I spent a day in Knoxville Tennessee this week with the Advisory Board of the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute. Our topic was all about supply chain education, but one issue stood out for me and that was the still nagging lack of women in supply chain.
Tennessee, along with most other leading institutions, is making a concerted effort to improve diversity and inclusion at the front end of the talent pipeline. Meanwhile, aggressive initiatives among hiring companies like Intel, whose CEO Brian Krzanich graces the cover of Forbes this week in recognition of its #1 ranking for corporate citizenship, are also making a difference. The SCM World community has invested five years in this quest and yet still, gender balance in supply chain management remains a long way off.
This is in spite of new survey data from Gartner showing that coveted millennials highly value gender balance at work. It also flies in the face of research that indicates that diverse groups make better decisions and that a wide majority of executives surveyed believe women’s unique skill sets are advantageous for supply chain management.
Why is the problem still so intractable?
The Value of Work
Gender justice is a wildfire topic at the moment. Separating the pure utility of better operational performance due to a diverse workplace from basic fairness demands a deeper look into why women earn less than men and how exactly we lose so many promising female supply chain leaders at the Director-to-VP frontier.
Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in 2016 men spent 34% more time per day at work while women spent 38% more time on household activities and twice as much time as caregivers. Considering this data against the backdrop of our experience-driven hiring and promotion habits it might seem natural that gender imbalances at work still persist.
As a matter of justice we obviously owe equal pay for equal work. As a matter of return on human capital investment, however, it is clear that the marketplace won’t pay for work experience keeping a home. It is also clear that child bearing and rearing cuts into career development for women trying to balance the two.
Finding Solutions in the Future of Work
The discussion in Tennessee, which was led by my colleague Dana Stiffler, surfaced some key insights around the design of work. Among the data points shared with the group were survey findings showing not only a preference for diverse work environments but also a desire for more flexibility in terms of office face-time, as well as more and faster mobility in job placements. The aha moment was triggered by a comment from Ben Cook, the SVP of Supply Chain for Sam’s Club, who noted that problem solving – which topped the list of desired skills – is actually an outcome of many other skills applied to any challenge.
For me, the takeaway was all about how leaders can tear down and reconstruct the work itself to make best use of a widening array of tools, resources and people for business benefit. Stable, twenty-year career paths familiar in the 1960s are clearly a thing of the past, both because the young don’t want or expect them and because business can no longer afford them.
The solution lies in structuring supply chain work explicitly around projects and initiatives rather than positions in a progression. This means more digital, virtual and event-oriented assignments. It also means measuring outcomes instead of effort. Digital natives value learning more than training, and they recognize the difference.
Work in this future should be able to accommodate the biology of family so long as supply chain leaders concentrate on solving problems rather than satisfying hierarchy. History is with us on this. Data on how US families spend their home production time shows a gender convergence arising from labor-saving technology both at home and at work. Women spend less time cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, while men have found more time to take care of kids and chores at home.
Gender equity is urgent. Intelligent use of human capital is important. The future of work should deliver both.
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