‘Don’t let boys have all the fun,’ Macquarie CEO urges potential recruits
More women should chase jobs in financial services so that they “don’t let boys have all the fun and miss out on what could be very exciting careers”, Macquarie CEO Shemara Wikramanayake says.
But it is on employers to enable this, she said, with the investment giant targeting year nine and 10 schoolgirls in its recruitment efforts and holding leaders accountable for unimproved diversity.
Speaking at the CEW conference, Shemara Wikramanayke reckons women are “self-selecting” out of financial services jobs. Elke Meitzel
Just one third of applicants for graduate roles at Macquarie are female, the CEO told the Chief Executive Women annual conference in Melbourne on Wednesday, meaning women were “self-selecting out of what we are doing” at entry level.
Employers needed to have initiatives specifically increasing awareness of these jobs among young women as a starting point, she said. Macquarie hosted 120 female students from diverse backgrounds in its Sydney office on Tuesday, for example, in a bid to open their minds to banking careers.
“[We get] people like myself talking to them to stop them inadvertently cutting off choices and have awareness of what they could be doing,” Ms Wikramanayake said.
Employers then needed to ensure they hired and promoted women at a rate that helped rectify gender imbalances, she continued.
Half of Macquarie’s grad hires are women despite the one-third application rate, for example, and Ms Wikramanayake said that “frankly, the people getting through to the final rounds are just as good [as each other].”
Employers also need to work on the historic problem of women leaving the workforce once they have children. The CEO, like countless others, pointed to more flexibility and work-life balance as a solution.
Then, how senior staff helped improve diversity needed to be measured and tied to their performance evaluations, with those showing unaddressed unconscious biases “held accountable”.
Improved gender equality was crucial to Macquarie’s performance, Ms Wikramanayake said, to come up with the best ideas and to serve its clients with more empathy.
Safety benefits
Speaking at the same conference, BHP CEO Mike Henry said that tying gender targets to employees’ key performance indicators had helped the mining company drive up female representation within its workforce from 17 per cent in 2016 to 35 per cent today.
Mike Henry at the CEW conference. Elke Meitzel
Holding leaders to account for improving diversity meant they were more “creative” in trying to address the issue, he said, and expended “effort and resourcing that otherwise wouldn’t be there”.
BHP is trying to reach gender parity by 2025 and already has 40 per cent women in its leadership ranks and 50 per cent in Mr Henry’s own team.
He said safety and operational performance at the company had improved as a result of this diversity, which in turn pleased shareholders.
Targets are key
Cementing gender targets in leaders’ KPIs was also key to Coles’ recent jump in women in its senior ranks, the supermarket’s CEO Leah Weckert told the conference.
Leah Weckert says gender targets are crucial. Elke Meitzel
While just over half its workforce has historically been female, only 30 per cent of its leadership roles were held by women in 2017 and just 2 of its 12 executives were. One of those was Ms Weckert and the other was in an acting role that was ultimately permanently filled by a man.
But both those figures now sit at over 40 per cent and Ms Weckert said that “the first really important thing we did [to get there] was actually set the target” of 40 per cent men and 40 per cent women in those roles.
This included “really breaking it down” into the business functions, she said, so that each had an appropriate target.
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