Hiring women and minorities seen boosting business profits

Due to different backgrounds and experiences of discrimination or life circumstances, women and minorities bring different perspectives and skills that previously lacked in the office. FILE 

By Scott Bellow

 

In Summary

• In the case of hiring women and minorities, as a CEO you really can have your cake and eat it too. Commit to workplace diversity and equality. Do the right thing and boost your profits at the same time.

Wanjiru stares at her CV in frustration at the lack of response to her numerous job inquiries. Among her group of friends that graduated from USIU last year with MBAs, she remains the only one unable to improve her career options.

Tom, George, John, and Michael all secured significantly good employment within six months of graduation. Meanwhile, despite her stellar academic performance, Wanjiru continues to struggle to make ends meet in a seemingly dead-end customer service job for a telecommunications firm.

“What can I do? What am I doing wrong?” She ponders.

The reality she faces along with millions of other Kenyans in the labour market — workplace bias and discrimination.

Some progress

But let us not mistake our reality for a lack of progress. If we ask our mothers and grandmothers about the difficulty of women employment in generations past, we will discover we have come a long way. However, Kenya has not yet reached gender or minority equality in the workplace.

Of the companies listed at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), almost 40 per cent do not see the value in retaining a single female director.

Further, according to research conducted by BrainTrust Strategies in 2012, another 26 per cent of NSE companies only use one woman on their boards of directors.

The figures paint a picture of a dramatic lack of female business empowerment among two-thirds of our largest Kenyan companies.

A global study by Deloitte last year found that the West, despite its equality rhetoric, did not perform much better in female board representation.

Now suppose you run a major firm listed at the NSE. As the CEO, you have difficult choices in hiring and promotions. In a country, such as Kenya that disproportionately hires men over women, would you find advantages in exploiting the underrepresented pool of female candidates? Would your organisation help or hurt profits by hiring more women over men?

You may fear upsetting the delicate work balance by hiring a woman to lead a department composed predominately of men. Now expand your geographic scope. Suppose your Nairobi-based entity desired to grow into Saudi Arabia. Saudi society famously suppresses the rights of women. Would you hire women in such a context to grow your business?

Now realise that the problem extends beyond gender. Minority groups also face intense discrimination and difficulty accessing jobs and promotions. Pastoralist communities repeatedly report bigotry in the job application process.

Tanzanians, have a disproportionate bias against people living with albinism. In Uganda, hysterical misconceptions about homosexuality pushes gay men and women out of the job market.

America’s widespread anti-Islamic sentiment yields Americans of Arab descent struggling to prove their worth in the country’s labour market. Europe faces its own chronic discrimination of gypsies.