Women Make Strides Climbing
Australia's Corporate Ladder

By S. KARENE WITCHER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SYDNEY, Australia -- When Bob Joss arrived at Westpac Banking Corp. in 1993, the new American managing director spent the first six months visiting the bank's far-flung branches to meet his staff.

A former senior executive at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., Mr. Joss was brought in to shake up Australia's oldest bank. Among the things that struck him in those early days was the lack of women managers, which he saw as symptomatic of the bank's complacent corporate culture.

Fresh off the plane from California, it was "just so noticeable, so different" from what he was used to. "I actually rang up some of my Wells guys and said, 'hey, remind me, what's the share of branch managers that are women?' " The answer was that, at the time, about 65% of Wells Fargo's branch managers were women. By comparison, a paltry 5% of Westpac's branches were managed by women.

With global competition forcing industries in Australia to lift their game, chief executives are now looking to promote women as a way of imposing a more performance-based culture on their companies. According to recent figures compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, women make up more than 40% of the country's employees, yet they represent just 20% of managers, excluding those who manage family farms. The contrast is even starker on Australia's corporate boards, where women make up 6% of directors, says executive recruitment firm Korn/Ferry International.

Comparative data on women in management in the Asian-Pacific region are scarce. But anecdotal evidence suggests that Australia "falls somewhere in the middle" -- behind, say, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines, and in front of countries such as China, Malaysia, Japan and Cambodia, says John Fisher, a Singapore-based partner of international accounting and management consultants Coopers & Lybrand. The difference between Australia and Asia, he adds, is that often it is political ties and established-family connections that propel women in Asia. "A person who is bright and female in Australia probably has a better opportunity than somebody who is bright [but] without those connections in Asia."

Post-World War II Effects

Hugh Mackay, a social commentator who has studied the gender issue in Australia, says it isn't a case of Australia being a male-dominated, rough-and-ready outback culture. But rather, he contends, the lack of women managers grew out of the post-World War II economic boom in Australia that lasted longer and was stronger than, say, in the U.S. That produced a burgeoning middle class of families that could be sustained by one income: the man's. Consequently, Mr. Mackay says, women were "repressed" and the clamor for workplace recognition came later.

"We just have to let the passage of time take care of this," Mr. Mackay says. Given the large number of women entering the work force these days, he adds, "in 10 or 15 years the situation will be very different."

"What's kept us back is that we have failed to convince men in business that there is an economic imperative to diversity," says Sandra Yates, who is chairwoman of advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi in Sydney and is president of Chief Executive Women Inc., a group aimed at supporting women in management. "The glass ceiling," she adds, "isn't something we should speculate about -- it's there."

Paths to Diversity

An affirmative-action movement has helped. Created a decade ago, the Affirmative Action Agency, a government body, encourages the hiring and promotion of women. But unlike its U.S. counterpart, which has sharper teeth, the Australian agency depends mostly on moral suasion and publicizing the names of companies that fail to make progress.

Some companies, such as Broken Hill Proprietary Co., a steel, energy and mining company that is Australia's biggest concern and employs more than 61,000 people world-wide, are hampered by "a legacy" of businesses that traditionally didn't appeal to women, says Daryll Hadfield, a general manager in BHP's human-resources department. In May, BHP disclosed that it had commissioned a study to help it diversify its management ranks. Currently women make up 4% of BHP's managers, which Mr. Hadfield calls "unacceptably low."

BHP hasn't set firm targets, fearing a potential backlash among its male workers. But Mr. Hadfield says BHP doubts it will get a major technical advantage over its global competitors, so its edge will lie in using "people better." And as far as women go, he adds, "it's just bad business not to be availing yourself of talent."

At Westpac, Mr. Joss saw hiring and promoting women as a strategy to help sharpen up the bank. First, he redefined what Westpac's nationwide branches should be. The biggest barrier stopping women from becoming branch managers was a lack of credit training.

"The branch manager was the king of a little bank in his community" and the only way to become the king was to be certified in certain credit skills, he says. Women were starting off as tellers, moving up to become senior tellers and maybe customer service managers, but they weren't getting sent to credit-training courses.

Mr. Joss saw two alternatives. He could implement a huge credit-training program, or he could remove the credit decisions from the branches and centralize them. He chose the latter. The branches weren't evaluating credit risks "very well anyway," he says, and centralizing credit controls enabled Westpac to apply more sophisticated assessment tools than was possible at individual branches.

At the new-look branches, Westpac needed people who could manage, serve the customers, and recognize sales opportunities. There were lots of women in the No. 2 and No. 3 positions in the branches and they "started to rise quickly," Mr. Joss says. "They were the logical people to take over when we redefined what a branch was all about."

Next, he turned his eye to the bank's recruiting. By nature, like begets like, so the bank's recruits were usually male. "It's a bit like making loans," Mr. Joss says. "Each loan looked like a good loan until you woke up and said, 'Oh my gosh, it's concentrated. It's too much property. We should have set a limit.' "

To balance the recruiting process, Mr. Joss told his staff that after they hired five men, to stop and try to find five "equally good women." The object, he says, wasn't to lower the bar, but to say "maybe you didn't look hard enough."

In the meantime, he began to notice that the language in the bank was changing. On his initial visits to the branches, the male branch manager would say "here are our ladies, or here are our girls, or something like that." Mr. Joss responded by making a point of calling the female employees women, and asking why there were so few of them. "Nowadays, when I go around" any male branch manager will say: "Here's one of our high-potential women." While the change hasn't been universal, it still makes him feel good. "Nobody would have said anything like that five years ago," he says. "They wouldn't even have had the term."

The rest, Mr. Joss thinks, is just a matter of time. The gender gap in Australia's corporate circles today is no different than he saw at Wells Fargo in the 1970s. "All that change has happened over the past 20 years" in America, he says, and "Australia is moving up rapidly."

Inside Westpac, a 60% turnover in senior management since Mr. Joss's arrival has fostered a rapid change in corporate culture. Mr. Joss brought in some top-ranking women, including some from the U.S. Several have left in recent months, sparking publicity that anti-women forces within Westpac played a part.

But Mr. Joss says that based on exit interviews, some of which he conducted personally, he is satisfied that there isn't a systemic problem. Instead, he attributes the women's departures, in part, to poaching by other organizations eager to add women to their management ranks. For others, he says, their jobs simply proved to be "too much work."

There are "pockets" of male chauvinism within Westpac, which isn't surprising given the bank's 180 years of "traditions and cultural biases," says Leslie Martin, one of the bank's senior women managers. But, she stresses that dismantling those biases is "very firmly established on the agenda from the top down."

A look at the numbers shows how much progress Mr. Joss has made. The proportion of women branch managers now totals 34%, up from 5% five years ago. Meanwhile, the total number of women in management throughout the bank, including branch managers, has doubled to 24% of its 35,000 employees. And since 1993, Westpac has had a woman director on its 10-member board.

"We have to do a lot better," Mr. Joss says. But, "I'm really happy with the progress and the changed attitude" within the bank toward women. Given the massive corporate restructuring Westpac has undergone, he adds, "I don't know if it could move any faster."