How do we fill the pipeline with board-ready women?

2016/03/08 Leave a comment

While the issues facing women are different, there may be some parallels with respect to increasing visible minority and indigenous representation:

On Tuesday, countries around the globe join in celebrating International Women’s Day, honouring the achievements of women and mobilizing with programs to close the gender gap. This year’s theme, Pledge for Parity, is a call to accelerate equality, with a special emphasis on shrinking the gender gap in leadership positions.

It’s time to consider what this means for Canada’s leadership landscape. We need to take a close examination of who our CEOs are and who is seated in our boardrooms.

It has been just over a year since new regulations required companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange to annually disclose the percentage of women on their boards of directors and in executive officer positions. Now companies must report their goals and the actions being taken to increase their figures, or provide reasons when no such targets exist.

Proponents of the legislation hope that the guidelines will raise the percentage of board seats held by women to 30 per cent – but even they acknowledge that progress beyond that level will require a more robust pipeline of female executive candidates. To truly achieve gender-balanced boards, we need to examine some of the root causes of the imbalance. While tremendous energy is being exerted on quick fixes, how do we take a long-term approach?

As someone who works closely with boards and CEOs to identify and develop the next generation of business leaders, I believe that we need to closely examine women in mid- to senior-leadership positions today to build a more robust executive pipeline – particularly since many companies are inadvertently hampering their own progress.

Consider what happens when a high-potential female executive returns from family leave, seeking a position that allows her to ease back into the workforce. Often, companies respond supportively by transitioning her from an operational role into a functional support role, allowing for career development that builds functional expertise and deepens her contribution and seniority without the time and travel demands of operational leadership.

At face value, this seems to be a win for all parties. But there’s a catch. These women with exceptional potential wind up in positions where they get overlooked for future growth or profit-and-loss leadership opportunities. Their steady success in transitional and functional roles limits their potential for future CEO or board roles.

As board positions become available and nominating committees seek new director candidates, they invariably prefer those who have been CEOs or heads of business units, bringing effective P&L management.

Our research shows that 21 per cent of the direct reports to the CEO of TSX 250 companies are women, while two-thirds of those women are leading support functions. Of the direct reports who have operating leadership roles, just 7 per cent are women. The pipeline of board-ready women doesn’t flow.

While we work to make the number of women in the boardroom rise above 30 per cent, both corporate Canada and female executives need to focus on building operational excellence. We must have more female contenders for CEO succession, and in order for this to happen, must collectively consider and thoughtfully engage in career-path decision-making.

Only by addressing these root issues can we hope to move toward full gender equality at the top of the corporate pyramid.

Source: How do we fill the pipeline with board-ready women? – The Globe and Mail

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Annual Report on the operation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act: Building a diverse and inclusive society

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

The 2014-15 report was released discretely (no press release, no announcement), given that it covers the period of the previous government. The only changes that could be made were largely cosmetic in nature.

The sub-title changes to Building a diverse and inclusive society, and Minister Joly picks up on the now standard language:

In Canada, we are recognized worldwide for our successful approach to multiculturalism, which focuses on building a diverse and inclusive society by promoting and encouraging awareness, understanding and respect for the many different cultures that contribute to the economic and social wealth of our country. While the Government of Canada sets the stage through the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, it is thanks to the full participation of our provincial and territorial partners, stakeholders and the Canadian public that we are able to find unity in our diversity and to learn from one another.

…As Canadians, we know that our country is made stronger because of our diversity, not in spite of it. By working together, we are advancing respect and appreciation for multiculturalism across the country while fostering a sense of inclusion and belonging in all Canadians.

In contrast, the previous report, consigned to Former Minister Kenney, reflects a different tone:

Our government is committed to promoting integration, intercultural understanding, peaceful pluralism as well as religious freedom—in Canada and abroad. I have been pleased to meet with many community organizations and international partners over the past year to advance our values and goals.

…By working together, we are making strides in celebrating our multicultural heritage, strengthening the value of citizenship and ensuring the successful integration of newcomers to Canada.

One of the disconnects or ironies is of course that the period under question, and thus the report, reflects the language, approach and activities for that period, with only really the Minister’s message reflecting the change. I was in a similar position when Minister Kenney had to sign-off on a report that largely reflected the priorities and language of the previous government.

No where is this more apparent than in the report’s vaunting of the changes to citizenship, both legislative and administration, many of which are being undone by the current government.

The other striking aspect is what appears to be under-spending in multiculturalism grants and contributions, $3.9 million, compared to the $8.5 million indicated in the DPR. This may reflect ongoing financial commitments in multi-year projects (which next year’s DPR will indicate).

Annual Report on the operation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act: Building a diverse and inclusive society

 

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Abolish office of religious freedom: Anthony Furey

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

Interesting that the call to disband the office is coming from the Toronto Sun which generally supported the previous government:

It really does look like the office is just multicultural pandering, letting various religious groups – and they’re well-represented on the office’s 23 member advisory committee – feel the government is going to bat for them around the world.

It’s not exactly a “Canada first” endeavour, is it? I’m rather uncomfortable with us encouraging religious leaders into thinking their priorities are automatically Canadian policy priorities.

It’s even in the mandate: “The office will promote freedom of religion or belief as a Canadian foreign policy priority.”

A good and true sentiment, but a priority? No thanks. Canada’s foreign priorities should be about geopolitical stability with a view to our economy and security interests. If religious freedom becomes a secondary goal in these ventures then fine, but it shouldn’t be a standalone one.

However Garnett Genuis, Conservative MP for Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan, believes the office is doing good work and hopes the Liberals keep it.

“Religious persecution is increasing and there are religious undertones to a lot of conflicts that exist in the world today,” he told me in a phone interview.

“If you believe the government should be involved in development assistance to some point, this is a very effective way for the government to be contributing to global harmony,” Genuis adds. “It helps to elevate our reputation as a country that takes human rights seriously and is willing to put its money where its mouth is.”

If these activities are priorities for the government, they shouldn’t be undertaken by a secondary office, but directly championed by the foreign affairs minister. And if they’re not that important, then leave them to the NGOs. There’s really no compelling reason for the Liberals to maintain this office.

Source: Abolish office of religious freedom | Furey | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun

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Why stripping citizenship is a weak tool to fight terrorism: Roach and Forces

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

Usual good analysis and assessment:

First, even assuming that citizenship revocations produced the removal of dangerous people from Canada, that strategy would amount to anti-terrorism NIMBYism. More concretely, Canada would embark of a policy of catch and release – setting up today’s convicts as tomorrow’s foreign fighters, with travel to foreign locales facilitated by the Canadian government. It seems unlikely other countries would embrace the “return” of people converted to violence in Canada, and deposited on their doorstep because of a potentially tenuous residual link of nationality.

Nor would it be sensible to assume that deported former Canadians would thereafter be unable or uninterested in engineering acts dangerous to Canada and Canadians. Operating far from Canada and its security services, they would enjoy a greater freedom to do so than would those kept closer to home, under watch and potentially more invasive strictures, such as peace bonds.

Second, the provisions only applied to dual nationals. The rationale for this focus was simple – making someone stateless would violate Canada’s international obligations. But this focus on a small subset of Canadians encouraged the dangerous delusion that terrorism is (or can be made into) a foreign threat and problem. The so-called Toronto 18 plot, the terrorist attacks of October, 2014, and the 1985 Air India bombing underline the fact that terrorism is a Canadian phenomenon. Some of those plotters were dual nationals, others were not. In almost all of the recent terrorism cases, the violent radicalization of plotters was made-in-Canada, not the product of residence in some foreign locale.

Citizenship revocation for dual nationals is at best a capricious and close to arbitrary tool, focused not on a class of people who are the most objectively dangerous, but on a population most legally vulnerable to the extraordinary revocation power.

Third, the law now being repealed would in most cases commit Canada to long and costly battles about whether it can deport a convicted terrorist to countries such as Iran without the person running the risk of torture. This is a path we have been down before, with the infamous (and to date fruitless) security certificate disputes – legal proceedings that have consumed millions of taxpayer dollars and have yet to result in the removal of any of the five foreign-born men accused of terrorism and subjected to removal orders after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The costs here stem not only from the extensive litigation but also from the reputational hit Canada incurs when it risks complicity with torture. The O’Connor and Iacobucci inquiries into the role of Canadian authorities in contributing to the maltreatment of Canadians in foreign jails are now a decade old, but their lessons remain acute. Stripping someone’s nationality before sending him to a foreign jail in a torturing country does not change in the least the ethical or legal implications of such conduct.

Fourth, the prospect of deporting terrorists who have served their prison terms provides Canada with another excuse not to dedicate resources to problems of prison disengagement from terrorism and rehabilitation. The Western world is slowly awakening to the reality that many people convicted under broad, post-9/11 laws enacted to prevent terrorism before it happens will eventually be released. The idea of citizenship stripping encourages the illusion that Canada can displace the risk of terrorism, rather than take responsibility for fighting it through programs that counter violent extremism, including for people convicted of terrorist plots.

All of these points condemn citizenship revocation even without considering questions of constitutional law and principle. But those, too, are ripe – not least, the issue of whether our courts would have followed their U.S. counterparts and condemned citizenship revocation as an underhanded supplemental punishment for things a citizen did, while still a citizen.

Source: Why stripping citizenship is a weak tool to fight terrorism – The Globe and Mail

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Canadian Heritage shows how public service seeks to foster innovation

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

Good initiative and equally good debate about its utility (I had tried equally to institute the Google 20 percent time set-aside – without much success):

As part of a push in the bureaucracy to find new ways to work, Canadian Heritage is one of a dozen departments taking a page from Google and letting employees spend up to 20 per cent of their time working on temporary projects outside their usual job descriptions and the usual procedures.

Deputy minister Graham Flack said the initiative – called “micro-missions” – was developed to bring some flexibility to the rigid organization of departments.

“The theory behind micro-missions is, in government, it’s actually very difficult with our traditional HR systems to move people around,” Mr. Flack said.

Mr. Flack also chairs a committee of top bureaucrats who work on new ideas, and the group invites junior employees to join their discussions to get fresh ideas and a better view on the ground.

“We operate in a very hierarchical organization, and sometimes [we have] to give them a reality check,” said Francis Nolan-Poupart, a 27-year-old policy analyst at Employment and Social Development Canada, who sits on the committee.

But just because an idea worked for Google does not mean it will work for the government – or even for other tech companies. Konval Matin, the director of culture at Shopify in Ottawa, and Anna Lambert, the director of talent acquisition, said their company – a rising star in Canada’s tech world – tried giving employees time every week for special projects, but it just did not work.

“We realized you would get so enthralled in your day-to-day that you wouldn’t actually set aside the 20-per-cent time,” Ms. Matin said.

Marianne Hladun, an executive who leads the Public Service Alliance of Canada’s young-worker file, said the union has some concerns that projects might just add work for already stressed employees.

“In a lot of cases, people are just trying to keep their heads above water,” Ms. Hladun said. “In some departments, which I believe Canadian Heritage falls into, … people are doing special assignments but they’re not being compensated at appropriate levels. That’s a bit of a concern to us.”

Leaders at both the political and bureaucratic level have warned that many areas of the federal public service are suffering from poor workplace environments that are hampering service delivery and the mental health of the work force. In her final annual report last year as the top bureaucrat in Ottawa, Janice Charette said there was an urgent need to create a “healthy, respectful and supportive work environment.”

Donald Savoie, a professor at the Université de Moncton and a leading expert on public administration, said he thinks some of the innovative projects are just “band aids” that do not fix deeper problems affecting morale in the public service. “For a government to say, we’re going to have hackathons, or collaborative events, or spaces, that, my friend, is the easy part. The much more difficult part is redefining the role of the public service so that it would resonate.”

Shopify holds townhalls on Fridays where employees are encouraged to share what they are working on, and talk about what is going well and what is more challenging than expected – just as Canadian Heritage tried to do with its pizza lunch.

Ms. Matin of Shopify said even the executive team takes part occasionally – and the exercises have been good not just for morale, but also for productivity as workers from different teams pick up tips from each other.

“The stuff that’s really easier said than done is the trust and the autonomy,” Ms. Matin said. “Not being afraid of letting people experiment and try new things and potentially fail. But the cool thing is, let them fail, let them talk about it.”

Traditionally, the public service is not known for taking risks. Mr. Brison acknowledges the potential for failure as more public institutions and individuals are empowered to try new things and make more decisions on their own. As a political leader, he could be held responsible if something goes wrong. But he says that is part of pushing the public service to do better.

“The only way to avoid ever making any mistakes is to do nothing,” he said.

Source: Canadian Heritage shows how public service seeks to foster innovation – The Globe and Mail

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Canadian Citizenship: From “Harder to get and easier to lose” to a new balance

2016/03/07 Leave a comment

This presentation made at Metropolis 2016 analyzes citizenship test and take-up data, reviews the policy changes and impact of the 2010 and 2014 Conservative government changes and assesses the likely impact of the Liberal changes announced February 2016.

I will update some of the data when full-year 2015 stats are released.

Canadian Citizenship: From “Harder to get and easier to lose” to a new balance

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Big Shift or Big Return? Visible Minority Representation in the 2015 Election

2016/03/05 Leave a comment

My presentation at the Metropolis 2016, analyzing the election results and the record level of visible minority representation, 14 percent of all MPs, close to the percentage of visible minority Canadian citizens. This presentation also reviews how this representation is reflected in Cabinet, Parliamentary Secretaries, Opposition critics, and parliamentary committees.

Big Shift or Big Return? Visible Minority Representation in the 2015 Election

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Diversity in political backrooms still lacking

2016/03/03 1 Comment

My piece in The Hill Times:

The Liberal government included in its mandate letters to all ministers a “commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity and that indigenous Canadians and minority groups are better reflected in positions of leadership.”To recall, the Prime Minister appointed a Cabinet with gender parity (15 each of men and women) and almost 17 per cent visible minority ministers (four Sikh and one Afghan Canadian).

Gender parity was not attained for parliamentary secretaries (12 positions out of 35 or 34 per cent) or other leadership positions such as whips and House leaders, visible minority parliamentary secretaries are over-represented (nine positions or 24 per cent) in relation to their share of the voting population (15 per cent).

Given this commitment and action, is the Liberal government also applying diversity and inclusion to its hiring of political staff? What about the official opposition?

To assess this, I looked at the Prime Minister’s Office (59 total positions and 12 senior staffers), the Leader of the Official Opposition’s office (OLO, 23 positions), and ministerial offices (senior staff defined as chief of staff, directors of communications, policy, issues and parliamentary affairs, along with press Secretaries, total number of 101 positions filled at time of writing).

Sources for the data include the regular ‘Hill Climbers’ updates in The Hill Times, other relevant press articles, and the imperfect Government Electronic Directory Services (GEDS). Gender and visible minority status were identified through names, LinkedIn profiles, biographies and photos where available.

From a gender perspective, women are under-represented at the senior level in PMO (one-third), but close to 40 per cent for all 59 PMO staffers. OLO has slightly lower representation of women (30 per cent). For minister’s offices, the percentage of chiefs of staff is slightly less than the overall per cent of close to 40 per cent who are women.

Visible minorities are consistently under-represented, save for the overall numbers in PMO (15 per cent). OLO and senior ministerial office staff all range between four to seven per cent, less than half of the percentage of visible minority Canadian citizens, with chief of staff visible minority representation slightly higher at 10 per cent.

While I have focused on gender and visible minority status, diversity includes of course other dimensions such as regional diversity (many, if not most Liberal staffers come from, or have worked in, Ontario and Toronto), sexual orientation, religion, education etc. R. Paul Wilson’s A Profile of Ministerial Policy Staff in the Government of Canada provides the best most recent analysis of the different aspects of diversity among staffers under the Conservative government October 2012 to June 2013.

Does this matter? In many ways, it does not. Gender parity in Cabinet and relatively strong Parliamentary Secretary representation set the tone for the government and Parliament.

Being a political staffer may not necessarily lead to a direct path to becoming a future MP. Staffer experience is not necessarily perceived as an asset in local riding associations or to the broader public. Staffers may be asked by the party to be its flag-bearer in unwinnable ridings. The most famous example of a staffer becoming an MP is, of course, former Prime Minister Harper, who was a staffer to Reform Party leader Preston Manning among other positions.

All three major parties were able to recruit an impressive number of visible minority candidates (women less so).

However, staffers play an important role in government (and opposition) decision-making. Having a diversity of backgrounds and experience generally helps inform decision-making.

The Liberal government’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, so well executed at the public level for both women and visible minorities, is lacking in the backrooms, particularly for visible minorities. Given the role that staffers play in preparing ministers for debates and discussions, this may impact on the degree to which the overall diversity and inclusion agenda is implemented.

http://www.hilltimes.com/opinion-piece/2016/03/02/diversity-in-political-backrooms-still-lacking/45495 

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When Integrating A School, Does It Matter If You Use Class Instead Of Race?

2016/03/02 Leave a comment

Interesting article on the latest US thinking on integration:

Stronger Together is not the name of the latest social-media fitness app. It’s a grant proposed in President Obama’s new budget, reviving an idea that hasn’t gotten much policy attention in decades: diversity in public schools. If the request is approved, $120 million will go to school districts for programs intended to make their schools more diverse.
As a new pair of reports from the progressive Century Foundation shows, integration policies have seen a resurgence: In 2007, 40 districts pursued integration. Today that number has more than doubled, to 83, plus nine charter schools or networks. That adds up to a total of 4 million students in classrooms that are more diverse than they’d otherwise be.

This new wave of integration has come with one big difference that sets it apart from the busing battles of the past. These programs rely on family income, not race, as the driver.

To be clear, there’s evidence that socially as well as racially integrated schools benefit all students. When a school reaches a stable level of about 30 percent middle-class students, the lower-income students achieve at higher levels and the privileged students do no worse, says Halley Potter, the author of one of the Century Foundation reports. Similarly, the racial achievement gap shrinks in schools that have less than a “supermajority” of 60 percent of any one race.

But the real case for diverse schools is a lot bigger than test scores, says Amy Stuart Wells, who teaches at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the author of the second report. “The qualitative and quantitative evidence is powerful enough to say, ‘We should do this.’ ”

It’s worth pointing out that because of the legacy of discrimination and institutionalized segregation in the United States, in most communities mixing up students by class also means mixing them up by race.

“Diversification by socioeconomic status also means by race,” says Mercedes Ebanks, an associate professor in the school of education at Howard University. “The movement towards socioeconomic integration will lead to racial integration and educational equality.”

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/02/29/466543209/when-integrating-a-school-does-it-matter-if-you-use-class-instead-of-race?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news

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Why do so many jihadis have engineering degrees?

2016/03/02 Leave a comment

Long but interesting article on why so many radicalized individuals have an engineering background:

That takes Hertog and Gambetta (the researchers who conducted the study)  to the thorny question of “mindsets for extremists.” Different types of people are attracted to different kinds of extremism—engineers mostly on one side, social scientists and humanities grads on the other—and the authors went in search of traits found in both secular and jihadi extremists as well as among engineers. Three stand out among conservatives in general in recent psychological research: disgust (or the felt need to keep one’s environment pure, which can underpin everything from homophobia to xenophobia); the “need for cognitive closure” (a preference for order and certainty that can support authoritarianism); a very high in-group/out-group distinction.

These are present in particularly high concentration among Nazis and Salafists alike, while European surveys show engineers to be consistently more conservative than other students: moderately right-wing, anti-immigration and tough on crime. Whether the discipline makes the man—it’s worth noting engineering, like the virtually women-free world of right-wing extremists, is male-dominated—or the man seeks the discipline, Hertog is not prepared to say, but the correlation is undeniable. And so is what it points to: contrary to what seems obvious, religious faith does not so much drive Islamist terror as provide its cover.

Why do so many jihadis have engineering degrees?

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with ,

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