Platitudes vs policies and progress on International Women’s Day
Positive vibes are nice, but let’s have a little less conversation, and a little more action, please
There was something seriously missing from International Women’s Day last week. Besides actual progress on gender equality, which I wrote about here, but business leaders talking about what they were doing to achieve this.
Instead, social media, LinkedIn in particular, became engulfed by a Mother’s Day-esque platitude parade. While the positive, appreciative vibe of people “shouting out” about the amazing women in their lives was sweet, to me, at least, it was a bit, “so what”? You took a few minutes out of your day to recognise the efforts of the women around you, but how does that actually translate to policies in your business that boost female senior leadership - and help close the gender pay gap?
Maybe I’m just a huge cynic and International Women’s Day doesn’t need to be anything more than a day of celebration. But, when the Gender Pay Gap Bot Twitter account brilliantly roared into life to reveal the pay gap stats of companies sharing bullsh*t IWD posts about how much value women add to their businesses, I couldn’t see a whole lot to celebrate.
This is what I wanted to see. Business leaders acknowledging that things are far from equal when you look at pay and seniority, but here is what they are doing about it. Like Aviva’s Lyndsay Edge, the employee relations consultant who brought equal parental leave to the business in 2017. Her post about it was literally the only one I saw on IWD with substance. 85% of new dads at Aviva now take at least six months off. While its gender pay gap admittedly remains high because of a lack of women in senior positions, initiatives like equal parental leave are making a difference. From 2017 to 2021 its median gender pay gap has gone down from 28% to 26%, with senior female appointments rising from 34% to 39%. It cites its equal parental leave policy as instrumental for retaining and progressing female senior leaders.
Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash
It’s important for these initiatives to be publicly shared to prove that the status quo can and should be broken, and that new paths for work and parenthood for men and women can be forged. But maybe I’m missing another point there - that just because it’s not on social media, doesn’t mean that it’s not happening or worth celebrating.
That’s why in this edition I wanted to shine a light on Creature London, an independent advertising agency that is punching above its weight in terms of policies to drive gender equality, like equal parental leave, childcare support and paid miscarriage leave.
CEO and co-founder Dan Cullen-Shute doesn’t use his male-ness as an excuse for not knowing what to do about the advertising industry’s sector-wide gender pay gap of 17.8%. He instead is using common sense, empathy, his own lived experience, and an ambition to make the industry better, by pushing ahead with policies that help people and are the right things to do. Dan also demonstrates what it means to be a male ally and voice in this area, because men absolutely need to be at the centre of this conversation so we aren’t just preaching to the choir every time we talk about gender equality.
Read on for a Q&A with Dan spelling out what action over platitudes look like, and don’t forget to scroll on for more of my coverage on male allies.
I was going to say, here’s hoping we see more of this next IWD, but actually, we shouldn’t have to wait a year for companies to get their asses in gear. (And when it comes to IWD, should I just get on board with the Positivity Party and enjoy the vibes?)
“The weight of childcare has fallen entirely upon women, which is damaging for men and women”: Q&A with Dan Cullen-Shute, CEO and co-founder, Creature London
What parental leave do you offer at Creature?
Dan Cullen-Shute (DCS): We have revised our shared parental leave policy to ensure that, as a man that wants to take the majority of the parental leave, you receive the same time and financial remuneration as our maternity policy. After one year of service, it’s 13 weeks full pay, and after four years of service, goes up to 26 weeks full pay. But it’s worth noting that we recently hired a new strategy director who went on maternity leave a month after starting at Creature, and is receiving maternity pay. She is brilliant and we couldn’t let her slip through our fingers.
What’s the uptake been like amongst men and what impact do you think this has on redefining gender norms and moving closer to gender equality?
DCS: We can't really comment on male uptake, because we haven't had any new agency babies! The 'problem’ with being a small-ish agency. But equal and shared parental leave speaks to something that I personally, fundamentally believe in, which is, historically, the weight of childcare has fallen entirely upon women, which is incredibly damaging for women, as well as for men and fathers in their relationship with their children.
What are your thoughts on the cost to the business of equalising parental leave?
DCS: It’s a reality that, when you're a small business, parental leave is something you have to factor in. It's absolutely a cost to the business but it pays itself back in terms of people being happy and feeling supported, then working harder and caring more, because you've been there for them.
What further support do you offer working parents?
DCS: Childcare in this country is bizarrely broken in how it works. The fact that there is no support for anyone until your child is three years old is just insane. I think we as businesses have to work out how to support people during that. It comes back to flexible working and looking at how we can support in the realms of childcare and everything else. We've just introduced a childcare scheme, working with Bubble to subsidise and support people in the mad times, when even our flexible working efforts aren't enough.
All of this will play a part in making the situation better. The degree of support that businesses offer people is going to become an incredibly important weapon in that fight for the best people.
You were ahead of the curve in introducing a miscarriage policy. Why was that?
DCS: We introduced our miscarriage policy - two weeks paid leave, for any parent, no questions asked - around five years ago. Our little boy Stan was two when we had our first miscarriage (of at least three - you don’t always know for sure), and the policy followed shortly after.
The truth is, I didn’t really know what miscarriage entailed full stop, let alone from a professional point of view. I didn’t know the vocabulary to use, and I certainly didn’t know how to treat it when it came to work. We’d always been very clear on our approach to compassionate leave in general (“take what you need, we’ll sort it out later”), but miscarriage had never come up, because, well, nobody had ever talked about it. Because nobody *ever* talks about it. But as it is that once you’ve bought a purple car, you can’t stop seeing purple cars everywhere, so it is with miscarriage: have one, and you realise you’re surrounded by people who’ve gone through the same thing.
Ultimately, our approach to our miscarriage policy was simple: miscarriage is loss, and if you can’t support your staff when they’ve suffered a loss, you don’t deserve them. We sweated the details for a while (1 week vs 2 weeks vs 3 weeks, line manager vs. anonymous HR portal, etc.), and ultimately decided that the details didn’t matter: what mattered was that it was there, it was out in the open for everyone to see, and it signified that miscarriage was something we were comfortable talking about as a business, because the one thing worse than a loss is a loss you feel you have to hide.
Thankfully, it’s not something we’ve had to put into practice that much, but I remain fiercely proud of it, and of the conversations it’s engendered at Creature. And I’m proud that parents, or wish-they-were parents know that this is a place where they can feel comfortable, supported and seen.
One of the reasons people don’t want to talk about miscarriage at work, apart from their own grief and trauma, is that they don’t want to be identified as someone who is going to start a family soon and therefore discriminated against. What are your thoughts on that?
DCS: We’ve never tried to shift perceptions that someone who’s miscarried is likely to try to get pregnant again: that’s something we’d support entirely, for exactly the same reasons that we offer industry-leading enhanced maternity/paternity support. We want the best people to love and be happy working at Creature, and we believe they’ll be better at their jobs if they feel supported. Sometimes that means having to manage without them for a year while they’re busy doing something amazing, and we’re ok with that deal.
The one broader thing we were looking to achieve, I suppose, was to bring the miscarriage conversation out from the shadows. Anonymity is always possible, for this or any other compassionate situation, either through our Head of HR, or through our external HR support: but we wanted to make sure miscarriage wasn’t something people felt they had to talk about in hushed tones, lest they be judged. Of course, if that’s what they preferred, that was fine: but we wanted it to be clear that it was their choice, and if they wanted to talk openly about it, that was absolutely fine.
There persists a weird stigma, or shame, around miscarriage, and that was one of the things I struggled with most the first time I went through it. The purpose of introducing the policy was first and foremost to look after our people: but the way we set it up was designed to make people realise that talking about this stuff was ok: in fact, that it was important. One in four pregnancies (at LEAST) ends in miscarriage, and yet it’s still barely spoken about, and so many people go through the pain as a result.
If someone wants to remain anonymous, that would always be respected. We just want to make sure people never feel that a miscarriage is a trauma that needs to be hidden: but it can always be kept confidential and anonymous if that’s what people would prefer.
More from me on male allies:
How addressing the motherhood penalty could solve the gender pay gap: Evidence links the gender pay and seniority gap to the discrepancies between parental leave for men and women. We need a shift in corporate and cultural norms.
Leveling up at home to level up at work: Post-lockdown dads are owning their newfound roles at home - so take that, motherhood penalty.
“There’s a huge cultural stigma around the role of dads”: why more men are requesting flexible working”: There’s a growing conversation around the increasingly active role of men in family life, how that contributes to gender equality and what that could look like in the workplace.
Flexi-schooling’s rise: Flexible working and flexi-schooling are converging in some families so dads can take the time in the week to bond with their children.
The co-CEO - can two heads be better than one?: Sophie Smallwood, co-founder and co-CEO of job share matching platform Roleshare, talks about how her business partnership with her husband has helped her excel professionally.