WOMEN LEADERS
GENDER, EQUALITY 4.0
From binary to balanced approaches
To mark International Women’s Day 2017, Ruth Holmes caught up with Julia Howes, principal of strategic workforce planning and analytics at global HR consultant Mercer, to explore how workplace trends like automation might affect workplace gender diversity at senior levels.
W
orkforce gender diversity is a serious business. Encouraging more women into senior roles could add $12 trillion to global growth, according to predictions
from management consultancy McKinsey. It is also the right thing to do, and something that everyone has a hand in helping to achieve. Today, the discussion is less about the business case and more
about how companies and individuals can act to move the needle on gender equality. Mercer is one of the organisations leading the global movement
for greater diversity at board level. Since 2014, its global When Women Thrive research has tracked female senior leadership representation in 42 countries and the factors underpinning it. One of its most arresting findings is that, across the world, gender
balance in senior roles is at least a full century away – that is, if progress continues on the same trajectory and legislative framework.
Davos 2017 Reinforcing the issue’s importance and the high-level support it is receiving, Mercer launched its latest When Women Thrive findings at the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit in January. A key theme at the four-day conference, opened by Chinese
president Xi Jinping, was the impact of job automation on the world’s workforce, and, by extension, the impact on diverse leadership and talent pipelines. Discussing the implications of the trend, Julia Howes, Mercer’s
head of strategic workforce planning, said that technology’s increasingly transformative role could be both a blessing and a curse when it came to rebalancing leadership. “I think greater workplace automation presents a risk and an
opportunity,” said Ms Howes. “It is difficult to know where things are heading. But, on the risk side, while disruption from technology
26 | Re:locate | Spring 2017
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