Antony Keane, managing director in Accenture, believes that companies that foster equality not only accelerate career advancement for women but improve career progress for men as well.

Accenture has been celebrating International Women’s Day for years. What’s on this year?

For Accenture in Ireland, IWD is our largest client event of the year. This year it will also be the largest IWD celebration in Accenture. The event will focus on how inclusion and diversity (I&D) help to drive innovation in business and more broadly in our society.

This year Accenture is also celebrating being in business in Ireland for 50 years so the event will take a look back at how I&D has evolved over this period. As always there will be a great range of speakers and performances which always make this event something special.

What strategies are in place to achieve an equal balance?

At Accenture, we believe the future workforce is an equal one, and that gender diversity is essential for an innovation-led organisation. Globally we have set ourselves bold goals to help us accelerate equality.

Today 47% of our new hires are women, and 42% of our global workforce of almost 500,000 people are women. By 2025, Accenture will achieve a gender-balanced workforce and, by 2020, women will account for 25% of managing directors globally.

To help us achieve this we offer flexible and innovative working arrangements, we encourage our women to connect through employee resource groups that help them build networks through the Accenture Women’s Network, our global online platform. We also ensure all employees have a mentor and a personalised training programme – women comprise 41% of total participants in mentoring and development programmes.

Does awareness about gender parity affect office culture?

It’s very clear to me and is supported by recent Accenture research and our ‘Getting to Equal’ studies, that creating a culture of equality unlocks human potential. If companies succeed in creating a workforce culture that fosters equality, they will not just accelerate career advancement and pay for women, they will also improve career progress for men. Sounds like a win-win to me.

How important is it for companies to implement policies aimed at closing the gender skills gap in STEM and ICT sectors?

I think it is undoubtedly important for companies to do this, however, I think the focus on this needs to start much earlier – there are simply not enough girls pursuing technology careers and learning to code from a young age. So much so that the gender gap in this space is actually getting worse. My own data point on this is when I drop my nine-year-old son to his weekly coding class and see a room filled almost entirely with boys.

Thankfully, there are a growing number of examples of technology and computing initiatives designed specifically for girls, but we really need to see more happening and more female role models flying the STEM flag.

Interview by Irene Psychari.

Natasha Jen, an award-winning designer, educator, and a partner at Pentagram speaks to ThinkBusiness ahead of her talk on International Women’s Day.

An individualistic mentality defines design studio Pentagram in more ways than one. Operating a unique socialist business model, rather than a purely capitalist one, as well as its innovative use of graphic, verbal, digital, and spatial interventions that challenge conventional notions of media and cultural contexts, all give Pentagram unique appeal.

You have 23 partners at Pentagram working together and independently, how does that work and how important is it to the company’s success?

At Pentagram, each partner is autonomous as a design business, with different staff size, different overheads and different revenue targets. Within each office, the partners share general shared overhead: office rent, general admin, office supply, etc. Each partner would generate different revenues, depending on what they pursue and how they manage their staffing overhead. This setup, at first glance, is similar to different teams (studios) sharing an office.

What makes Pentagram unique is that the different revenues from different teams would get aggregated and redistributed equally back to each team, so it’s a socialist model. What this model does is essentially a very sophisticated check-and-balance. It first allows a partner – a designer – to define what he or she is interested in and they can shape their practice accordingly. It’s an incredibly individualistic kind of mentality. What keeps it in balance is the socialist economic model. While we pursue what we like to do, which may include things that are not profitable, we must keep in mind that our own profitability or unprofitability would affect other teams. 

This business model is really simple mathematically, but behaviourally and psychologically more nuanced than a pure capitalist model. This is beyond simple friendship, it’s a true partnership psychology and that creates a collegial culture and that culture is what keeps Pentagram going.  

How important is design in the way we live in 2019?

I think design has to be talked about specifically as opposed to generically. Generic “design” tends to end up being a feel-good word that, in the face of some of the biggest crises we face right now, feels superficial. There are real urgencies that each design field faces and there are shared crises, such as global warming, or the erasure of local culture in the age of social networks and global monopolies, or the paradox of algorithm, that it is benefiting us yet manipulating us. I don’t think we know how to answer those questions as a collective. I don’t. But that not-knowingness also sets a direction for years to come. 

What has made Pentagram so successful?

I sometimes wonder if we’re just lucky. We are not a practice informed by conventional corporate models yet we are prolific. We’ve done celebrated work and we’ve done work that went under criticism. But what’s true in the history of Pentagram is that we are a creativity-led practice, and that’s the soul of the group. 

How important is avoiding trends and designing instead for longevity?

It’s hard to say what are trends and what are timeless. Trends, such as the Chanel tweet jacket, can become timeless. I think it’s more important to think about how we respond to the challenges of our time than thinking about being trendy or timeless. That is for history to judge, 

How has technology influenced design and do you as a designer embrace it or feel you have to fight it?

Technology, similar to the word ‘design’, has specificity to it that it’s hard for me to answer generically. Digital technology pretty much has consumed everything we do and communication design, my field, is a sub-set in that totality. Technology has its way to erase uniqueness and encouraging sameness, and that’s what we work against. I don’t like to think that I am “fighting” as I have no power to set the rules in the big currents of technological developments; I tend to think that there are choices that we can make and that we don’t have to feel that we are victimized by tech. 

How important is keeping control of your work and how can you do this in a busy and large company?

There’s never a case where I can say we’re “controlling” the outcome. Design service is a messy process and clients, regardless of how much or little they have training in design, get their hands dirty in the process with us. This is not to say that we’re not the author in the final outcome, it’s that the outcome is never as pure as a fairytale. But people are people: we can be genius and we’re also flawed. For me I try to understand the people condition the best I can so the work can be conceived in the most communicative way possible. 

Interview by Olivia McGill.

Agri-food specialist Karen Brosnan says more needs to be done to bridge the gender gap in her sector with 50% of companies yet to address the issue.

Originally from a dairy farm in north Kerry, Karen Brosnan is a management consultant working with companies, boards and executives in the agri-food sector to plan strategically for organisation and culture change, and to implement programmes of leadership and people development.

She is the current chairperson of Gurteen College, a director of Nuffield Ireland and the former chairperson of Ceres, the women in agri-business leadership network, as well as a member of the agri-food inclusion and diversity (I&D) taskforce. Here she discusses a number of issues facing women in her field.

What can be done to get more women involved in the sector?

Research shows organisations that embrace I&D are more innovative, sustainable and successful in the longer term. In this fast-paced world, it is important to provide opportunities for both men and women to make the most of their skills and experience.

According to a study by AON last year, 50% of agri-food businesses surveyed have engaged or have started the process of engaging in I&D strategies. The other 50%, in order to compete for talent with other sectors, need to follow suit and continue to row in behind the national programmes and initiatives that are currently underway.

At a broader level, the goal of the National Women and Girls Strategy is to develop ‘an Ireland where all women enjoy equality with men and can achieve their full potential, while enjoying a safe and fulfilling life’. The strategy’s success depends on the shared engagement of women and men, in building a fairer society. This involves finding the programmes, opportunities, and people who support change and working with them.

What are the biggest challenges facing women in the sector?

While the number of women in CEO positions in the Irish agri-food sector has increased in recent times, female representation on boards and at senior management level is still low and far from the 30% base-line considered international standard.

I believe that the biggest challenge facing women in the workplace is unconscious bias. This bias comes from our life experiences and the way we have been brought up. It is hardwired into us. We bring these unconscious biases into the workplace and they influence how we make decisions.

When it comes to women in decision-making positions in the agri sector, we need to consider what are the assumptions that men and women make that might stop them recognising and utilising talent and potential. What are the assumptions that women themselves are making that might be stopping them putting themselves forward. Individuals need to become aware of their beliefs and biases and to take part in conversations around how we support women, young men, and different nationalities in different roles.

What needs to be done to increase female representation on boards of agri-food organisations?

Studies over the last decade have consistently shown a positive correlation between women on boards and the company performance. In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse in 2018, organisations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that didn’t have any women on the board. Increasing numbers of women in the workforce has not translated into significantly higher numbers of women in higher and management grades. Organisational cultures, and particularly agricultural cultures, need to become increasingly open to challenging gender and other stereotypes.

Is there a lack of talent in the pipeline?

Ireland has the highest rate of college students per capita, in Europe, and with an increasing number of third level programmes in agri-food with a high female participation, it means that a shortage of talent is not the issue; the issue is graduates’ perceptions of the industry. The agri-food sector needs to be able to compete with others for top talent. There are many businesses in the industry that are struggling to attract talent from traditional sources, because they cannot compete on reputation or compensation. The future success of the agri-food industry depends on attracting diverse talent and thinking. The pace of change demands it.

Are there opportunities for greater planning and review on family farm businesses?

As with every self-employed person in Ireland, some businesses are ahead, but for many, it can be hard to get the balance right. Entrepreneurs need to build in thinking time, and time for review. I speak for myself when I say that it is easy to get lost in the ‘doing’ instead of thinking. One of the best opportunities I have had in the last 18 months has been to become part of an entrepreneurs synergy group. We take one morning a month to review our business goals, our challenges and outcomes for the month. This gives us a great opportunity to take an honest look at the return on investment of our time and to look at what is stopping us being better, more courageous or to question our motives. It has encouraged me to be more realistic, and it is something I think all business, including farms, could benefit from.

The rise in veganism is having a previously unanticipated effect on meat farmers – just how worrying is this?

Growing public awareness of health, climate change and animal health are driving changes in food preferences. We know that the food industry is responding by providing more plant based products, which means that this is a new reality rather than a food fad. This is a complex debate with much broader social and environmental ramifications, which will greatly impact on farmers who serve as custodians of land and animals. We need a holistic view on the impact of our food systems, as we must also consider the nutritional value of what we can grow locally versus alternatives with lower nutrition and more additives, which may be imported from across the world.

The sector needs to choose to be informed, to challenge ‘fake news’ and to avoid polarised responses. Everyone wants better health, a stable climate and the vast majority of farmers are passionate about the health of their animals and their land, so committing to collaborating on policy and outcomes is imperative.

By Stephen Larkin.