Corporate leaders need to set the right tone from the top if female representation at the upper levels of management is going to be addressed – both in financial services and elsewhere.

This was one of the messages to come from  Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) Group Executive, Wealth Management, Annabel Spring, as she discussed the issue in Sydney last week. Contributing to a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) panel discussion on ‘blocked promotional pipelines, widening pay gaps and occupational segregation’, Spring said that a lot of CBA’s success in promoting more women to senior positions can be put down to its leaders making the issue a priority.

“A third of our board are women, a third of our executive committee are women,” she said. “And we have a target that we’re moving very solidly towards, which is that 35 per cent of our executive managers will be women.”

She noted that, as a financial services firm, CBA follows the old adage that ‘you get what you measure’. But it has also committed to putting the systems, processes, culture, education, training and policies in place to see these measurements head in the right direction.

Pay surveys just the start

On the subject of measurements, Spring pointed to disappointing figures regarding the gender pay gap in Australia – and in the financial services sector in particular. “It’s not a myth, gender pay equity in financial services. If you look at total remuneration and the gender pay equity gap in Australia, it’s around 25 per cent, which is shocking,” she said.

“If you look at base pay in financial services, the gap is 28 per cent. And if you look at total remuneration including super and bonuses, etc, the gap in financial services is 36 per cent, which is clearly not just good enough.”

To address this situation, she said that organisations need to analyse the problem in depth to uncover its nature. And one of the key issues is the lack of women in leadership positions. Noting that less than 20 per cent of leadership positions in financial services are held by women globally, Spring said that it’s essential to focus not only on gender pay equity, but also on the promotion and development of women.

While recent figures suggest that only 24 per cent of organisations nationwide perform gender pay equity surveys, she explained that the figure for the well-resourced financial services sector is closer to 50 per cent. But performing these surveys is just the start.

“Certainly that’s something we’ve focused on in Commonwealth Bank, but we’ve also focused on doing it properly,” she said. “As you look at those surveys, understanding the biases, and really doing an analysis properly so you’re looking at equivalent jobs,” she said.

She added that performance outcomes are another area that warrant scrutiny, given that they may be subject to unconscious bias. And occupational gender segregation is also a huge issue, which can be solved in part by giving employees the opportunity to change and supporting exchange between roles.

‘Safe to speak up’

Cultural awareness is also crucial, said Spring. Noting that nobody goes to work with the explicit intention of being unfair, she said that increasing awareness and understanding can change the mindset of an organisation. “Once you’ve done that gender equity pay analysis, make sure that everybody sees it, they understand it, they understand how to use it,” she said.

In addition, she promoted the idea of fostering a ‘safe to speak up’ culture, which enables both women and men within an organisation to feel comfortable discussing critical – and often awkward – issues.

“Talking about pay is really awkward, so having a general safe to speak culture helps men, it helps women, it helps everybody to feel safe to speak up about the awkward things. And that’s an important part of the culture,” she said.

Finally, she said that the measurements relating to issues such as gender pay equity need to be discussed at every level of the organisation, from board and executive committee downwards – something that’s typified by CBA’s involvement with the Male Champions of Change campaign.

Original Author Robin Christie

This article was originally published on Finsia. Read the original article here.