During the summer of 2013 about two and a half years after the start of a
major effort to increase the number and proportion of senior-leadership roles
held by women at eBay Inc.1
—we
conducted a global gender-diversity survey on the attitudes and experiences of
our top 1,700 leaders.2
The survey revealed some
good news: for example, our leaders—women and men alike—consider gender
diversity an important business goal. Moreover, we found no aspiration gap: women
and men, in roughly the same proportion, want to move up.
Many of the findings, however,
were troubling, for they suggested that men and women experience the company in
strikingly different ways. A majority of women, for instance, felt that their
male colleagues didn’t understand them very well, though a majority of men felt
well understood by the women. Likewise, women were significantly less likely
than men to believe that their opinions were listened to and more likely to
doubt that the most deserving people received promotions. Finally, we did not
see any significant differences in the survey results across geographic
regions. Our gender-diversity challenges (and therefore opportunities) were
global ones. We were both frustrated and motivated by these survey results.3
But they didn’t necessarily surprise us. The
company’s gender initiative really had significantly increased the
representation of women in leadership roles. Between 2011 and 2013, in fact,
their number rose by 30 percent annually, and we increased the proportion of
leadership roles held by women every year. This early progress exceeded our
expectations and showed that it is possible to make a difference.
Nonetheless, we believed that our demographic
results ran ahead of the cultural reality—the numbers were moving in a positive
direction, but the experience of women at our company wasn’t yet notably
different. At the root of the challenge, we believed, was the pervasive mix of
unconscious mind-sets, behavior, and “blind spots” that color anyone’s
perceptions of gender. Now, with some wind at our backs from the progress on
demographics, and armed with the data from the gender survey, we committed
ourselves to addressing our cultural challenges.
‘This
is personal’
Even getting to this point took significant effort.
Gender diversity has long been a passion of our CEO, John Donahoe, but it
wasn’t something he could tackle immediately upon assuming the role, in 2008.
The global recession and a business turnaround at eBay came first.
By 2010, the turnaround was succeeding, and John was
keen to sustain it. In a competitive marketplace for talent, he argued, eBay
should create a business climate where talented women could thrive. At the end
of that year, he launched our Women’s Initiative Network (WIN). Although today
this effort includes women at all levels, we began with leaders, defined as
directors and higher, because we wanted to start with something manageable that
we could do well. Besides, if you don’t have role models at the top, it’s
harder to encourage women at earlier stages of their careers to pursue their
aspirations.
At our first global WIN Summit, in January 2011,
eBay’s 200 highest-ranking women met with our senior-executive team for three
days of professional development and networking. At the outset, John went
onstage and described, in quite personal and moving terms, why gender diversity
matters so much to him. He recalled one of his wife’s more challenging career
experiences and concluded, “I just remember thinking: my God, she has a tougher
row to hoe than me.” He went on to discuss her career experience over 25 years,
the issues she has faced as a successful professional woman, and how it felt to
observe all this. John finished by explaining his aspirations for WIN and his
desire for a more supportive, inclusive environment at eBay. “This is
personal,” he told us.
Indeed, from the outset,
John’s personal conviction rather than a conventional business case inspired
our gender-diversity initiative—not because the case is irrelevant4
but because it can’t, in itself, generate enough passion and conviction to
sustain gender diversity as a priority. Our company’s experience thus far
suggests that a committed chief executive and C-suite are essential to
telegraph the importance of the effort. When senior leaders engage with
something, others are encouraged to make individual commitments, establish
shared goals, and accept collective accountability. Real change can’t happen
without a commitment from the top, because that’s where people take their cues.
Soon after the WIN Summit, John publicly
demonstrated his commitment by proposing to eBay’s board that he be held
accountable for the effort’s success. The focus areas he chose included
increasing the number of women in leadership roles, reducing their attrition
rate below that of men, and improving women’s satisfaction with their jobs and
work. He also committed himself to mentoring five women leaders. (We should
note here that we do not set quotas, which we philosophically oppose; we simply
aim to achieve progress.)
John’s role modeling had a remarkable effect. About
a year after he had taken on the goals—a year when the initiative was broadly
discussed internally—he was in a meeting with our senior vice presidents. John
was reviewing his annual goals when someone spontaneously suggested that they
all adopt a similar set of gender-related ones. By the end of the discussion,
all our senior vice presidents (about 20 of our most senior leaders) had agreed
to include gender-related items in their annual goals. Later that year, we
rolled out a modified version of the goals to all our vice presidents (about
170 leaders). These included:
- All
open leadership positions should have a diverse slate of candidates and
interviewers.5
- Top-talent women, at
every level, should have career-development plans and discuss them with
their managers.
- Leaders should monitor
the diversity of their promotion pipelines to ensure fairness.
- Each senior vice
president and vice president should help to develop top-talent women by
mentoring or sponsoring five of them.
- The company would
continue to measure progress on our demographics regularly.
Why did we wait a year for this to happen? After
all, we could have mandated goals right away. We didn’t, because we strongly
felt that senior leaders needed to find and “own” their roles in our gender
diversity effort at their own pace. John called this “meeting everybody where
they’re at in the journey.”
A
focused approach
The goals our leaders chose helped us focus on a few
essential people processes in the early days: recruiting, promotions, and
development planning. This, in turn, inspired straightforward and obvious
changes. For example, we insist on diverse slates of candidates. We’ve expanded
our pool of women candidates for top-management jobs by looking more carefully
internally, by more actively leveraging our leaders’ and employees’ personal
networks, and by expecting our sourcers to find more diverse candidates. In
addition, we stepped up our presence at targeted recruiting events, such as the
annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the conference of the
Society of Women Engineers.
Other changes seemed straightforward but in reality
required us to take on hidden biases more directly. In our promotion and
development-planning processes, for example, we wanted to counter the
assumption that managers—men and women alike—know what teammates want from
their careers. That’s particularly dangerous for women because a manager can
unwittingly make incorrect assumptions about things like their geographic
mobility or interest in stepping up to the next level. In addition, if a woman
doesn’t have a deliberate conversation about her aspirations with her manager,
she may assume that merely doing good work and keeping her head down will win
her promotion.
Sidebar
Talking the talk to thrive
Some women suspect that their managers may not be comfortable
talking to them about their careers. Some men think they might do or say the
wrong thing when talking to women. Few people have much experience discussing
gender and understanding how it affects careers. Our company therefore decided
to facilitate the conversation by choosing a few topic areas and suggesting
questions and discussion starters that managers could use.
Career aspirations
What are your career aspirations?
What do you dream about or imagine in your future?
How could your aspirations be better met?
How connected do you feel to our purpose?
Compelling, challenging
work
How excited are you about the work you are doing
today?
What would it take for you to feel you are
innovating in your job?
How much are you learning/growing in your current
role?
Team-working norms
What do you want in your next role?
When will you be ready for a change?
How well does your team define expectations and
working norms for each other?
How well do those norms enable you to make choices
that work for your work life and personal life?
What flexibilities do you want/need to
enable your work life and personal life to thrive?
To help counter this problem, we began encouraging
all women in leadership roles to define their aspirations, create a plan to
achieve them, and discuss it with their managers. Because talking about gender
is difficult for everyone, we created simple tools our managers can use to
prompt and sustain productive development conversations (see sidebar, “Talking
the talk to thrive”).
Measure
and share
Companies measure what matters. We pull our gender
data twice a year and share this internally at our leadership forums and WIN
events. Measurement is essential to establish a baseline for tracking progress
and to reinforce accountability. Everyone knows we will be transparent with the
numbers inside our company.
At the beginning of 2011, shortly after WIN started,
we determined the number and proportion of women leaders across the
organization and in each business, function, region, and critical talent
segment. We looked at the number and proportion of women hires and promotions,
compared the attrition rates of our men and women leaders, and established the
number and proportion of women at every management level. Looking at the data
is motivating. It reinforces our commitment to gender diversity and instills
confidence that the company is serious.
We share the demographic data at meetings of senior
vice presidents and vice presidents and at each global WIN Summit. The data are
also discussed at staff meetings convened by the heads of each business and
function and by the technology and customer-service/operations groups. These
organizations therefore see their own gender data, including the mix by level,
the progress and status of women leaders, and the outcomes of decisions on
hires, promotions, and terminations. In the staff meetings, we also show the
number and proportion of women leaders reporting to the direct reports of each
business-unit president, so all of them can see the data.
It’s hugely important to share
this kind of information within the company because progress begets progress,
and even senior leaders need encouragement to maintain focus and enthusiasm.
Last and perhaps most important, transparency demonstrates commitment and
conviction. With this in mind, our CEO and senior leadership team recently made
the decision to publicly share key data about diversity at eBay for the first
time. As our data shows, we have made notable progress on gender diversity. But
we still have much work to do.6
Changing
the culture—for everyone
Since WIN began, eBay has more than doubled the
number of women in leadership roles. At the same time, we have increased the
proportion of women in leadership by improving the promotion rates and
(notably) our retention of female leaders. We’ve made progress across all
businesses, functions, geographic regions, and key workforce segments,
including technology. Yet the numbers can also tell a different story. At the
most senior level, we are still almost exclusively male, and our board
diversity remains a work in progress. Despite the impressive increase in
numbers at the director-and-above level, we are far from declaring victory and
are in fact humbled by our experience thus far.
We know that shifting the culture to improve the
day-to-day experience of women at eBay has only just begun. Yet cultural change
is essential because culture trumps all: even the best policies fail if
employees think it isn’t really acceptable to avail themselves of them without
hurting their careers. Furthermore, women must have faith that our people
processes are fair to feel confident that they can build lasting careers at
eBay.
The perception of fairness in people processes
matters to everyone, not just women. Many of the concerns they expressed in our
survey—for example, about promotions, hiring, challenging assignments,
mentorship, or the visibility of job opportunities—worried men too. By
improving our execution and the perceived fairness of our people processes, we
can make eBay a better place for women and men to build their careers.
This is no small undertaking—nearly 6,000 people
managers around the globe must raise their game—but it is also a tremendous
opportunity. We intend to spur cultural change through multiple efforts,
including our people-manager-effectiveness initiative already under way. We
have just embarked on this journey.
As we reflect on what drove the early progress of
our gender-diversity initiative, it is clear that a few things mattered most:
senior leadership commitment and conviction, a focus on a few people processes,
and the measurement of our data. Our continued progress will require shifting
mind-sets and changing our culture so each employee gains a greater awareness
and understanding of these issues and becomes better equipped to embrace our
differences and support our successes.
This isn’t just a journey for women. Academic
research shows that everyone has gender biases and expectations. Women and men
acquire these attitudes, many of them unconscious, early in life. Starting with
the children we raise, we must rewrite the norms that limit both genders, and
this will take time. “Meeting everybody where they’re at in the journey” is
hard while establishing trust and sustaining momentum for change, but it’s a
worthy effort. In the future, winning companies will be those that learn to
deploy the entire workforce productively and inclusively. We hope eBay will be
one of them.
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