Kenyans today woke up to the sad news of the demise of Safaricom CEO
Bob Collymore. Collymore not only headed the highest grossing technology
company in Kenya, but championed many social issues some affecting
women.
In 2016, he spoke about bridging the gap between men and women in
the workplace. In the statement, he pointed out the efforts Safaricom,
was making to ensure that they fostered as much home-grown talent, from
both men and women. He went on to point out the benefits of hiring more
women in a job market where many companies see the hiring of women as a
liability.
Below is his statement:
One of the questions I am frequently asked is how a technology
company operating in Africa (like Safaricom) is able to identify the
right talent for its needs.
As Africa is widely seen as an importer of information and
communications technology, there was the fear that there was not enough
home-grown talent to manage the need of the expanding technology sector.
For years, the concern was that there were too few highly skilled
technical personnel on the continent to help fuel the rapid growth of
new technologies across the continent. Businesses joined hands with
learning institutions, governments reformed their syllabi, and
professionals formed mentorship groups hoping to bridge the knowledge
gap. The results have been impressive.
But there is a more compelling gap that we rarely talk about, and
which is seldom addressed anymore; and that is the continued gap
between equal opportunities for men and women. As an illustration, as
one of Kenya’s biggest employers, we are often pleased to say that we
have achieved an almost 50/50 balance in terms of creating equal
opportunities for the men and women who work for us.
However the picture is very different once you analyse those
numbers. We have found that the majority of women we hire are at entry
jobs, with just a handful of them making it to mid-level and senior
posts. Over the last few years, Safaricom has managed to invest in its
female employees to boost the number of women who sit at board or who
hold top managerial seats. For instance, our executive committee has
five out of its 11 posts filled by women.
This trend is not replicated very often across much of the globe;
proof that it is still very much a man’s man’s man’s world, nearly
fifty years after James Brown’s hit single with the same title.
More worryingly, women already in leadership posts are not hiring
women. Some even say women do not want leadership positions. This is
not a problem unique to Africa, where some of the strongest cultural
biases still dictate the way women are treated or expected to act.
Globally, just 22 per cent of senior roles are held by women,
compared with 19 per cent in 2004. Almost a third of businesses have no
women in their senior leadership teams, although this number has fallen
by 6 per cent over the past three years.
The tech sector are often the worst culprits: just 17 per cent of
Google’s workforce are women and the story is no better at younger
start-ups such as Airbnb where it’s 13 per cent or Pinterest at 14 per
cent or even Dropbox where it shrinks to just 6.3 per cent of the
population. How critical is this to future economic growth? For
businesses, a growing body of research reveals that the impact of a more
inclusive gender agenda can directly impact their financial bottom
line.
A new report by Granton Thornton reveals that companies with
diverse executive boards consistently outperform their peers – with the
opportunity cost for companies with male-only executive boards (in terms
of lower returns on assets) at a staggering US$655 billion in 2014.
In practical terms, this means that shareholders are looking for
companies who invest in having women in senior roles and will follow
that interest with cash. In addition, hiring from diverse groups allows
companies to benefit from ‘informational diversity’, where the aggregate
views of create a melting pot that boosts innovation.
Countries will benefit from greater inclusiveness too.
As the world adopts new Sustainable Development Goals to drive
the next 15 years of development, none of the goals that countries have
committed to will be accomplished without putting women at the centre of
our efforts. Excluding women from any equation removes 50 per cent of
the population; as President Barrack Obama recently said: no team can
survive when half of the players are absent.
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