main culprit was major corporations setting unambitious targets for getting women into senior positions. 

It’s a view we’ve heard expressed by a number of people, but in our experience ambition is very often not the problem. Many of the organisations we work with and speak to have very ambitious targets about the representation of women at the top of their company, and many of those are making good progress towards their targets.

Instead, the problem we see is firstly one of commitment - of being prepared to make the kind of deep cultural and policy-related changes that are necessary to achieve and, critically, sustain the goals that have been set - and secondly one of knowledge: People simply don’t know how.

Sustainability is the key here: In research to support its recent discussion paper on diversity and inclusion in the financial services sector, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) concluded that the focus of most firms is on the representation of women at senior management level, and that this risks the development of a culture in which firms simply poach senior women rather than building a strong and sustainable female talent pipeline. We would wholly concur. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that the real problem isn’t at the top at all: It’s in the middle.

The sort of tokenistic approach highlighted by the FCA is further underscored in a report by Cranfield School of Management, which found that many of the UK’s biggest companies are trying to increase the number of women at board level by appointing them as NEDs rather than in executive positions.

With that in mind, I suspect that a focus on ambition may actually be counter-productive, because it will force more organisations to publish targets and resort to quick and dirty measures to achieve them. That runs the risk of toxifying what should be a constructive debate about how to overcome the challenge.

Incidentally, the conditions for that toxification are fertile: In our experience, many senior executives who are genuinely committed to the cause are becoming increasingly exasperated by the failure of their attempts to bring about change, and may start to feel as though they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. What they need isn’t someone encouraging them to be more ambitious. They need someone to tell them how to achieve their ambitions.

Of course, the answer to that second problem - knowledge - lies in addressing the big issue at the heart of the first: culture change. There is much that needs to be learned about why women leave the workforce in mid-life, blowing a gaping hole in talent pipelines as they do, and there are many worthwhile initiatives and point solutions that can be deployed to improve the situation. But without a commitment to culture change, there’s a danger that the prevailing headwinds against which many such initiatives are pushing will continue to blow strongly.

That, in our opinion, is where the energy needs to be directed. We shouldn’t be encouraging the leaders of companies to set out ever more ambitious targets or we’ll end up with the same problem that exists where environmental pledges are concerned: Lots of worthy goals and no idea about how to achieve them, resulting in a counterproductive cocktail of anger, resentment and skepticism. Instead, we should be doing the harder work of committing to culture change and increasing knowledge.

We should be committing to figuring out how.