During the 11th annual ExCo Women’s Dinner at the NH Johannesburg Sandton, Kevin Wilson, group GM: IT at Stefanutti Stocks said healthy population growth requires companies to make it easy for people to have families.
On 13 August, at least 260 women CIOs, CFOs and CHROs gathered for an exclusive dinner to celebrate women’s rise to the C-suite.
The dinner gave women across all sectors a chance to ditch their heels as part of the suits and takkies dress theme for the night, while networking over delicious food and wine.
The highlight of the evening was the candid conversations that arose from the popular segment titled Ask A Man which gives women a chance to ask their male counterparts questions that usually don’t make it into the boardroom.
Panellists Kevin Wilson, group GM: IT at Stefanutti Stocks; Njabulo Nyawo, CPO at Momentum Group and Mikaeel Tayob, CFO at Bridgestone, faced tough questions about double standards, workloads and often invisible parenting responsibilities women are carrying – often alone – before they even reach the office.
Women got candid and personal about their roles as executives while balancing their responsibilities as mothers of the future generations.
Mikaeel addressed an unwritten stigma around women leaders: that they have other priorities.
“It’s not about the effort or the long hours… we have to somehow break the stigma of the fact that a woman doesn’t have the same amount of time as other people,” said Mikaeel.
In keeping with the theme of other priorities, Kevin drew on the example of Japan’s negative population growth and its knock on effect.
“Japan has got a problem because they’ve made it difficult for women to go back to work and they now have a negative population growth. If we don’t find a way, either way, I don’t even care what the policies are, to keep our population growth going, to make it really easy for people to have children, look after them and work, we’re going to end up where they are.”
Mikaeel admitted that he’d only realised how much single mothers were carrying after his company asked women what they found difficult about their roles.
“Some of the things that I was being told were ‘I have no time to work out and I’m getting fat because I’m coming in the morning and you guys expect me to be here at 8am and then I go home and I go to cook, but you want me to leave at 6pm and I cook for my three kids and then when do I do the work that you want me to do afterwards?’.”
Kevin also highlighted that many companies, while switching to remote working policies, were still largely framing employment contracts from the Industrial Revolution lens instead of accepting different ways of working. Here, he advocates for prioritising the family. “To your company, you are a cog in a machine. To your family, you are irreplaceable.”
Mothers before leaders
In keeping with the multiple roles women leaders have, mothers in the room addressed educational concerns they have about their children and the impact it would have on the future generations.
In response, Kevin highlighted a worrying trend his company discovered through its bursary programme in which girls are being pushed out of taking Stem subjects.
“We found that it’s a very broken situation there. What’s happening to a lot of you is they’re telling you don’t take maths, don’t take science and then suddenly when we get a hold of you in grade nine, grade eight, wherever it is that is where the fork in the road comes in. There’s only a few left in the class that have been allowed to keep the sciences.”
Conversely, one guest who spoke on behalf of boy mums told panellists that they were seeing another disturbing statistic in real time in their homes: boys are no longer taking maths and were taking much longer than four years to complete a degree.
Mikaeel responded that mothers remain the strongest force in their sons’ lives while they are still youngsters. “When we speak about young men coming of age and growing up, young boys, there’s often the misconception that they need a father figure. I’m not saying that it’s not important, but I feel the point I made around empathy and nurturing… I feel boys need more of that, so that when they grow, they pay it forward. If you can enrich a young mind with empathy early on, the world would be a much better place.”
Passion vs emotion
Other aspects of women leadership that guests touched on were how they are perceived in the boardroom.
“I've constantly heard in boardrooms when a woman says something with passion, they mistake that and that is a problem because we need passion in the world,” said one attendee.
Kevin acknowledged the stigma saying arguments in the boardroom are mistaken for emotionality.
Njabulo added: “We’re not here to tell women how to lead. I don’t think men can ever tell women how to lead. I was raised by a single mother, so a lot of my foundational leadership lessons came from her and that is enough validation. I was reflecting while preparing for today and realised that a lot of my leadership development came from female leaders, from school to university and now at work.”
Meanwhile, another attendee asked how the panellists were addressing the old exco practice known as the “boy’s club” which typically excludes women in leadership from places and informal conversations in which executive decisions are made. These conversations often take place at sporting events or bars.
“We’re deliberately widening that – finding things that are far more inclusive, more family‑friendly and less about the old boys’ club at the bar,” said Kevin.
In the end, the men on panel acknowledged that the workplace was designed for men by men to benefit men and the only way for that to change was for the women to enact the change.
The event was made possible by Principal partners: Cassava Technologies, Entelect, iOCO Technology Group, MakwaIT, Old Mutual Corporate, Regenysys Corporate Education; and Executive partners: BDO, Discovery, Gordon Institute of Business Science, HCLTech, ITR Technology, ManageEngine, jem, Kaspersky, Marsh, Stanlib Asset Management and Workday.
