Four ways to use diversity to save your company

Growth is a challenge for Australian businesses in 2020 more than ever. That makes it inexplicable that three out of five companies are overlooking the opportunity to potentially add double-digit growth to their innovation revenue by embracing gender diversity.

I'm a male business executive speaking to those other male executives who still need to hear this message. The naysayers are wrong. Diversity does, indeed, have a measurable impact on performance.

The companies that address gender equality head-on are also generally the most innovative, fast-growing, and enduring. The study I mentioned above that found most companies are not diverse is from the Harvard Business Review. It also established that companies with above-average diversity have 19% points higher innovation revenue and 9% points higher EBIT margins. Nine points of EBIT is a significant dividend for doing the right thing.

Stop excluding half of the best minds

This is finally the time for tech companies to tackle the lack of gender diversity in their organizations. (Exclusion and inequality are not limited to gender, but gender is what I will focus on here.)

While I am writing for Australian readers, I don't mean to criticize Australian companies above those of other regions. While progress at times seems excruciatingly slow, Australian companies are far from being the worst performers in terms of diversity.

In2020 it finally seems that equity, inclusion, and diversity have made it to the top of the list for business leaders and entrepreneurs. The United States, after all, has just elected a female vice president.

In the context of the Asia-Pacific, Australia is -believe it or not- a leader on gender diversity. That fact reveals how far the entire region still needs to progress. A report from the Australian Institute of Company Directors shows that women now account for 32 per cent of ASX 200 company board positions.

To give you a sense of how we compare to the region around us, the Southeast Asian gender diversity leader is Vietnam, where women hold one quarter of CEO and board-level positions. In the rest of Southeast Asia, that ratio is just 12 per cent.

The Group CEO of one of Asia's leading banks, Bill Winters of Standard Chartered, put it wellearlier this year.

"We're in a war for customers," he said, "a war for service, a war for talent all the time. How could we possibly expect to win if we're limiting our pool of talent to half the population?"

People who believe women are not capable of the highest levels of performance in business (and there are still some of these people) are ignorant of the facts. Look at technology, for example, a field where many men prefer to believe they have an inherent advantage. They don't know that the entire field of software was invented by a handful of women-not men. Women were the world's first programmers.

At the time, the blinkered men in charge valued hardware above all. (The same thinking in 1980 led IBM to disastrously permit young Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft to license their PC operating systemto other computer manufacturers.)

U.S. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a woman, invented the first computer language compiler. Hopper's leadership led to the development of COBOL, which was the first common business language for computers and is still in use. Without her pioneering work, the tech industry of today could not exist.

Despite their early innovative work, women were squeezed out of the technology industry and education by restrictive social norms. It has been said that pioneers often end up with arrows in their backs.

One legacy of this exclusionary policy is that today woman make up only 17 per cent of Australia's qualified STEM population. And when brave individuals do pursue careers in science, engineering, or IT, they are paid as much as 20% less than their male counterparts, the according to data from the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.

When you look at the critical skills of the future, the gap is even worse. Only about one out of fiveglobal AI professionals are female.

All leaders should invite both genders to participate equally in leadership teams and the wider workforce. Doing so will not only rectify the record of exclusion but also make available all of the best minds for any given role. Your advantage will compound because many others still ignore this immensely deep talent pool.

At Juwai IQI, we still have work to do, even though we have gone some way towards creating a diverse workforce and leadership. When it comes to gender, our staff is 77% female, two out of six board members are female, and we have equal pay for equal work.

Our most recent former CEO is a woman. It might interest you to know that S&P Global Market Intelligence reportsthat female CEOs produce on average a 20% increase in stock price momentumin the 24 months after taking their role.

The gender diversity road map

We are proud of the progress we have made, although we still no doubt have much to do. What advice can I give to other business leaders who are even further behind?

No magic button will transform an insufficiently diverse business into its opposite. For most companies, the change will take a cultural shift, sustained focus by the leadership, and committed implementation.

I believe there are four pieces of advicefrom which most businesses can benefit.

Make a business case for diversity. For diversity to stick, leaders and staff need to understand the payoffs. One needs to emphasize the benefits it will bring, including human resources cost reductions, a more productive workforce, and reputational gains.

Understand the starting point. There are vast differences among industries, companies, and even individual workplaces. Gathering data and insights from across the organization will make it clear where the challenges lie. That survey enables leaders to establish the specific policies and goals that will lead to a more successful and diverse future.

Create a roadmap. Someone once said, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else." A diversity strategy should assign responsibilities to specific team members and include metrics to measure progress.

Stay focused. Even the best-designed diversity strategy will face challenges during implementation. Changing company culture can be like pushing a boulder uphill. The moment one takes a break, the stone starts rolling backwards.

No one should be intimidated by the challenge of implementing such a far-reaching workplace change. Every positive step takes a company closer to its destination. The rewards will come in terms of both personal fulfilment and financial success.