Gender diversity in the age of Marvel and #MeToo

Less than six years on from the publishing of Lean In bestseller by Sheryl Sandberg and two years since #MeToo movement, no aspect of how we as men and women interact with each other or the world around us has been left unchanged. However, these changes, though rapid, have occurred incrementally, and — swept up in the successes of our own voices — without much thought for their implications.

Only in recent months have critics begun to step back and examine whether the right message is being delivered. The conversation about diversity in tech is getting hijacked by bad research. Closing the gender gap in the workplace has turned into a game of numbers, stirring focus away from the main issue.

Being both a movie buff and someone committed to this topic, I couldn’t wait to see the latest Marvel release featuring for the first time a female superhero. After all, both Disney and Marvel didn’t shy away from promoting it as a “feminist” movie. So, in the aftermath, I couldn’t but wonder what is holding Captain Marvel as the feminist flag holder back in her movie? The fact is that she can’t remember who she really is and that she is secretly fighting for the bad guys. At the end of the movie she fights for the little guy, reconnects with friends, remembers who she was and accesses her full powers. The problem with all of this, it’s all external. She never has to fight anything within herself. The world is her burden, not her own flaws. Being an imperfect person myself I have a hard time relating to that. I bet I’m not the only one.

So where should the incentives for change come from?

Almost 20 years ago as an engineering student and a bona fide geek I participated in a robotics competition. My team did not win, but I received a special prize for just being there. It turned out I was the first woman to participate the competition since it was established so the prize I “won” was a floral shirt and a rose. That was my first introduction to gender diversity initiative. But this is 2019 and as much as I appreciated it then, the point for the girls today should be “who cares”?

We hear the troubling statistics often: Only “X” percent of board seats of Fortune 500 companies are held by women. Campaigns are loud, driven by marketing machine (not unlike Captain Marvel) and often without a clear message, detached from the personal stories. Let’s just take an example from one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography. Hurrah for business owners and circular economy supporters. Not much thrill for many other members of the workforce.

Industry is on one side fighting to often blindly push the gender numbers into the HR sheets, while harassment scandals from Hollywood to Silicon Valley and biggest VC funds plague the news. If you build a brand on culture and it’s revealed that your culture is toxic, you really do stand to take a hit.

Large tech companies report their gender diversity statistics annually. That’s a good thing. The reporting facilitates accountability to their board of directors, shareholders, as well as the public. This data, which highlights female representation in the companies over time, clearly demonstrates what progress, if any, is occurring. With the most progressive companies fighting back through all number of creative workarounds — including #MeToo clauses in startup deals, unlimited parental leave, strong HR targets, switching to flexible working plans, the tech industry has been forced to take real notice. Despite occasional lack of good candidates and sometimes going against their commercial imperatives to do so, the tech giants recognise that unless they embrace gender diversity, they’ll be regulated to do so.

For women in the workforce, these moves present both a challenge and an opportunity. The attention to compete for is already in short supply, and this guarantees that aiming for the top is not going to get easier. However, those companies and their brands that are adding genuine value to their female employees’ and customers’ lives may have reason to rejoice. As more women begin to fill in the industry roles, media campaigns and board diversity number crunching will become less of a reflexive exercise, but rather an activity performed with a purpose.

Because, as usual, current noise and confusion in addressing gender issue is not in the idea itself, but its implementation. We, as a society, need to make sure we are not driving this paradigm shift the way we could describe the Internet today: “Built to outlast nuclear war but fails at smart toasters.” The change needs to come from within too.