Strategy consultancy Bain will not budge from its “rigorous” selection process that led to the appointment of three times more men than women to management in the past seven years, says managing partner Peter Stumbles.
Despite Bain being a vocal advocate for more female leaders in business, fewer than a quarter of its full-time managers are women, the lowest proportion of the three strategy consulting firms, an analysis by The Australian Financial Review shows.
Bain’s slow progress towards management diversity is despite most of its junior ranks being staffed by female consultants and the firm’s continued spruiking of the benefits of gender equity in the workplace to staff, potential employees, and clients.
Only 24 percent of Bain’s leaders are women, or 22 of its 92-strong management, compared with 26.5 percent at McKinsey (61 women of 230 managers) and almost 30 percent at Boston Consulting Group (49 women out of 168 managers).
Of the three firms, Bain has also made the least progress in hiring or promoting women into management over the past seven years.
Bain notes on its website that “gender diversity is a strategic priority for our firm” and tells clients: “Companies that encourage managers to help women navigate the path to the top will gain more from their talent across their entire workforce.”
Bain has produced research for policy group Chief Executive Women that details the factors that “stop women from reaching the top”. That 2011 report concluded one reason change was hard was because “it requires shifting underlying beliefs and behaviours. The brutal fact is that the barriers to women’s progression into leadership roles are in large part due to perceptions of a woman’s ability to lead.”
In an email, Mr Stumbles said that although “womxn representation in our manager ranks is not where we would like it to be”, the firm was working constantly to improve it. Bain uses the phrase “womxn” to cover both female and gender non-binary staff.
‘Rigorous promotion process’
Mr Stumbles cited policies such as greater flexibility, removing the distinction between primary and secondary carers in leave policies, and continuing superannuation payments for staff on unpaid parental leave.
Asked about the number of women becoming managers, he said the firm would not compromise its “rigorous promotion process”.
“Every promotion enables our growth in our leadership team; we are not making trade-offs across individuals for a given promotion. We have a rigorous promotion process and one of our priorities as a firm is ensuring that this process is objective and equitable,” Mr Stumbles said.
He acknowledged women faced barriers to equal advancement early in their career – such as fewer sponsorship opportunities than their male peers – and said the firm had developed programs to mitigate this.
Bain has increased the number of women in management from 22 per cent in 2013-14 to 24 per cent in 2019-20, according to an analysis by The Australian Financial Review of data for full-time management from the government-run Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
That means Bain has hired or promoted about three men into management ranks for every woman over the past seven years.
McKinsey, BCG move ahead
In contrast, the firm’s competitors have made much larger strides in hiring and promoting women to management.
McKinsey has increased the percentage of female managers by more than 12 percentage points from 14 per cent in 2013-14 to 26.5 per cent in 2019-20. In the same time period, BCG has maintained its leadership in the area, with 29 per cent of its full-time managers women.
The professional services sector is renowned for having workforces that are bottom-heavy with women, but this fails to translate into promotion into senior ranks.
Experts cite gruelling hours, a bias towards men in promotions and a reluctance from management to allow truly flexible working conditions as barriers to women’s progress.
More than half Bain’s full-time professional staff – meaning fee-earning workers such as consultants who are not in management positions – are women, up from less than 40 percent seven years ago.
Boston Consulting Group Australia and New Zealand managing partner Anthony Roediger. Wolter Peeters
Women now account for 50.3 percent of all professionals at Bain, outstripping BCG’s 41 percent and McKinsey’s 49 percent in the year to March 2020.
New ways of working help women
McKinsey Australia and New Zealand managing partner Angus Dawson said the firm “still had a long way to go” on gender equity but hoped the pandemic would lead to work conditions more conducive to women’s advancement.
“The dramatic shifts to adapt to COVID create the opportunity to develop new ways of working that allow more flexibility for all of our people,” he said.
BCG Australia and New Zealand managing partner Anthony Roediger said his firm was “laser-focused” on improving its leadership pipeline but acknowledged it had “more work to do”.
“On recruitment, we continue to have a target of 50 percent at all levels, and have exceeded this at graduate and MBA level for the past three years,” he said.
”For senior roles, we are on target and continue to remain laser-focused on tailored recruitment strategies that require longer recruitment cycles, especially as we focus on senior STEM consulting hires,” he said, referring to science, technology, engineering, and maths fields.
BCG and Bain noted they had female managers in part-time work, meaning they had not been captured by the data analysis.
Sourced from Financial Review - written by Hannah Wootton and Edmund Tadros