Dutch Political Parties Working Together for Women's Rights

The Hague, December 6, 2012 – Dutch politics is deeply divided on a wide range of topics, but today there is one topic that unites parties from left to right: Women. In an article published by Wo=Men, we read that nine parties signed the Gender Multiparty Initiative: Women the Motor for Development, on December 6th. This initiative is only the second party-wide parliamentary initiative in Dutch parliamentary history. The Netherlands has a multiplicity of parties, with at the moment two in government, the Liberal Party (VVD) and the Labor Party (PVDA). The nine parties that agreed today to work together in the area of ​​women's rights are the VVD, PvdA, the Democratic Party (D66), The Christian Democrats (CDA), the Christian Union,  the Green Party (Groen Links), the Socialist Party (SP), 50plus – a new party devoted to the interests of the older generation -  and the Party for Animals (PvdD). The President of the Initiative is Ingrid de Caluwé  (VVD). Sjoerd Sjoerdsma (D66) and Marit Maij (PvdA) are Vice Chairs.

"From the Arab region to conflict zones: women make a significant contribution to global development, peace and democracy. Through the creation of a broad parliamentary cooperation, the Netherlands can now stand squarely behind these brave women and girls, and support them in their struggle for equal rights", the article says.

"Just how important Dutch support for the position of women is, is demonstrated in Egypt," the article continued. It quotes Hibaaq Osman of the women’s organization Karama: "I read an article last year in Time Magazine ‘Thank you for the revolution, but go back home now’. That is typical of what has happens in many revolutions: women participate actively and subsequently have no voice in the reforms."

Minister Liliane Ploumen

The initiative took its first big step in June of this year, just before the end of the parliamentary sitting and before the old Cabinet made way for the new. In June, seven parties signed a declaration in which their spokespeople announced that it was time to focus on gender. Since then, a new coalition leads the country, and new ministers have taken the reigns in many ministries. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lilianne Ploumen is now Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation. Minister Ploumen entered her new position with a drastically reduced budget relative to the previous year. Minister Ploumen has a deep understanding of women and development, having been a former director of Mama Cash, the women's funding organisation, and director of Cordaid, the Catholic Organisation for Relief and Development Aid.

"The initiative launched today is a sequel to that declaration. The goal is to anchor gender in all aspects of foreign policy, and especially in the field of international cooperation. The nine signatories agree that gender has to stay firmly on the agenda at home and abroad. They will do this for example by conducting research and by jointly submitting motions and amendments," the article concludes.

Congratulations are due to Elisabeth van der Steenhoven, her staff and the members of Wo=Men, who have been campaigning for this cooperation. Wo=Men is a network organisation, set up five years ago by entrepreneurs, development organisations, and knowledge institutions, who understood that combining each other's knowledge, resources and talents provides a faster route to achieving the goal of gender parity worldwide, than working side by side (or worse, getting tangled in each others 'strategies'!)

This article was originally published on the Wo=MEN website and the translation in English on the NETSHEILA Facebook page. LIKE the page and continue to get updates on the power of networks for good.

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

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Lin McDevitt-Pugh MBA is an active member of Wo=Men and has been from the start. She has provided strategic communication training and strategic development training to the staff and working groups. Lin is director of NETSHEILA and is passionate about people working together to create futures we believe in.

 

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

Business Cases for Diversity Bring New Opportunities to Gender Mainstreaming

Gender training was the subject of a conference I spoke at this week in Vilnius, organized by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). Practitioners, professors and government representatives participated in the event that was intended as a networking event where people could exchange knowledge or find people with the knowledge and ideas they are looking for.

I was asked to speak in the workshop on Accommodating Diversity in Gender training programmes. This is a great subject for me, allowing me to follow through on inquires I have been involved in over the past dozen years. I have a long history in pushing the envelope in women’s empowerment and more recently in understanding how businesses and institutions benefit from taking into account that people with whom they interact – clients, employees, other stakeholders - are more than one of two things, Man or Woman.  People are clients and they are sources of information and they have multiple skills, multiple identities and multiple sources of engagement. In any group of people, the way Men are perceived and the way Women are perceived varies greatly. I notice this in simple interactions. I often hear women experiencing me as powerful and men experiencing me as scary. My identity, in the eyes of others, is fluid. How wild is that!

In my contribution, I brought in the concept of living from a future in which we all live in dignity and respect. If you think that is a new concept, think again. It is actually Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I find it incredibly compelling to work from that vision and to see what strategies we could implement now that could forward the action. Any one of us can think of something that can forward the action, depending on what our starting point is. In Sweden, for example, a kindergarten has chosen to change the language it uses with little ones. They no longer use the pronouns He or She and instead refer to Friends.  Imagine the impact this will have on kids. They will not be forced into gender stereotypical behaviours by the implicit assumptions of the kindergarten staff. Hopefully they will learn that playing with dolls and bashing boxes can be behaviours enjoyed by one and the same person, depending on the mood. 

As I was researching my presentation I came across an article on how 50% of the kids in craft classes in UK primary schools are boys. One of them was a football player who loves knitting because it gives him peaceful time. He is not required to run around and push and kick at all times and he loves it. The simple strategy of having knitting clubs at schools can contribute to developing a new notion of what being Boy is. 

In the end, the notion of who belongs in a boardroom will change.

I am grateful to Helga Christian and Landmark Education for the outstanding training session I recently attended, called Transforming Yesterdays Strategies, where we explored sex stereotypes and how they affect our reality. As children we develop strategies around being boy, or being girl. We tend to keep and strengthen the strategies, mostly because no-one ever tells us that we can choose to keep them or get rid of them and take on different strategies. We have, certainly as adults, the ability to reject strategies that don’t work for us and our communities, and bringing this element of choice into gender training is powerful.

More and more companies are inquiring into and developing the business case for diversity. It is taking the discussion on mainstreaming gender to a new level. In today’s wrap-up of the conference, the moderator noted that the issue of diversity was one of two "Hot Issues" of debate during the conference and added that he expected it to be a source of change in how companies, public institutions and civil society organisations reconstruct their relationship to gender.

I have every hope that this is the pathway to a world where all of us live in dignity and respect.

A Culture of Standing Aside

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In the McKinsey Quarterly published this week, I was impressed by an article entitled The Global Gender Agenda. I couldn't resist a letter to the editor, as I felt we need to vamp up the discussion of diversity in relation to women at the top. 

The authors encourage committed leaders to take on four priorities:

1. Treat gender diversity like any other strategic business initiative, with a goal and a plan that your company monitors and follows up at the highest levels over many years.
2. Ask for—and talk about—the data, sliced and diced to identify ‘pain points’ in the pipeline by business, geography, and function.
3. Establish a culture of sponsorship, encouraging each top executive to sponsor two to three future leaders, including women.
4. Raise awareness of what a diverse work environment looks like, celebrating successes to reinforce the mind-set shifts you desire.

I would like to include diverse diversity in the conversation. Diversity looks at difference, how we are all somehow oddballs, even those of us that the others think are ‘the norm’.  We are all men, or women, sometimes in bodies that match our gender, sometimes not. But we are more than that. We are richly layered personalities and each of us is good at something irrespective of the visible outer casing we come with.

So far, the discussion on gender in business has concentrated on women being given the space to grow and develop.  The four excellent tips in this article similarly look at how to promote a greater possibility of women at the top through promoting women in the pipeline.  There is nothing wrong with this. However, one major behavior remains unaddressed: the culture of standing aside is not being developed.

A culture of standing aside would seem counter-productive to a business seeking success. If there are people who ‘naturally’ rise, why would a company go out of its way to invite them to stand aside and give their place to someone equally valuable to the organization and with a different style, different skill sets? It doesn’t make sense, right. And it doesn’t make sense all down the line. It doesn’t make sense for the parents of naturally inquisitive and expressive little boys who recklessly experiment and who seem set for surviving in life, to say “Now, dear, why don’t you stop bashing up that box and give it to the little girl so she can make a bed for her dolly”.  At school, where teachers are committed to providing kids of all sorts with a great education, we will be hard pressed to see a teacher teach boys to stand aside and give girls the space to develop a different style of leadership. Yet what will make a difference in future boardrooms is developing a culture of respect, and giving space, to diversity in the classroom.

Without a culture of standing aside we will get more, lots more, of the traditional male approach and we will continue to struggle to include otherness in our business culture.

This is where diversity training becomes a tool in gender mainstreaming.  Where gender mainstreaming as a concept is based on human rights principles, diversity management is based on noticing that difference is what is missing, and difference makes the difference. Competitive advantage is never based on everyone having the same product based on the same knowledge and the same capacities in staff. Competitive advantage, as Porter (1980) argued, is based on uniqueness.  Bringing companies to the next level will depend on harnessing diversity. With that, our communities will have to learn to value the differences in girls and boys and make sure that boys and girls learn to give each other space in the classroom.

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

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At the core of Lin McDevitt-Pugh's work is a passion for freedom, exploration and respect for all people. Lin is the Director of NETSHEILA, a company she founded three years ago to provide management expertise in connecting organisations to the most valuable resource they have: the people they know or could know.

Culture of Cooperation = Networking

How do networking skills change the way people work?

Imagine a work environment where people beg you not to give them any more work, because they are overloaded as it is. Imagine promising this group of people that by participating in a networking leadership course for three afternoons in a 3 month period, they will experience their work as being more fun and they will get more done with less effort.

This is the promise of a project designed to promote a culture of cooperation that NETSHEILA is presently undertaking in a school environment in the Netherlands.

 

 The people

Before looking at how this promise is working out, let me introduce you to the project. It takes place at a secondary school with thousands of students and many many staff. My client loves being an educator and wants his staff to have the best environment possible in which to do their work. The teachers in the project were hand picked by my client. From the moment we met I could tell they are passionate about teaching. They have a busy load, and one of their challenges is to carry the load and stay positive about their work. They are passionate about what they do. They are delighted to be teaching, proud to be the people who are educating the young people in our community. They work closely with the students to surmount problems and they celebrate wildly when the students are successful. They give themselves fully to their job. They really do work hard. And they are willing to test run a project that is designed to improve the quality of the work environment at the school.

Outside of school hours they are also passionate. I am working with teachers who live full lives outside school hours. One is a volunteer at a radio station and has been for years. Another loves to build things for people, and one business administration teacher with one little child and one on the way converted her attic into a kitchen where she makes delicious cakes and pastries. One person is secretary of a car-lovers society, another runs the local ice-skating club, a third trains kids to be Olympic champions in judo. 

 

Defining the need

On the first afternoon, everyone was asked to think of a task or a plan or an issue that they have on their plate that is bigger than what they can deal with alone. They are assured that having something on your plate like that is a sign of strength. After all,  if you can deal easily with all the challenges you face, your game is too small. If you are up to something big, you need other people.  I defined this ‘something’ as a need.

Everyone could easily think of something. They then shared with the three other people at their table what their need was. 

 

Ding that people are social assets

Putting their need aside, people then proceeded to map out their circles of friends and acquaintances. Some noted the categories of people, others the people themselves.  Friends from college friends from school, friends from previous work situations, people they play sports with, family, colleagues, and on and on. 

 

Matching needs to assets

Each table of four then took one for one the needs people had described, and looked at who in their community map could be useful for that person.  Even if they felt they could help the person themselves, the purpose of the exercise was to see what other human resources they as an individual have that they can provide their colleagues.

Everyone left the first afternoon with a need that was concretely expressed, and with an understanding of conversations they could have in and outside school that could easily help them work further on this need.

 

Concrete results

Twenty days later the group came together for a second afternoon. The intention of the afternoon was to take the knowledge of connecting to people to the next step, creating a culture of cooperation at school. A lot had happened in 20 days.  One teacher had been able to overcome management failings in her department by asking to be assigned the role of section head, and getting the role. The other section heads in our group freely offered to support her in developing herself in this new role. Others had found the space they needed to sit together with their team and plan. Another had started conversations with various people to find the money he needed to implement an innovative plan. When one teacher declared he hadn’t done anything relating to the need he had expressed, two other people let him know they had taken up his issue and big progress had been made. 

 

After 20 days teachers were experiencing their work as being lighter and they were getting more done with less effort.

 

Moving toward a culture of cooperation

The challenge is to create that ease and lightness in a structural way, which is why we then proceeded to working on developing a culture of cooperation.

Tribal Leadership, the work done by the good folks at CultureSync, forms a basis for developing this culture.

 

The 5 stages of culture

Tribal Leadership distinguishes 5 stages of culture existing in the world of work.

Stage 1 is Life Sucks. Researchers Dave Logan an others found 2 percent of companies in their 10-year study to fall within this category. I see stage 1 as mainly the realm of criminal societies, where there is no empathy for others and it is an environment of shoot or get shot. Having said that, I can think of plenty of examples where people try to trip up their colleagues to avoid getting tripped up themselves.

Stage 2 is My Life Sucks. It seems to the individual that everyone else is doing fine, its just a pity that their own life isn’t where it should be. When asked if they will do something this people in this culture say “I’ll try”, but they won’t commit.

A stage 2 culture can advance into (and not step over) a stage 3 culture. “I’m Great!... and the Others Are Not.” Why did that project fail? The other people were not of a good enough quality.  Why did you not get the job you wanted? Someone else had the boss’s ear. About 49 percent of organizations function within the culture.

A stage 4 culture says “We’re Great” and while there is rivalry in that (the implication is that the others, the competition, is not great) there is a sense that we can work together to get things done. This is a culture of cooperation, and 22 percent of organizations function at this level.

Then there is stage 5, which is a great place for saints like Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama to dwell but most of us can be pretty satisfied if we manage to operate consistently in a stage 4 culture. At stage 5 the dominant expression is “Life is Great”.  

The structure of the environment in each stage is key to the capacity for organizations having cultures like these to be cultures of cooperation. Stage 5 cultures are an interlinkage of integral units. At Stage 4 the working units are integrated. At Stage 3 management operates the hub and spokes method: tell me everything an don’t disturb your colleagues by telling them what you are up to. At Stage 2 there is little adequate management and at Stage 1 the actor is outside the culture, looking in.

In other words, to have a culture of cooperation the best place to be is in Stage 4. Or stage 5 (Good luck on that).

 

Consistent at stage 4

At our school, we are working on developing a culture of cooperation where the participants are consistently operating at Stage 4. And to do that, the advisors at CultureSync say, people have to be able to operate in triads. Triangles are powerful structures.  Each side of the triangle keeps the other side in place. In a triad, each person listens to the expressed intention of the other two people. The expressed intention is the thing that inspires the person to undertake something that is bigger than him or herself. The genuine desire to educate kids, for example. To not be stopped when there is not enough money for projects, or not enough other teachers wanting or willing to participate in a project, but to keep going, keep looking for that funding, keep enrolling those teachers to participate because educating kids takes courage and effort. Each player at Stage 4 regularly checks in with two other people to have the discussion: are you acting in a way that your intentions will be realized. These two people are not necessarily colleagues. They just have to be people who are committed to you being successful. They are your committed listeners.

 

Practice

The teachers have now formulated shared projects, taking some of the needs expressed in the first session to the level of projects. They have triads supporting them in focusing on their intention, helping them to not get bogged down in the rejections, the complaints, or the negativity that Stage 3 people around them will possibly place in their pathway.  The coming 6 weeks is a time of practicing being consistently in Stage 4. 

Lin  McDevitt-Pugh

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Lin McDevitt-Pugh MBA, owner of  NETSHEILA, is a management consultant with a particular expertise in creating cultures of cooperation in the workplace.  With a culture of cooperation, organizations can realize big goals through fun, ease and connectivity. Call +31 6 150 48468 to see how NETSHEILA  can support your organization. We work in Dutch-language and English-language environments.