Merit

International Women’s Day always brings things out of the woodwork...
Unilever has announced that it has achieved 50/50 gender balance in management roles for the first time. Now this is of course a good thing, but I would be interested to know what percentage of their top managers and leaders are women: once they get that to 50%, then they will really have an achievement to celebrate. Organizations need diversity at the very top to truly change their culture and make equality sustainable.

What really interested me was one comment posted in response which went along the lines if ‘I hope this was achieved on merit’. This sums up the problem for me. Why question that women merit 50% of jobs? Maybe if women were dominating 80% of jobs we could raise eyebrows on merit, but questioning 50% can only mean one thing: that you don’t believe women are equal to men in intelligence, competence or capability. If someone out there wants to have that debate then bring it on - the data is overwhelmingly against you.

The real question we should be asking is ‘why do men have more than 50% of the top jobs’ (which is true in most cases).. ‘was this achieved on merit?’