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from Breakingviews:

Why is IBM even sponsoring the Masters?

By Agnes T. Crane The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.Golf and business often mix well. But Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the famed Masters tournament, staunchly remains an all-boys club. That conflicts with the diversity aims of tournament sponsor International Business Machines. The difficulty is particularly noticeable this year, given the gender of the technology company’s new chief executive, Virginia Rometty.

As a private organization, Augusta can do what it likes. But with the financial logic for sponsorship fuzzy anyway, the club’s policy raises serious questions for IBM and the other big Masters sponsors, AT&T and Exxon Mobil. IBM, for one, talks about all its business, social and recreational activities being conducted without discrimination of any kind.

The company has the record to back that up, having been among the first big employers to embrace anti-discriminatory hiring practices in the 1950s. Former CEO Lou Gerstner, whose decade-long tenure ended in 2002, increased the number of female executives by 370 percent and minority leaders by 233 percent, according to the Harvard Business Review.

However, sponsoring Augusta’s annual tournament dilutes that message for the company’s 430,000 or so employees, and particularly for the women among them who aspire to follow in Rometty’s footsteps. As it happens, it also poses a tricky test for Augusta. The club has granted membership to IBM’s last four CEOs, all male. If continued, that tradition would demand the admission of one of the very few women in charge of Fortune 500 companies. But that move would break Augusta’s much longer men-only history.

When the last such storm blew up a decade ago, Augusta resisted the pressure and went two years without sponsorships to underline its prerogative. The sponsors came back, and IBM and others can argue their involvement is justified by the exclusive showcase and high-end viewership the Masters offers. But any return on the millions of dollars presumably handed over is nearly impossible to quantify. It’s largely a question of image and brand.

And that kind of benefit is in jeopardy if a sponsored event contradicts other important corporate messages. Even if IBM could make the business case, it would still be better off pulling the plug.

from Breakingviews:

Why is IBM even sponsoring the Masters?

By Agnes T. Crane The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.Golf and business often mix well. But Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the famed Masters tournament, staunchly remains an all-boys club. That conflicts with the diversity aims of tournament sponsor International Business Machines. The difficulty is particularly noticeable this year, given the gender of the technology company’s new chief executive, Virginia Rometty.

As a private organization, Augusta can do what it likes. But with the financial logic for sponsorship fuzzy anyway, the club’s policy raises serious questions for IBM and the other big Masters sponsors, AT&T and Exxon Mobil. IBM, for one, talks about all its business, social and recreational activities being conducted without discrimination of any kind.

The company has the record to back that up, having been among the first big employers to embrace anti-discriminatory hiring practices in the 1950s. Former CEO Lou Gerstner, whose decade-long tenure ended in 2002, increased the number of female executives by 370 percent and minority leaders by 233 percent, according to the Harvard Business Review.

However, sponsoring Augusta’s annual tournament dilutes that message for the company’s 430,000 or so employees, and particularly for the women among them who aspire to follow in Rometty’s footsteps. As it happens, it also poses a tricky test for Augusta. The club has granted membership to IBM’s last four CEOs, all male. If continued, that tradition would demand the admission of one of the very few women in charge of Fortune 500 companies. But that move would break Augusta’s much longer men-only history.

When the last such storm blew up a decade ago, Augusta resisted the pressure and went two years without sponsorships to underline its prerogative. The sponsors came back, and IBM and others can argue their involvement is justified by the exclusive showcase and high-end viewership the Masters offers. But any return on the millions of dollars presumably handed over is nearly impossible to quantify. It’s largely a question of image and brand.

And that kind of benefit is in jeopardy if a sponsored event contradicts other important corporate messages. Even if IBM could make the business case, it would still be better off pulling the plug.

from Davos Notebook:

Cherchez La Femme at Davos

-- Elisabeth Kelan is lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s College London. The opinions expressed are her own. --

The World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes insightful research on gender in business, the economy and politics. Every year, for instance, the WEF releases a Gender Gap Report that measures how countries are doing in regards to  gender equality.

This always stood in sharp contrast to the annual meeting in Davos itself, where spotting a female face in the crowd was easier said than done. It might come as a surprise (then again, it might not), but  one of the most influential meetings around the globe has so far taken place with minimal female involvement.

This might be set to change  with the announcement that this year's WEF will impose a gender quota. More specifically, one in five delegates needs to be female.

However, close inspection reveals that this only applies to the 100 so-called 'strategic partner organisations' -- groups which pay for the right to send five delegates to attend the WEF.

Applying a gender quota is a laudable effort, and there is evidence that it works. The success of quotas on company boards in Norway has led other nations, including Spain and France,  to introduce or promise to introduce a similar framework in the future.

In most cases the quota is set at a level higher than one in five (usually around 40 percent), but in the WEF's defence, the 20 percent mark is in line with targets for female executives that some companies such as Deutsche Telekom have set themselves.

from Global News Journal:

“Frauenpower” at Siemens: another crack in the glass ceiling?

Siemens’ announcement this week that it has appointed a woman to its management board has generated a loud hullabaloo in the media, with newspapers trumpeting “the womanless age at Siemens is over” and “Barbara Kux, the strong woman at Siemens.”

But how was the news of a woman’s appointment to a senior executive position deserving of a celebratory press release and the ensuing excitement? Surely in an era of equal opportunities in developed countries, such news should be commonplace.

The fact that this news is not self-evident, and that Barbara Kux was the first woman appointed to Siemens’s managing board in its 161 year history, goes to show how far we have yet to go before women are equally represented at leadership levels.

Fifty-four year old Kux , who will be responsible for Siemens’s annual global procurement of 42 billion euros ($52.02 billion), will be one of a handful of women  on  the management board of a German blue-chip company. 

German management boards are notoriously white, male and middle-aged. As a young, female journalist in Frankfurt, it is hard not to feel like the odd one out at annual general meetings and corporate events.

Earlier this year, even Siemens' own chief executive said his company’s top management was too German, too white and too male for its own good.

“We are too one-dimensional,” Loescher told the Financial Times in an interview, publicly subscribing to the theory that a company that does not represent its customer base can not tap its full potential.

from UK News:

Was super-mum always out of reach?

A major survey of social attitudes reveals that enthusiasm for equality between men and women is on the slide in Britain.

In the 1990s, around 50 percent of women and 51 percent of men said they thought family life would not suffer if a woman went to work. Now the figures have fallen to 46 percent of women and 42 percent of men.

The decline is even more pronounced in the United States.

"It is conceivable that opinions are shifting as the shine of the 'super-mum' syndrome wears off, and the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealisable by ordinary mortals," said the survey's author, Professor Jacqueline Scott of Cambridge University.

Do you agree?