Late last year, Nomkhita Nqweni bought a copy of Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s powerful tome on women empowerment, for each of her male colleagues on the Barclays Africa Executive Committee. She says she felt a responsibility to help them understand the motivations of the company’s many executive women, who include CEO Maria Ramos and Chairperson Wendy Lucas-Bull.
The CEO of Wealth & Investment Management says she believes women have a more inclusive way of doing business. The wealth division Nqweni runs works with institutional clients like unit trusts, as well as private clients with a net asset value of at least R7 million.
Teams of advisors manage and invest the hundreds of billions of rands she oversees, creating discretionary investment portfolios. “I believe women offer broader perspectives, partly because of their experience as mothers and nurturers, which brings very positive aspects into the boardroom. Many of my male colleagues actually appreciated my buying them the book, so when I see them standing up and joining us in our He For She campaigns, it tells me there’s a consciousness there,” Nqweni says.
The Barclays Group employs 51% women globally, and is a founding supporter of the He For She initiative, a project of the United Nations Women, which is currently helmed by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. It encourages men to stand in solidarity with women to speed up gender equality.
The company has set itself very public targets of increasing the representation of women in senior leadership to 26% by 2018, and exceeding a 30% quota of women on boards by 2020 (the Barclays Africa board comprises 13 members, three of whom are women – ie, 23%).
Nqweni, who also chairs Barclays Africa’s Diversity & Inclusion Council, says the company has rolled out mandatory “subconscious bias training” for directors and MDs in a bid to create gender-sensitive offices.
“You don’t develop subconscious biases because you’re a terrible person. It can happen simply as a result of growing up in a different environment from someone else’s. But it affects the kind of thinking you bring to work and the decisions you make.
“The training was quite a watershed moment for many people who became more self-aware. We’ve started to see a lot of progress in terms of the growth of women in senior management structures.
“We focus on senior management structures because my fundamental belief is that if decision-makers are diverse in their views, that will filter down into the rest of the organisation.”
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