Global: Encouraging diversity
How mentoring is helping Unilever's board address its diversity challenge.
Encouraging diversity through mentoring
Helen Toogood and Rudy Markham are mentors to each other. Rudy is Chief Financial Director of Unilever. Helen is Vice President, IT Academy, in Unilever's global IT department, two levels below Rudy. For the past two years, they have been meeting every couple of months to discuss the challenges that Helen faces as a senior woman working at Unilever and the difficulties Rudy and his fellow directors are having in promoting women onto the board.
Over a third of Unilever's managers are women, up from 11% in the early 1990s, and the number of women in senior management has grown from 2% to 16%. But so far the company has not succeeded in appointing a woman to its executive ranks. It's an issue that greatly concerns Rudy and his colleagues.
Unilever recruits equal numbers of men and women but, for a variety of reasons, women have tended to leave when they reach senior management positions or simply not get promoted. Of those who take career breaks, less than half return.
Building relationships
Rhodora Palomar-Fresnedi, formerly Unilever's senior executive for global diversity, persuaded every member of the executive board to develop mentoring relationships. "I realised this wasn't just a promotion or retention problem," she explains. "It is also a development issue. When you get to the top of a company you need to learn how to bring on others in the organisation who are different from you, otherwise you will only recruit people who are in the same mould."
So does mentoring make a difference? The building of relationships between the board and women two levels below has helped to reassure directors that the company has a cadre of women rising up the career ladder in whom they can feel confident. It is also giving women the confidence that they can take time out from work without jeopardising their careers, return to work part time, and still be in the running for a top job.
Read the full story by downloading the pdf in the links below.
Note: The pdf was written in 2004. For more information on our approach to diversity, please see the Employees section of our online Sustainable Development Report 2007.
