
Helena Morrissey CBE talks diversity at the Cass Dean's Lecture
Helena Morrissey CBE and founder of the 30% Club gives the Cass Dean's Lecture on 'New approaches to diversity: how to develop more inclusive cultures from here'.
Helena Morrissey CBE is CEO of Newton,
a global investment management subsidiary of BNY Mellon that manages
around £50 billion for pension funds, charities and through funds
available to individual investors. She is also founder of 30% Club
a cross-business initiative aimed at achieving a minimum of 30% women
on FTSE-100 boards through voluntary, business-led change.
Her
lecture on 'New Approaches to Diversity' focused on developing more
inclusive cultures but in a more nuanced way. She told the audience at
Cass Business School:
“In today’s world, the idea of including
diversity as a part of what it takes to develop healthy organisational
cultures and to run a modern, forward-looking business is well accepted
and understood. Most leaders of organisations would say that improving
diversity, from the imperfect situation that we still have today, is one
of their top priorities.
“However, once you look beneath that
goal, you often find that the actual approach to bettering diversity
within an organisation is either very siloed: delegated to certain
people to resolve; or it’s left to a number of specific initiatives. The
approach isn’t really embedded and there’s no focus on the day-to-day
behaviours people are seeking to change. But, we have the opportunity to
take a different approach”.
Slow to change
She founded
30% Club in 2010 and held its first major seminar at Cass Business
School in July 2011. The Home Secretary, Rt. Hon Theresa May, MP, then
also Minister for Women and Equalities, spoke at the event. One of the
major new points to emerge from that seminar was made by Martin Gilbert,
CEO of Aberdeen Asset Management, who suggested that if institutional
investors really got behind this issue, it would take only a year to see
meaningful change.
However, the change Morrissey hoped to see
after founding 30% Club was not as swift as expected, “I became
disappointed and disillusioned by how little progress we were making in
getting more women in senior roles. There was so much effort with very
little to show for it”.
Morrissey said that initially 30%
Club’s mission was well-intended but vague, “I realised we were doing
two things wrong. Firstly, we needed a measurable goal”.
Morrissey
is known for being against legislative quotas, “I believe it’s a very
old-fashioned, combative approach to solving something that requires a
more collaborative culture”.
She added, “Secondly, we needed
more involvement from those in power. Changes happen when those with the
power to make the change realise it is in their best interests to do
so. Therefore, the key members of the 30% Club needed to be the chairmen
whose boards we were trying to change”.
Today, the work of 30%
Club, alongside other initiatives, has clearly made significant
progress, “In the past five years we have seen quite a dramatic increase
in women on FTSE-100 boards – from 12.5% to 26.1%”.
Adaptation
Over
time the organisation adopted a broader view of how to tackle the lack
of diversity. It started an Investor Group, helping to coordinate the
investment community’s approach to the issue and also developed a
mentoring scheme offering cross-company and cross-sector mentoring to
women in their mid-careers.
Additionally, 30% Club works with
schools and universities, for example Cass is pleased to announced that
it will be launching two new 30% Club Scholarships for its Executive
MBA. The scholarships will amount to 50% of course fees for students
accepted to the EMBA September cohort or the Modular EMBA March cohort.
Beyond tokenism
Morrissey believes the movement towards change has taken on a new lease of life, “I think organisations realise there is an imbalance in their organisations and in their boardrooms. It’s not just about putting a few more women at the op and its job done! This thinking only masks the lack of progress; I want to see us re-prioritising the corporate agenda. Also, it’s not about asking women to step-up for these senior roles and then join the men’s club".
She said, “We have to move away from
tokenism – hiring a woman to sit on the board because she is a woman
only masks the problem of gender diversity. Women need to be women all
the way through their career and we have develop a culture that affects
meaningful change.
“We have to develop a culture where both
genders and other types of under-represented groups can rise and create
more balance so we can complement each other. I also hope that our
efforts will lead to more options for men to break through the social
pressures surrounding working practices and their prescribed roles in
family life”.
She concluded, “We must make it work for each of
our families, for each business and in doing so we will have a happier,
more productive culture”.