Sunday Morning Sermon - Sep 8 2013
[better late then never, the pastor was too bz this week]
In the corporate culture that we do live in these days, we don’t monitor or measure women’s advancement adequately. Overall, we as a people understand an issue better when we have ways to perceive, analyze and measure it. Our Corporate Planet still hasn’t effectively quantified and measured the impact of the lack of women leaders on business outcomes, or researched and identified effectively where in the pipeline women are falling out, why, and how to address it. Diversity programs abound, but the needle has yet to move.
In many peoples view, quite a number of women haven’t themselves made the decision about how far they want to go in business or government or readied themselves to deal with the consequences. We believe that there will always be a work-life balance struggle that women will face more intensely than men traditionally have (although that may be changing with younger generations on the ground today). “Men have always sacrificed not staying home with the kids, and women haven’t thus far been willing to make that sacrifice to the same degree. “ Women now need to decide definitively how far they wish to go, and commit to actions that support those decisions.
There are hundreds of women who have fought very hard to lead, thrive and grow in the corporate environment and in the political arena, but our culture has yet to embrace them. In short, people are more comfortable with what they know, and men have remained more comfortable with men at the top. As long as 95% of senior corporate leadership is male, the culture will be challenged in integrating and promoting women leaders.
In politics, women don’t really help women. In fact, most women are “super critical” of other women. Nations need to grow more accustomed, as some countries have, to accept women at the top, as powerful, intelligent, highly capable agents of authority, command, and change. Why aren’t women voting for women?”
It’s vitally important to include women in key decision making roles and to encourage diversity of all kinds — of background, culture, gender, socioeconomic background, etc. – in leadership and teams to ensure success. Research shows that the more diverse a group, the more capable it is to solve the problems at hand and arrive at better solutions.
David Landes – eminent Harvard historian in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,
asserts that one of the key forces behind how an economy will perform is its openness to new ideas. And one of the best gauges of that openness is how a country treats its women. The best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women, and the economic implications of gender discrimination are serious.
Kathy Matsui, renowned top-ranked equity strategist in Japan, conducted groundbreaking research on what she calls “Womenomics” which points to investing in women as the key to creating stronger economies and a more equitable global society. She asserts that women’s education is the best investment our generation can make for global peace and sustainable development. In her TEDxTokyo Talk on Womenomics, Kathy shares that companies who have adopted explicit practices that promote diversity – for instance, programs that support working mothers or ensure objective evaluation and performance metrics — experience higher average profit margins than companies that don’t.
This tells us that it is vitally important for both companies and individuals to step up and do what they can to support the education, development and growth of women globally.
Amen!
No comments:
Post a Comment