Meet the pioneer panel

Challenging Ideas, Committing to Change

The Pioneers’ Panel at the Gender Balance Summit by Moving Ahead is always a thought-provoking event, and this year’s featured three female leaders from markedly different industry backgrounds sharing extraordinary and inspirational stories and perspectives on diversity and inclusion. Ann Cairns Chair of the 30% Club was joined by Karen Blackett OBE, Country Manager for WPP and CEO for Group M and Colonel Lucy Giles President of the British Army Officer Selection Board and the first female commander at Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, to talk about the pivotal moments in their careers and what they #choosetochallenge in 2021.

With #ChoosetoChallenge the call to action for International Women’s Day 2021, the panel looked to pivotal moments in their own life and career that have forced them to step up to drive change. Lucy began by speaking about the difficulty of making decisions under pressure, when a situation forces you to question your remit and how that can change your perspective in interesting ways, while Karen recalled a pivotal pushback moment around a pitch for a brand that her company lost out to another agency. She later discovered that the two male clients said her agency did a great job but there was ‘no way they would have a female business director, let alone a black one.’

“That came back to me. That’s personal,” she said. “It’s not about the work, the presentation, the commercial terms. It crushed me,” she said. “You can let it hold you back or you can decide to move forward. It was [about] the two individuals not me.

“We set out to win that brand’s competitor and show them what they missed, and in the end we won more new business than any agency at that time and grew significantly. I really do believe in karma. Those two individuals left that organisation, not of their own choosing, within 13 months of that decision being made.”

Challenging structural inequality was a theme for Ann, talking about how upon becoming a senior leader at Mastercard she found out that she only had a handful of female country managers across more than 200 territories. “I said, ‘I want to look at every single appointment of a country head. I’m not telling you to recruit women but I want you to justify your choice.’ There was a 10 per cent change within a year, and now 30 per cent [of country managers] around the world are women.”

It’s a drive for equity and an energy that she has brought to her work as Chair of the 30% club. “We said we wanted at least one person of colour on every FTSE 350 board, and 50 per cent of those seats to go to women of colour. Several CEOs rang me up, not because they didn’t think it was a good idea, but said ‘can we sign up to this? Is it realistic to get 50 per cent women?’ I said absolutely. We are tracking more than 40 per cent of women in these seats today.”

Changing the conversation

Looking forward at progress made in their own industries — and the work still to be done — accountability and clarity were common themes, as well as the need for transparent and accurate measurement of gaps to close and gains made.

“Women make up 43 per cent of our most senior roles at WPP,” said Karen. “A lot of that is based in sponsorship programmes including those that look at the intersection of ethnicity and gender.”

And with Mastercard publishing its gender pay gap around the world and rolling out maternity leave in every country, Ann notes its willingness to lean into the challenge to improve inclusion and level the playing field. “We’re committed to bringing in a billion people into the financial system and many of those people are women. This is easy to measure and relates to our core business strategy.”

The army too is making real progress in D&I, with significant changes since Lucy first joined. “The [previous] policies that surrounded service were that if you got pregnant you had to leave. But the organisation has adapted and taken on best practice from outside of the military,” she said.

However, she notes there are still issues around diversity and inclusion. “We have a challenge in middle management to buy into the case for diversity – 10 per cent of the army is female and the figure even less for BAME personnel — which isn’t good enough by some margin.”

Future focus

Of course, there is always work to be done, and looking forward to 2021, the panel considered their own #choosetochallenge for the next 12 months. Karen’s focus is on driving accountability for the pledges that have been made in her industry, not just around gender equity but racial equity, to actually deliver actionable and tangible change; Lucy’s to challenge the army’s gender diversity ambition and for Ann it is around challenging big global businesses to publish their gender pay gaps and outline their plans to do something to close them.

As Lucy noted, in closing the discussion, the future is there to be designed for diversity by those who dare to challenge with vision. “Unless we set more audacious goals, we’re never going to fundamentally change our processes and our policies.”