Women Who Lead

The Empire Club Presents

Women Who Lead

September 22, 2015

Welcome Address by Dr. Gordon McIvor, President, Empire Club of Canada

Good afternoon, everyone. From One King Street West Hotel in downtown Toronto, welcome, to the 112th season of the Empire Club of Canada. And, for those of you just joining us through either our webcast or our podcast, welcome, to our meeting. Before our distinguished speakers are introduced today, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our head table guests.

Head Table:

Distinguished Guest Speakers:

Ms. Amber Kanwar, Anchor and Reporter, Business News Network; Director, Empire Club of Canada

Ms. Shelley Martin, President and CEO, Nestlé Canada Inc. Ms. Andrea Stairs, Managing Director, eBay Canada

Ms. Ilse Treurnicht, CEO, MaRS Discovery District

Guests:

Mr. Thomas Chanzy, Vice-President, Public Affairs, Ontario Trillium Foundation; Director, Empire Club of Canada

Ms. Marty Deacon, Canadian Olympic Committee Executive Board Member; Superintendent, Waterloo Region District School Board

Ms. Sarah McEvoy, Anchor and Reporter, Business News Network

Dr. Gordon McIvor, Executive Director, National Executive Forum on Public Property; President, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Bliss A. White, Partner, Blakes

Ms. Jill Lawrie, Partner, Blakes

Ms. Stephanie MacKendrick, Partner, Blakes

Ms. Andrea Wood, Senior Vice President, Legal Services, TELUS; Past President Empire Club of Canada

My name is Gordon McIvor. I am the Executive Director of the National Executive Forum on Public Property. Ladies and gentlemen, your head table. I would also like to acknowledge the presence in the room today of three of our past presidents: Verity Sylvester, John Campion, and, as I already introduced, Andrea Wood.

Introduction

Almost half a century ago, the Empire Club welcomed to its podium Ellen L. Fairclough, Canada’s first woman Cabinet Minister. It was a different time to be sure, and we were still at least a decade away of what would eventually become known as the “Women’s Movement.” But already on that cold December day in 1957, Minister Fairclough was speaking very plainly about the need to get more women into the executive seats and boardrooms of the nation. I would like to read you a very short quote from that historic speech:

In spite of the large number of women shareholders in business and finance, the names of relatively few women appear in the list of directors of Canadian companies. It is my conviction that this situation will change in the next ten years, but I think that I would be dodging facts if I did not admit that, although legislation has been adopted in most of Canada today which gives equal pay for equal work to men and women, there has as yet not been general acceptance of the principle of equal opportunity.

So that was 50 years ago, and, by the way, Minister Fairclough was invited to speak to the Club on the first Ladies’ Day of that season so that women could attend and hear her. They were different times as we have stated, but today we are going to explore if they really were so very different than back then in 1957 for successful, bright, female leaders in Canada as they make their way to the top of their respective organizations.

Now, to help us have this discussion, we are delighted to welcome to the Empire Club four dynamic leaders. In no particular order, let me now introduce our panel members to you today. Andrea Stairs is Canada’s Managing Director for eBay. Andrea leads the Canadian Strategy and Operations of one of the world’s largest online marketplaces and Canada’s second largest ecommerce business. A fully bilingual native of Montréal, Andrea is responsible for cultivating eBay’s community of Canadian users from individual users to established brands and retailers.

Next, we are delighted to have with us today Ilse Treurnicht, the CEO of MaRS Discovery District. Treurnicht oversees both the development and operations of the MaRS Centre and its broad suite of entrepreneurship and innovation progress. She is an active member of our country’s innovation community and has been ever since graduating from Oxford University which, by the way, she attended as a Rhodes Scholar.

Thirdly, we are fortunate to have with us today, Shelley Martin, the President and CEO of one of our most iconic brands, Nestlé Canada Incorporated. She has executive responsibility for Nestlé in Canada which includes numerous food and beverage divisions and employs approximately 3,600 people in 23 facilities across the country.

Finally, because I said at the outset that we had four remarkable women with us today, we are delighted to have with us a well-known and extremely respected anchor, and I am referring to Amber Kanwar, who is a reporter, of course, with Business News Network. We have all watched Amber reporting on upcoming deals and IPOs slated to hit the market, and she is probably one of the most plugged-in reporters in the country on such diverse issues as the turnaround effort at BlackBerry or on various initiatives by some of the country’s pipeline companies.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please, welcome all of our panelists to the podium today, and I will now hand the microphone over to Amber to begin today’s discussion.

AK: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this lunch hour. This is an issue that is very important to me, and you have proved through your attendance that it is important to you.

Now, I traffic in numbers all day at BNN, and the numbers in this case do not lie. Notwithstanding all the measures that have been made to effect the change of women’s position in this world, still women make about 70% of what a man’s wage is for the same job, even if they are full-time employees. There is only about 5% representation of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, and only 20% of S&P 500 board seats are occupied by women.

Now, those are the statistics but the women up here show that statistics were not their destiny, and that is what we hope to talk about a little bit today, that is, whether or not that is the case that you can control your own destiny through your actions. So I hope that you enjoy the conversation.

Let us start, ladies, with this concept—I mean the elephant in the room is that women have babies and men do not, and that is the issue of this notion of so-called “having it all.” Some say women cannot have it all. Some say they can, and some just get very angry at the mention of women having it all. Let us start with you, Andrea. How do you think about this concept of “having it all”?

AS: So I am in the camp of finding this a completely unhelpful concept: A) I do not even know what it means, and then B) striving for it seems to be without purpose, frankly. I also do not think that balance is particularly helpful. I think that we all are managing multiple things simultaneously, and if we happen to hit balance, that is on the way from one extreme to another—sort of passing through.

I like to think more about the idea of managing your career and being very purposeful about where you are putting your efforts and priorities. So the idea of, you know, like, you are driving your car: When do you put your foot on the gas, and when do you take it off? I do not think that you can manage a career and a family and all of your outside interests at full tilt simultaneously for your entire career. I have seen friends burn out, and so it is a question of when are you putting your foot on which pedal and, necessarily, when are you taking your foot off what other pedal?

And so, you know, I have got a four-year-old and two-year-old, and so there is a certain amount of work there, and then there is work at work, and then there is work with my spouse, and so I think that that is an ongoing challenge, and so “having it all,” I think, really, is not very helpful.

AK: Shelley, where do you stand in this debate because when you are—to use the car metaphor—trying to strive for a leadership and you are trying to go further than other people while perhaps managing a family life?

SM: I would agree with Andrea, and I think that everyone has their own definition of balance. I think that the balance conversation ends up in such a way that there is some magic math notion that everyone has the same, and, in my experience, balance changes by the day. Your work/life balance, if we want to call that, can change depending on what is going on with you or with your family. So what I always tell new parents coming back to work maybe after being off for maternity or paternity leave is do not stress about it, and you will never be in someone else’s balance. But, you need to be clear on what your priorities are in your life, what your priorities are for that day and have that drive, whatever it is, whether that is spending time at work or not, spending time at home—but just be true to yourself on what those priorities are.

AK: Do you travel a lot? How do you manage this notion of balance?

IT: To echo Andrea’s point, I take a somewhat philosophical view of the inputs into this notion of ‘balance’, and I think for most people, at any moment in time, something is seriously out of whack, and so you have to make peace with that right up front, and then, perhaps, it is helpful to think about this notion of balancing career interests, family interests, community interests, personal interests in a sort of a long sinus wave over your lifetime, where in certain periods, children will take priority and in other periods—but there will be periods where some of those pressures will be less, so do not think that you have to give up on them. Just park them for a while.

AK: I pick up on that notion of ‘crisis management’. That is what every leader has at their essence, you know. That is why they are a leader because they can do it better than somebody who is not leading the team. What skills do you think are important when you are dealing with a crisis? How do you approach it, Ilse, when you see something that is happening, not just because you are a woman but, in fact, because you are a leader? Something must be managed. How do you approach it?

IT: I think as we accumulate more experiences and take on more responsibilities one of the things that you certainly build competency in is responding to uncertainty or navigating uncertainty. I think that is one of the very key attributes of an increasingly complex working world, whether you are a leader in it or not. And I think being in the moment incredibly focused on the data coming in but really keeping an eye on what is important for the long haul is the challenge. It is to not be overwhelmed by the demand and the moment, but keep focused on what needs to happen to get through the crisis in a way that is to the benefit of the organization in the long run.

AK: I imagine that day-to-day none of you think, “I’m a woman, and this is what I’m going to do today.” But as a leader, are you attuned to the fact that other people might be thinking that when you are trying to manage day-to-day or manage through a crisis? Shelley?

SM: I do not think that at all. I hope not, honestly, because I think it is just being about a leader. And I think that if we were to carry that burden that would add different complexity, and I prefer to think that we are working in a world now where that is not so obvious.

AS: Probably the only time I think about it is when I am trying to put together a portfolio of styles for something. At eBay, our Canadian office here in Toronto— we have a head office in San Jose—we often need to be kind of advocating on Canada’s behalf, and so it is about thinking about a portfolio of styles and a way of attacking a problem. It is, therefore, less about male/female and more about “What kind of styles can I bring?” and about knowing what my style is and whether I can complement that with somebody else who brings a little bit of a different style. Or should I be moderating my style, my sort of home style a little bit into something that would be more effective in the situation? So there are—without it being about men and women—more female styles than more male styles, just for lack of better kind of phraseology. And I think sometimes I think about it that way in terms of creating a good mix, but, yes, I certainly do not go to work thinking, “I’m a woman.”

AK: Well, if you went to work in the ‘50s people certainly thought, “Oh, you’re a woman, and you are being a bad one because you are not at home with your children.” And, of course, we have come a long way since then. I am wondering if through the lens of your own careers, you have seen that shift in attitude towards women in the workplace, and do you think that that has maybe created a bit of a tailwind for you?

AS: I think I had an advantage because I grew up with a mom who was an executive, and she was a single mom. I got to see that she would come home at the end of her day and sort of need to tell somebody about what happened at work. And her 16-year-old daughter happened to be the audience, and so I kind of got a sense of what work was like and sort of the granular progression at work. It was not sort of, like, you know, this big thing and then that big thing. I saw the pieces in between, and so I think that gave me a huge advantage because I sort of had a sense of how I could be in business and did not have to sort of think about some of the things that I think some of the women who joined my team occasionally are still thinking about: Is business right for me? And what does this look like? They might and be a little bit more uncertain about what that path might be. I do not know if that is answering your question.

AK: It does, and I will toss it over to Ilse because you are in the sciences, which are, typically, very male-dominated, but you have been there for a long time. How have the attitudes changed?

IT: You know, I have to say it is a bit sobering when you think back where we were 50 years ago and the fact that we are even having this conversation today and how little progress we have really made with kind of this incremental approach program to boards or senior leadership positions. So, perhaps, the transformation in male-dominated fields, like science and technology or venture capital, where I spent some time, will come as workplaces are entering a period of extraordinary transformation through technology, through globalization, through demographics, through changing customer demands, changing business models. And so, many of the traditional workplaces, where I think we have stalled will in fact have to undergo very significant change, and, you know, that is true of financial services, legal services, many, many other businesses. And maybe that is the opportunity for disruption and where we might begin to finally design workplaces around the reality that women have babies, which, if we can put a man on the moon, I do not think can be that hard.

AK: Just try to have a man have a baby. Then we will never hear the end of it. At Nestlé you are very consumer-focused, very oriented. That was seen as kind of one of the original industries that woke up to the fact that, hey, women are the decision-makers in the households. Have you seen that evolution?

SM: I would say in my time at Nestlé in Canada, I have seen the evolution. Shortly after I joined, we had our first female executive appointed or hired actually, and she was actually hired and was expecting at the time so, you know, it was sort of big on a couple of different fronts.

But I would say that I have never personally had that, and so I had the pleasure of working with the CEO who had a 50/50 balance on his executive team, and that was 20 years ago. That was a purposeful thing, and that remains as we go forward, so in this country, I saw from quick progression through there, and I have daughters that are the famous millennials who do not get what the big deal is about feminism, and so I am hoping that that will be some of the transition because, as the millennials come into more leadership, I think that the female millennials maybe do not understand or do not have the history or they are just growing up, and that is a foreign concept so, therefore, they maybe just will not put up with women’s oppression, or they will be expecting no difference with respect to gender.

AK: But as Ilse mentioned, though we have made progress, the numbers are so staggering and we are nowhere near equality. So people want to be solutions-oriented and focus on how to get that. They talk about quotas; they talk about mandating representation—not only in government but, at the board level, at the management level, and that can be quite controversial. I am wondering for you three as leaders, where do you sit on that debate? Andrea?

AS: I am not sure about quotas, but I am a very data-oriented, fact-based kind of person. That is how I make decisions and, you know, all of us in this room know that what you measure gets attention and changes. So I think things like comply or explain on the Canadian boards or forcing companies to declare the splits of both men and women but also visible minorities within their full employee base and within their executive or directors and above kind of level, I think, is incredibly helpful. I think we need to just continue to shine a spotlight on the numbers.

I was with a Silicon Valley company in the last couple of years, and there has been a lot of attention on, particularly, visible minorities and women, and there is a lot of public pressure and media pressure to get those companies to declare where they are at. It is very uncomfortable for those companies, and I think that is great. I think measuring things and getting the data and putting it out there is incredibly impactful.

AK: Ilse, you are nodding.

IT: Yes, I would say absolutely. And I think it is up to women to demand that those numbers be out there and to speak in our public voices and our votes and any way we can. This is an expectation now that we have for women in the workforce but particularly for our daughters going forward.

AS: And I think this also applies in our less public forum, so whether it is sort of pointing out to a male colleague that their management team is very male. I think that is our job, and it is a very uncomfortable conversation, and you do not want to accuse someone of sort of overtly making decisions that are sort of anti-woman or anti-anything else, but you do need to point it out. I think that is on us to actually do that and to have the conversations with your management teams and sort of say, “Was this a balanced slate for that role that you have got? That job opening?” It does not need to be massively confrontational. A single question just kind of pops something that might be unconscious up to the conscious level.

SM: I have a diverting point of view from that standpoint. While I think that it is important that we attract and acknowledge the numbers, I think, within an organization, working to promote and from a manager level to have quotas and to reinforce that takes away from the benefits because then if a woman gets the job, it questions her ability. One might say, “Oh, well, we needed to 50%, so that is why you got the job as opposed to you were capable.” So I think, with respect to senior leadership, it is that balance of being aware, as Andrea said, but not forcing that through the organization because I think that will diminish the work of great people progressing as it goes forward. Maybe when it comes to external on boards there might be a need to break down some barriers. There might need to be more measures there, and that may be as much about recruiting women. I am not sure whether some of those numbers are because women are not asking or putting themselves to be selected as opposed to not being chosen. And I think we just need to be clear on that as we go forward as well.

AK: So, if the onus falls on the individual, whether man or woman, to get out front for management so that you can be selected or at least be noticed for the work that you are doing, how do you do that? How did you go about getting out front or go about, as Sheryl Sandburg likes to say, “leanin in”?

AS: I was at a dinner several years ago, and someone mentioned a stat that actually ends up coming from Catalyst about the fact that I think the most impactful thing to a woman’s career of all of the different that you can do is actually to have a male sponsor and that sort of went into my head and went “Click.” I thought that if that is the most impactful thing, let us go and do that, and I did not restrict myself to men, but I definitely put a plan together and very actively pursued sponsorship which is different than, in my case, very different than mentorship. With the sponsors that I have, we have a very direct conversation about, “This is where I want to go. Do you think I’m qualified? If so, will you advocate on my behalf in whatever closed-door meetings that decision will be made in? And what do you need from me? Do you need talking points? Do you need data? Do you need content to advocate on my behalf?” And so it is a very transactional conversation.

The first time I did it I was terrified. But it turns out that they have all done it before with their bosses, and so everyone is sort of all on the same page. I think that is one way where you can take the reins of your own career and be your own advocate but also take advantage of other people’s power and use it to your own advantage.

AK: No wonder you work at eBay: You think in transactions. What about you? Can you think of different ways, Shelley, about how you got out front?

SM: It was nothing purposeful. Just being the best I can be every day in every situation, so I cannot honestly say that I went into a room saying, “I’m going to take advantage of this room, any different than any other thing.” It was just everyday being, as I said, the best I could be as it went forward. And, yes, I had sponsors, but they would be sponsors sort of organically through an organization, as opposed to direct; although I have heard many people that have done as Andrea did, but in our culture that is not so much the case, and it is about showing great work all the time.

AK: Ilse?

IT: I cannot claim a grand plan. You know, I think going back to this conversation, I think what we have to do also is that sponsorship or that advocacy for women leaders needs to get beyond just “It’s a nice thing to do because we don’t have enough women.” I think we have to bring the debate back to the fact that we are in a global talent war. Canada cannot win with half our team on the field, and this is about betting the best people working on the most important projects and getting beyond also very fixed views of what, you know, the perfect leadership model is. If business as usual is not working, it is because leadership as usual is not working, and it is time for us to really open up our minds to new approaches, not just from women but from a diverse range of people with different experiences so that we can tackle some of these complex challenges in a different way. That might open up more opportunity for women, rather than be brought out of the cheap seats as a bit of a society’s favour to women.

AS: There are studies, and the data shows that far from making teams less cohesive, a diversity actually makes them more cohesive, and there is more of a sense of togetherness and belongingness when you recognize people’s individuality which you would not think. That then drives innovation as you would totally expect. And innovation, you know, either capital “I” or little “I” is so essential for us now such that Canada’s at that point where you sort of think, “How could you not want this? How could you not take advantage of this advantage that is sort of sitting there and can be grasped?”

SM: And I think that the technology is going to challenge, as you said, the way leaders are in business going forward. Because of the flexible work hours, the flexible work locations and spaces, you do not need to come in an office with a door, nine to five, partly because we are in a global world and partly because technology enables work in different ways to put teams together from around the world.

Taking advantage of that, I think, is going to be maybe a disruptor from a leadership standpoint. But it is going to help all the young leaders to evolve in a different way. As the older leaders, we need to be open to that adjustment and change. We need to be open to those changes. Let them happen and explore them for ourselves as well as for younger people coming through.

AK: Let us talk about one of the oldest trends in business— and let us face it: Cliques do not go away. When you are in high school; when you get into the job network, there is the “old boy’s network,” which even in today’s society definitely exists. I think about banking and I see, you know, trips to Las Vegas for a closing dinner for three days with eight guys. They are not going to the spa for those three days, or you have got road shows and things like that. That tends to be going to the golf course. Women can pick up golf, absolutely, but that tends to be something that exists within most industries. So how do you crack that?

AS: I think it does not exist in my industry, and so maybe you self-select industries where you—and this is a horrible thing to say—you have a bit of an easier time. I was in finance, and when I was in finance, in corporate finance, I did not find that—I mean it was obviously male-dominated—it was a particular disadvantage. I do not know.

SM: It is not big in our industry either, and that is another thing that has changed. With respect to the golf tournaments through the summer and that sort of stuff, there are a few of those, but business is not done on the golf course as it used to be, and I think for it to change—it is not my life for it to change. It is going to be for senior people to say, “No, we don’t need to do that. We’re going to do something else that is more inclusive” because, to me, doing that is not just about a male thing. That is about a family change. Now, people want to stay home with their families and do that as opposed to do a lot of corporate stuff as well, and so I think that notion of being respectful to the team members and team involved and challenging that or enabling a challenging conversation to try something different is going to be helpful.

AK: One of the consequences of opening up more management spots, leadership spots, for women is that there are still fewer of them, of spots. I have seen that in my own industry where what that creates is actually a more intense, competitive environment among women than it does among men, and so you do not get this sense of women helping each other to raise each other up as much as it might seem natural for men. Now, that is just my experience in the media, but I am wondering whether you see that playing out as well. And how as an employee who has a leadership goal do you combat that? Ilse, let us start with you.

IT: You know, I absolutely believe that for women to succeed, women have to support each other, and I have been extraordinarily fortunate in terms of meeting, working with, becoming friends with extraordinary women all my life. I have no idea how my life would function without them, so I am incredibly intolerant to that notion, and I think there is a great communion between women all over the world that is quite fundamental, I think, to the health of our society. We need to find every possible way to strengthen those networks rather than undermine them, and, in industries where that is not the case, I would absolutely say we have to—even if the numbers are small—to find every way possible to get rid of that dynamic because it is extremely unhelpful on so many levels. I think it starts with the women leaders in that organization actually.

AS: I think that the whole idea that there is a zero sum game is so not helpful. It is not a zero sum game. We are all trying to get more out of less and get more out of whatever resources they happen to be, whether they are human or otherwise. It comes down to the leadership of companies to banish that concept that we are all competing, that we are all in competition with each other. You are competing against your competitors. You are trying to get the best teams possible in order to do that. It accrues to everyone’s benefit if that team is an exceptional team. Everyone gets recognized. I think that is the kind of culture that you need to create and exemplify. I think they call it sort of the “queen bee syndrome,” and, actually, I have never seen it. To your point, I think that there is an amazing amount of support amongst women and, you know, there is also an amazing amount of support from men. It is not us versus them. In my career, the people who have moved me forward have been men who have recognized whatever they thought was special in me and have kind of, you know, made sure that I had opportunities and so, you know, I think that setting this up as kind of a competition is something that we should actually avoid and discourage because I do not actually think it is the case.

AK: So as a leader, Shelley, how do you that? How do you ensure that that is not what happens in your organization?

SM: By being gender-neutral on any kind of opportunities or promotions that are available. So it is for the skills and building the right team, and it has not been my experience and I do not think that if you talk within the organization that gender is on anyone’s mind, in terms of where they stand and what their competitive set is. I just talk to them, like, “You need to have the greatest tools in your toolbox,” and gender is never part of that. It is about your experiences and your skills.

AK: One of the trailblazers of the day—and there are so many to choose from—is Marissa Mayer. I think about in my world how much people obsess over the success that Marrisa Mayer is having, even though, you know, she is doing it while pregnant. They are just gobsmacked that the brain continues to function while you carry children, and that strikes me as somebody that young people can really latch on to in terms of role models. I imagine that each of you had somebody that you were latching on to in terms of what was driving you forward and an example of what you could be. Maybe we will start with you, Andrea. Just who was that person for you? What was it about them that made you kind of strive for what they had?

AS: My mom is sitting right over there, and she very much was my role model, probably very, very early. I was in high school. I was twelve, and my friends would be sitting on the locker room floor. I remember talking about what they wanted to do when they grew up, and no one would ever ask me, and it drove me nuts because I had a really prepared answer, and they would never ask me. So, finally, I said, “Why aren’t you guys asking me what I want to do when I grow up?” And they were, like, “Ah, it’s so boring. You just want to go into business.” So I kind of knew very early, and it was very much seeing someone very up close and seeing how they were managing their career. I remember when my mom became Vice President. She came into the house and walked up the stairs and said, “Kids, I got it!” And we were so enthusiastic because we had been part of the team sort of behind the scenes trying to get her there. So, again, I think that example of seeing the granularity and seeing how it comes together bit by bit and taking a very long view of your career, all came from watching my mom’s career, and so that has been very formative for me.

SM: I just want to make one comment that is a bit of a watch out I think. We have all the celebrity female CEOs that a week later they are back at work, and I am not sure that that is the right role model. I worry that that is putting this sort of expectation on people: “Well, she came back. Why are you taking your year off? And I think we just have to be careful for that, again, in terms of being respectful of what people’s priorities are and being careful about setting a new expectation that if you are not in the office and managing your child the day after you have delivered, then you are not a great mom, and you are not committed to the business. So we need to be careful on that. Concerning mentors, there have been many people that have been in my life and that have shown me the way, but it would be my first boss at Nestlé, who was a man. It was not a woman, and that was just about a leadership style of being open and respectful to everybody and their ideas and being collaborative but making a quick decision and taking accountability on behalf of the team to make things happen and follow it up. It was a leadership style that involved stopping and listening and being focused on whatever is talked about and then moving forward from that—so basic leadership stuff, but it sticks with me every day.

IT: I grew up in anti-Apartheid South Africa, so I always had enormous admiration for the women of all backgrounds who kind of kept the healthcare system and the education system operating through that period and even today. I love women like Mary Robinson, who led a country and is now looking after what is happening to the world’s most vulnerable people through climate change. Those women I think are iconic.

The most remarkable person I have ever worked with is certainly John Evans, who was the founder of MaRS, and I had the privilege of working pretty closely with him for a number of years. He was an extraordinary combination of a true visionary person with very ambitious ideas for Canada and someone with a really practical streak in terms of bringing those ideas into reality. He was an extraordinary, accomplished person who had absolutely no interest in the limelight. But the most remarkable thing about him was in his one-to-one interactions with people that were so kind and so generous and so effortlessly brought out the best in them. And I think when you look at that combination of factors, there is no question it was that fabric of incredibly positive, small, human interactions that allowed him to move mountains, and I have never seen anything like that. It was truly, truly amazing.

AK: A lot of our discussions have focused around getting to the role that you want, having the level of status that your hard work dictates that you should have. But at the end of the day, you got to get paid, and this is where women generally do not get paid as much. Some of it comes down to this notion that women do not ask. It comes down to the negotiation process and pushing for more because they are ready to give you that title and they are ready to give you more work, but how much are they willing to pay you for that? So shed some insight into negotiation skills that every upcoming leader needs to know, needs to have—skills that have worked out for you when you have been negotiating, not only for your rightful place, but your rightful pay cheque.

AS: Obviously, you need to ask. I think this is where having a really strong group of sponsors actually takes a lot of the weight off you because I think if you can enlist people into your corner, that actually helps you to make sure that you are getting the role but you are getting it at the right threshold of whatever. It is very difficult to go into a manager’s office and say, “Hey, you know, the other guy down the hall seems to be making more than me.” Nobody really knows, and then there are all these explanations. I do not have a really great solve for that. Obviously, you do need to ask. You do need to figure out, do some research and figure out what it is that you should be asking for.

I have sort of an informal personal board of directors. Essentially, they are friends and former colleagues, people whom I respect and who do not have a personal stake in my career but who care deeply about it. And I think that sort of a conversation that I would have with one or two of them would be, “What is sort of market? What should I be asking for, and does this seem about right?” But I think conversations about money are particularly difficult to have. I was just listening to a presentation by someone from Catalyst who found they have done a massive, global study, and they actually found that the average starting salary for women coming out of university and like vs. like for jobs around the world has a $4,000 gap, and in Canada it is actually an $8,000 gap. And then you layer on that the fact that women tend to do more mentoring and less sponsoring and men the inverse means that the women’s curve kind of does this while the men’s curve does that just because of the effectiveness of the sponsorship. So I think that sort of speaks to the fact that there is more than one issue here. There are multiple issues.

AK: You brought up an interesting point when you know somebody that does your job, is a man, and makes more than you. How do you bring that up to your boss?

AS: I do not know. I think you have to delicately. Whatever it is, porcupine—how do you kiss a porcupine? Delicately. You bring it up delicately.

AK: But you bring it up?

AS: Well, I think you do. I do not know who wins if you do not. You certainly do not. It is one of those things where you can ask, “What is the worst that can happen?” Your manager will say, “No, you’re completely wrong.” Okay. Well, if that is the worst that can happen, it is an uncomfortable conversation, but at least you have put him on notice or her on notice that you are watching, so, if anything, people kind of know that you are paying attention.

AK: How do you negotiate?

SM: I do not have a lot to say to add to that. So being clear and doing your research just to have an understanding of what is going on. And what is the worst that can happen? They say no. So you have to go on understanding, but you have to have your facts because the challenging thing is it is not just about the level. It is about the skills and competency and how well someone is doing. And that is where it gets grey.

AS: And performance and experience.

SM: Exactly. So, you know, that is where you have to, again, do the research because it is not just about title, and sometimes those are honest conversations, good or bad: “Yes, well, that person might be better than me,” but to do that and check yourself on that first.

AS: And I do not think you could have an expectation of having the person say, “Oh, you’re right.” In no scenario did that conversation end with, “You know what? And I’m giving you a raise in this room.” This is a multi-phase conversation, and you sort of have to feel your way through, but I think you have to think, “What’s the worst that can happen, and what’s a realistic outcome?” The realistic outcome is they sort of say something noncommittal and leave the room after that meeting without making any comment, any commitment at all.

SM: But they are thinking about it.

AS: But they are thinking about it, and that is the victory. And you have to think about this as a long game, not a one-off.

AK: It sounds like what they are saying is you have to go in; you have to be prepared to ask, and if you get kind of a wavering answer, that is not necessarily the end of it. Be prepared for more follow-up conversations?

IT: Yes, I would say. Certainly, I think these kind of structural barriers or differentials are probably more prevalent in large organizations where there are multiple people at certain levels. Most of the roles I have had have been in sort of more start-up type organizations, and, to be honest, I have been extremely unfocused on money all my life, and it usually works out. If you pick a great organization with great people without a lot of structure, those things tend to kind of find a place that works.

AK: If you leave the workforce for any period of time, do you essentially kiss your leadership opportunities goodbye? That is at the root of what many people are worried about—it is why somebody comes back from maternity leave after a week or does not take the full time because they are afraid of disappearing.

SM: I understand the fear on that. I think that you have got to choose the company that is going to be respectful of the individual and of the family, and I think now it is not just about the moms. It is about the dads as well, and we have just announced that we are putting in longer paternity care. You have got the legal opportunities from a paternity care standpoint, but a lot of young dads are wanting to take the time; they want to raise the children, and they want to go to the Christmas concert or go to the doctor’s appointment. And I think that it is making sure that there is balance on that. For the first guys that are taking paternity leave, there is a lot of pressure and a lot of stigma that goes with that, too. So having a company where everybody supports those decisions to go forward is important. And supporting young fathers supports young mothers at the same time because he is wanting to be involved and maybe he is doing the doctor’s appointment because she cannot because of her work. And so, to me, I do not delineate between; it is supporting young parents because that supports both genders and their leadership challenges as they go forward.

AK: Andrea, you have young children, two and four, I believe. Were you afraid of disappearing because you are Managing Director of eBay Canada? Were you afraid to take time?

AS: No. I think in Canada—at least among my generation and younger—the maternity leave, having a year, up to you how much of that year you are going to take, feels pretty baked in now. I think paternity leave is definitely something that we need to work on and, to your point, we need to celebrate the people who take it and make very positive examples of them as opposed to kind of making them seem like exceptions. I think the harder question is if you are going to take several years off. I think businesses are pretty much set up now, particularly in Canada, to deal with a one-year maternity leave, and I did not take the whole year, but I certainly took a lot more than the norm, and I did not really know how much I was taking when I went off, right? Maybe I would be back in six months, but I was back in eight months. But I think the decision to take multiple years off to stay home until your kids are four and five, is still one, to be frank, that we would probably still grapple with. And I do not think that, in that situation, you have kissed leadership bye-bye, but I do think that it is a significantly bigger challenge to come back from that than to come back from maternity leave where the business has sorted that out more.

IT: I would certainly say one-year maternity leaves are common now and were not common when my kids were young, for sure. I almost see a different emergence now that I am quite interested among the women that I know. I think the reality is still that many workplaces are not really set up for women to shine in that period when they have a lot on their minds. Their kids are young. Stuff happens with kids, but there is also no question that as kids leave home, there is a lot of energy and capacity that emerges for women, and I see amazing women doing amazing things in their 70s, 80s, 90s, and I wonder if our workplaces will shift to take advantage of that sort of unleashed energy from these amazing women. I hope we do because it will be such a loss if we do not. They are amazing.

AK: You said though that workplaces are not necessarily well-equipped to be there during the times that they are absent. What specific strategies do you think might help to allay an employee’s concern that they are going to disappear, thus encouraging them to come back to work maybe before they are ready? What can leaders do?

IT: I think it depends very much on the industry. The areas where it is tough is if you are an academic professor, and you have to earn tenure, and, in your 30s, you have to publish, like, crazy to hit the bar, to move forward. This is the time when consultants have to travel. There are a lot of structural stuff built into many workplaces that make it difficult for women to just deal with the practicalities—particularly, if you have two parents on a travel track. That is a really difficult one, and I think the more we as leaders can design flexibility that is just real and acknowledge people for who they are and what they bring to the workplace and give them room to deal with the rest of their life, they will reward us by bringing their best selves to work every day, and the productivity gains will make up way more than any of our rules can structure to somehow the employer’s benefit.

AK: Shelley, what do you do to kind ensure that flexibility or maintain contact with people that are gone to make them feel like they are still part of the organization?

SM: Well, people can choose to engage as they like while they are off. But I think the issue is pushing on the flexibility and enabling that, whether it is work from home or whether we have a flex program that people can take time through the week, any time, for whatever reason they want. I think that we are exploring different office and times to enable people to do that. So that allows people different flexibility. We do not expect people to be engaged while they are off. If they have chosen to be off, then you need to be off for whatever that reason is. How they would want to stay engaged, that is up to them, but we encourage that time be dedicated to your family that you need to support for yourself and to that family.

AK: You mentioned you came back earlier, but did you stay engaged during your mat leave?

AS: Yes, I stayed engaged. The first three months is a fog, so it was not engaged during the first three months, but after that, I was kind of, you know, engaged and I would bring my son to work and, you know, inevitably someone would want to take him from me and sort of play with him, and I would meet with sort of my team and talk about issues but that was very much my choice. I felt absolutely no pressure. In fact, I had managers sort of saying, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” I am the kind of person who does not like stuff happening in such a way that I do not know what is going on. On my team right now, we have got a number of women who have very young families, and so, working with them, we literally had a conversation this morning about how one woman’s husband’s schedule changed, and daycare pick up and drop off have to be juggled. I was, like, “Oh, yeah.” The nice thing about the internet is it is always on, and so if she needs to take two hours off in the middle of her day in order to be able manage this and come back in the evening, I do not care. I honestly do not, and the purpose of this conversation was making sure that she knew that it was okay for her to sort of have that as part of her consideration set and that I was supportive of that. Whether or not she takes me up on it, I think it is important as leaders that we do convey that these are entirely valid options, and we will be supportive of that and kind of give the choice back to the employee as a team member to make the decision with their spouse or with their family, whoever that makes the most sense for them. And I think that is when you get very committed employees. There is nothing that drives loyalty more than that, and people are at their foundation good and want to do what is right for the company at which they are employed. If they feel loyal, that is where you get great team members.

AK: Ladies, fascinating discussion. We have time for a Q&A.

Question & Answer

Q: Hi. Thank you. You touched on quotas a little bit, and I think one of the challenges with quotas is that in some industries, we are still not even having the volume of women entering that industry to discuss quotas. I was at a great social media and tech roundtable where one woman said that she was having her five-year-old daughter engage in a robotics course. And I love that idea because it was not just about ballet and gymnastics. It was also about robotics. So how are you, as leaders in your industries, encouraging very young women or even children to consider careers outside of what the norm may have been?

AS: In my industry, what we find is that you do not need to tell high school students that a career in tech is cool or that it is available. I think one of the challenges that high school students have is “How do I get from where I’m at to that career? I know that it is a good career, but how do I get there?” And so we are engaged in a number of activities, one called “Career Mash,” where we actually go in, and we talk to high school students and talk about our own backgrounds, and so mine is an undergrad in medieval history and a law degree, an MBA. I have on paper no qualifications to be running eBay Canada. And our head of product, which the head of the technical side of the business, has a degree in film.

So I think we do need to encourage people to take those established career paths, and, certainly, academia has a very established sort of step one, step two, step three. But when you actually look around, and you dig into who are running these companies, you have got a crazy set of backgrounds, and so I think it is actually a disservice to say that everyone has to come through this single pipe into this area.

That being said, getting women into the STEM industries and STEM education programs is definitely a huge focus, and I think actually we are moving the wrong way which is really disappointing. Figuring out ways to engage women and sort of demystify it and make it more practical, more relevant to what their personal affinities are is definitely something that I am engaged in. Again, it is all of these issues—it is not one. There is no silver bullet to this, but I do think part of it is just sort of demystifying who is actually leading and how they got there, and so that means there is a lot of opportunity.

AK: Ilse? Sciences notoriously have struggled to attract female enrollment.

IT: I think a lot of this is about exactly as you put it, you know, showing that there are multiple paths and, at the same time, conveying the excitement of science technology careers which often is missing. We are doing a lot of stuff now to bring entrepreneurship education into schools. We had the whole summer full of coding camps for girls and so on. So I think opening up many of those doors but then telling the stories of people taking multiple paths to get to these interesting integrated career paths I think is a big part of opening up the opportunities for people. I think it is very important to celebrate the women at the various stages along the way, so young girls can see themselves in those next generation leaders.

One of the things happened at MaRS, which I think is just a fascinating example: We run a very introductory program called “Entrepreneurship 101,” and it is open to students or new Canadians or people in career transition. It is free. It is open access, and we started to integrate the concept of social innovation into this predominately tech-based innovation program. We did not dumb down the technology content or the business content one bit, and within one year, it went to 50/50 male-female. So the minute you could bring a values-based business approach, the women show up. So there are lots of ways, I think, beyond just opening certain gates that we can engage women in a new generation of business.

SM: I think that all of us in business need to be reaching out to young women and to young men. Youth unemployment is a big issue in this country as it is around the world, and so we were launching a youth initiative to go out to talk about what we are doing. But I think having students with mentorships into companies and having some support through on-campus activities from the companies is important. Half of my executive team is female, so to be able to go out and have those conversations to show that there are multiple ways and that you are not committed if you sign up to whatever engineering in year one and that there is not only one path is important. And there are lots of different ways, and having those real conversations with people and having that intimate chance to have those are really going to help.

AK: All right. Well, it has been a fascinating discussion.

Ilse, Shelley, Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.

Note of Appreciation by Andrea Wood, Past President, Empire Club of Canada

What an incredible session and an inspiring group of leaders. Thank you. In listening to our speakers today, I was struck by the differences between each of our speakers and their personal styles, and I was struck by the different approaches they have each taken to succeeding in the workplace. There is still one thing that I think unites them all: If there is one thing that we learned today it is that there is no one path to success, but there are some personal characteristics that I think define strong leaders and these women today demonstrated them in spades. Those characteristics are grit, determination, drive, commitment to excellence, clarity of purpose, having a great mom and great role models.

On behalf of the Empire Club and those in attendance today, I want to thank you each for taking so much time to share your stories and your perspectives with us today. Your stories were inspiring and heartwarming, and, hopefully, they will contribute to us winning the global talent role that Ilse has described. So thank you very much, ladies. You have proven to us today that you refused to have statistics be your destiny, and we are very pleased to have learned from your example. So thank very much on behalf of everyone here for helping us to better understand how to kiss a porcupine.

Concluding Remarks by Dr. Gordon McIvor, President, Empire Club of Canada

Thank you, Andrea, and thank you, ladies. I just wanted to add my own thanks, and, listening to you today, I actually recalled such a poignant memory. My dad used to be a CEO of a company. Once he told me that the most difficult moment—or one of the most difficult moments—he remembered in his career was the first board meeting where they had a female board director show up, and no one knew what to say. They were actually paralyzed with fear, and it is hard to believe today. This lady, by the way, was interviewed on television years later, and she always used to wear a suit and tie—not that there is anything wrong with wearing a suit and tie, but someone asked her, “Why do you always wear a suit and tie?” And she looked at them as though they were really dumb and said, “It was too desexualize myself. It was to make people forget I was a woman in the boardroom.” And I thought, “Wow, that is pretty amazing when you have to disguise yourself in the boardroom,” so, as I listening to you today, you brought a lot of things home that a lot of things are still problems, but there is a lot of progress that is being made as well, and I want to thank you very much for taking the time to join the Empire Club today. Wonderful session. Thank you.

Thank you to our very generous sponsors. I want to thank Blake, Cassels & Graydon, and Edelmen as well for sponsoring today’s lunch. We could not do it without you. I would also like to thank Narrative PR who was the original group that came to us with the concept of doing a lunch on this subject. We are very thankful to you. I want to thank the National Post as our print media sponsor and also Mediaevents.ca for live webcasting today’s event. Follow us on Twitter at @Empire_Club and, please, visit us on line at empireclub.org. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Please, join us again soon. We have a remarkable fall lined up. Starting tomorrow, we have David Plouffe, a name which will probably be familiar to anybody that is a political junkie in the room. Plouffe is largely credited with being the primary architect behind Barak Obama’s two wins in Washington, but he also is today the Chief Advisor to Uber, so he will be here to talk about how to you be the world’s largest transportation company without owning an asset. Not a bad record. We also have Rachel Notley showing up next week. She will give her first major speech outside of Alberta on what is happening with the crisis in the oilpatch. Three days after that, on October 5th, our own premier will be here to talk about women that lead. We have got a lot showing up here in the next season, and, in December, we have the Governor of the Bank of Canada coming to talk about Canada’s economic situation. We hope you will join us again during this fall season, and, thank you very much, for coming today. Ladies and gentlemen, this meeting is now officially adjourned.

Thank you.