6 practical tips to promote corporate diversity, by Joanna Kirk (StartHer) & Elsa Hermal (Epicery)
The inaugural Mandala meeting was held on 10 January at Le Plateau. Mandala is a series of conferences and a media devoted to inclusion enabling us to meet those who are working for greater diversity.
For this first interview, we met Joanna Kirk, Managing Director of the StartHer, association which is striving to build a more inclusive technological sector by standardising female role models in entrepreneurship. She was accompanied by Elsa Hermal, one of the 10 women to watch in 2018 according to StartHer and the co-founder of Epicery, a foodtech startup that delivers products from shops in your local neighbourhood.
See their 6 practical tips to promote corporate diversity.
1. Promoting women encourages more women to apply
Joanna Kirk says that promoting diversity isn’t enough: it has to be applied in positions of responsibility. Indeed, when a company says that 50% of its workforce are women, you have to ask yourself what jobs they have. “Because the higher and more strategic the jobs, the fewer women you find. The problem is the same at Board level”.
Elsa Hermal obviously approves this statement, and gives the example of one of Epicery’s investors, Julien Codorniou, Vice President of Workplace by Facebook: “I have a lot of admiration for him, because he encourages female role models amongst women managers at companies such as Facebook. He says that promoting female managers encourages more women to apply; it’s a virtuous cycle”.
However, you often find the opposite at companies that want to attract more talented women but don’t make an effort to promote more of them to management positions. Why would a woman join a company if she knows her career prospects are limited there?
2. Bear diversity in mind when drafting your job offers
“If you’re looking for a coding expert, you won’t get women applying”, says Elsa.
According to the two women, the way you communicate, your narrative, should always bear this issue of diversity in mind. Recruitment is often a perfect example of the way in which how a job offer is written can alienate a certain population.
Joanna says: “I have an anecdote about our job board, which is there to encourage and give more visibility to job offers in technology and startups. When we launched it, we received a first job ad to join a member of a team of developers. The ad used terms such as pizza, beer and table football. There were immediate comments because the way the job offer was written was not as appealing to a woman as it was to a man. This requires real work, greater awareness. This is not something that is done aggressively, but people need to think about the way their offer is worded if they wish to attract a more diverse range of applicants”.
3. Encourage each new launch
Joanna is delighted that, for a growing number of startup founders, diversity has become a pivotal issue. “Diversity is borne in mind from the start. When diversity is taken into account from the outset, it enhances the company’s evolution”.
So is it too late for existing companies that haven’t taken diversity into account in the past? Of course not! She advises companies to use the creation of a new team or division as an opportunity to incorporate diversity as a founding principle of that new entity.
“I think it’s an experience that will be a lot like what can happen in startups”.
4. See as many female applicants as male applicants for each job position
More than once, Elsa Hermal mentions the Gender Agreement set up by the Galion Project, a group of entrepreneurs that presents itself as a Think Tank.
The agreement in question is a list of best practices, notably regarding recruitment.
“You can’t expect to have women in technological jobs if you don’t see as many female applicants as male applicants”, she explains. “I recently needed to hire a new member of a tech team comprising only men, but I wanted this product owner to be a woman. If I hadn’t found any women then I would have appointed another man, but I really wanted to bring more diversity. You therefore need to see as many female applicants as male applicants”.
However, this is an additional challenge because it takes more effort to find these applicants.
5. Don’t tolerate everyday sexism
Elsa Hermal also strives to avoid everyday sexism, but you frequently hear sexist ‘jokes’ in all companies. “Gender, sexual preference and race are all facts”, she says forcibly, “not something we should joke about”.
Some people prefer to ignore the issue and say that the person didn’t mean anything nasty by it, but not taking everyday sexism to task sends a message to men that joking about such matters is acceptable and sends a message to women that they have to put up with it in silence.
6. If somebody asks for something, ask yourself who else could benefit from that something
Elsa Hermal has remained attentive to one issue since Epicery’s very beginnings: “Straight white men tend to ask for more things than women. I’ve made this a personal fight from the start: when a man asks me for a promotion, access to information, contacts, to be able to participate in an event, to take time off for training, etc. I ask myself whether there is a woman, a counterpart, with the same level of expertise who might want to benefit from this same thing. I respond to the man, but also summon women who could be interested by the information and say to them: look, I’ve been asked the following, and think it could interest you as well”.
Elsa feels that it is a duty for all managers and senior executives to ensure that they look at people around them in a hyper objective way and ask themselves who needs the same opportunity?
The full meeting is available on YouTube
#LePlateau is a third place dedicated to Open Innovation within Societe Generale. It’s a 1,000m² space that hosts, under one roof and for periods of up to 6 months, Societe Generale teams and ecosystem start-ups. Each resident works on their own disruptive or innovative project in large open spaces where teams commingle. #LePlateau provides an environment enabling this work to be undertaken in a single place, but also and more importantly methodological support to accelerate projects, the organising of the residents and premises to enable them to exchange and share their expertise and experience.
