Hello everybody, welcome to another edition of C&F Talks. Today I have with me Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, one of the foremost experts on all things DEI, management consultancy, leadership, intergenerational workforce issues, and well known I think to many people in the audience today. Avivah is going to be speaking at the 10th Annual Culture and Conduct in Financial Services Summit, which is being held in fact next Tuesday, the 4th of February in London. Avivah, welcome.

Thank you, Maurice, lovely to be with you.

Very good to have you with us today.

One of the most fundamental shifts in the changing workforce in your view according to what we have seen is what you call the longevity revolution. With people living longer than ever and falling birth rates, what do you think organisations need to achieve generational balance and nurture talent in the older population?

Well, I think there's a lot of work to do. The first thing is to actually get this issue onto the radar. It's been somewhat resisted, I think it's up there with climate and AI, but you rarely hear that demographics is the third pillar of our 21st century shifts.

So, step one, get it on the radar and see how much it's going to affect and impact your business.

Yeah, once you've got it on the radar then looking at it from the corporate perspective, how should they view this? What are the top three steps perhaps they should be looking at taking?

Well, I think there's a degree of becoming longevity literate for leaders, I'd put that kind of first. What's the audit of your existing organisation? What does it look like? What's your talent demographics? What percentage of your own employee base is over and under 50? What percentage of that employee base is 10 years from retirement?

What knowledge do they have that you might want to start thinking about succession planning? And then the other side of the coin, of course, is what's the opportunity in the longevity economy? How old are your markets, consumers, clients?

And how can you seize the opportunity of better understanding this fast expanding over 50 segment to develop your business, adapt products and services to their needs and aspirations, which is not yet a part of big focus.

Yeah, no, I agree. I suspect quite a few things need to change to facilitate that, don't they?

But turning to another topic, despite the fact that the majority of graduates are women, they are still very underrepresented at board level.

Whose fault is it, if indeed it's a particular group or whether it's a wider source of a problem? Is it men, women themselves, or an ingrained cultural unconscious bias?

Oh, that's a big question that I've spent 20 years on, Maurice. So, we're not going to get it quite licked in this conversation, but I would say that actually my two topics are very linked. So, the issue of gender and generational balance is linked in interesting ways in response to your question.

Part of the challenge, I'd say, I would never lay the blame too simplistically at men or women's feet. I think it's a combination of systemics that haven't fully adapted to this very gender balanced talent that we now have in most organisations. And it's partly because the default career setting is based on slightly outdated male norms, the sort of linear, upwardly mobile career that goes very fast from 25 to 50 and then stops is something that suited a generation of men with wives at home that didn't work.

Now, in a world of dual career couples and much more gender balanced talent, the fact that we're going to live longer and work much longer opens up what I call this whole third quarter of life, which is the 25 years after 50, which I think will be some of women in particular, but any parent prime career years where you're not so desperately juggling family and career prospects as you are in what I call Q2, the 25 years before 50, but you have much more time.

The problem right now is that companies are almost entirely focused on Q2 workforces and nudge anybody over 50 slowly but gently out the door.

Yeah, I saw some statistics, I forget from which group, talking about how women have been successful up to a certain seniority level just before board level, but then at board level huge number of NEDs who are women, but very few in those top executive roles of CEO, etc, and that there seems to be a sort of a cliff that occurs, an unbridgeable gap between the two in terms of executive positions on boards. Is there a particular cause for that part of the problem?

So, the explanation for why there aren't more women in senior executive roles is grounded in gender imbalances that build over the life course. It doesn't suddenly happen just at senior levels, it's if you've spent as much time as I have looking at the statistics of gender gaps in organisations, you have what I call gender jaws. Every company has their gender jaws, so it's basically the ratio of men and women at different levels as you go up through the organisation, and what we see today is what we've accomplished is we've gender balanced the entry levels of organisations.

They're pretty balanced, if not even sometimes in many organisations increasingly female dominated, but what happens is as you go up through the ranks, based on a pretty classic male linear uninterrupted career pattern, you tend to lose a percentage of women at almost every promotion level, and you see the percentage of women fall, the percentage of men rise, so that at the end you end up with these rather large gaps, and what you look at is the explanation for that, which is a mix of leadership skill and driving balance, management competencies in changing and shifting cultures so that they are equally hospitable to both genders.

And you have to manage the differences in work and life priorities across the entire life course, and that's what we haven't really done, and so we lose a lot of women, I would argue, in their late 40s, early 50s, which is actually exactly when we should be starting to accelerate them and promote them into the levels you're talking about.

Yeah, very interesting.

I mean, the other cultural issue which you're involved in is geographical. How can companies develop more geographically diverse workforces to ensure that they have a balance of cultures and a genuinely global output, something which I think is particularly important today?

Well, it's particularly relevant today as people harness back in, right, so the debate on globalisation and its aftershocks. You also talked about DEI and its aftershocks. I've never labelled myself a DEI consultant precisely because these issues are either seen as being extraordinarily strategic, so if a company is globalising, if it's trying to penetrate markets around the world, most companies that have done that successfully have learned that they need geographically balanced, culturally balanced teams that understand local markets while balancing global perspectives.

What's interesting is the companies that have done this most successfully tend to come from small countries where their own home nationals don't completely dominate the executive teams. You will quickly observe if you look around that the majority of large organisations today are still dominated by home country nationals and the way our current geopolitical trends are going, that may actually increase.

Yeah, yeah, I fear you're right on that. Very interesting, Avivah. I mean, for our viewers, if you'd like to hear more about these very interesting, very pertinent issues, do come along to the 10th Annual Culture and Conduct in Financial Services Summit on the 4th of Feb.

More information is available on our website www.cityandfinancial.com and I'm very much looking forward to seeing you there Avivah, next Tuesday, and thank you so much for sharing those insights with us today.

My pleasure. See you Tuesday.