When I was invited to the forum’s 3rd edition, I immediately noticed an interesting place for me not to feel absolutely exotic: the men’s corner; a little dark stall where minority men who dare attend the event can freely gather together (at least that is what I thought at that time). Every women were supposed to be prohibited from that place built on a club-style basis with a giant TV screen and leather armchairs. A sort of forbidden city in which the men could compound in case of any sudden feminine attack.

After the two first days I must confess the organizers were right but on the other way around what they had imagine: men have been ferociously attacked by hordes of women that seemed to consider the little square the best in the all Deauville CID (our host resort). So much so that men began to cautiously avoid the men’s corner.

But manliness had not enunciated its last word. The battle was going to its apogee on this afternoon. The forum comprehensive program was announcing the arrival of Carlos Ghosn (CEO of Nissan & Renault), Frank Brown (Dean of INSEAD), Olivier Marchal (Bain&cie) and JP Tricorie (CEO of Schneider). Yes, in the twenty-square-meter thing. Of course the idea was to enable these well-known economic figures to meet the happy few other men in Deauville and talk between men about something like how and why women matter in business.

That’s not saying much that the she-army would fight tooth & nail to evacuate the poor guys who dare to try to attend the conference planned specifically for them.Here’s come a genius idea from an organizer: let’s change the place for the conference: a very classical feint in war period. The women would headed like a whirlwind into the men’s corner, while, we, happy and victorious would celebrate peacefully our victory in good company. The machiavelic plan worked out, only one thing mattered: discretion. (you know Guitry? If you’re man, rush to that: “Of course women can keep a secret, they only need to be several of them”).

How The James Bond stronghold was attacked

Men rushes into a first floor conference place, hidden behind a big totem that advertises the event. But there was a previous conference that was taking place there. And guess what, the men’s gathering in front of a door was noticed by passing women that was hanging around. In less than five minutes, streams of red-headed, blonde or dark, asian, indian, american, european and african women were surging toward us, perched on stiletto heels, full of rage for the attempt to elude them. We could hear from the depth of the pit the victorious rumour moving upward. Our guests were already arriving to the James Bond room and the James Bond girls were following them in an unbelievable uproar.We tried diplomacy in order not to surrender immediately.After hard peace talks we agreed on the following rule: three women should have at least one man to assail the place.

Let’s make it clear they didn’t respect the treaty as soon as they were numerous enough inside to put us down: powerful women are crual and pitiless.

As there were so few chairs for these numerous women present, they began to sit onto the fitted-carpet, leaving shoes and pushing their peers just as if in a mud battle. Indeed women wanted to eye their hero intently.The conference started in a strange way: M. Ghosn, who probably meant to be sincere, explained that diversity was compulsory in order to achieve effectiveness in companies but had to be meticulously prepared, and so that in his executive there were no women so far. Here we were and I really thought at the time we were on the verge to a nuclear war. I grabbed my bag and rushed to the door. Actually I am too young to die and I cannot bear physical torture. Thus I ran toward the door in an desperate attempt to save my life as the popular discontent voices were coming up. Were the bodyguards ready to evacuate the unlucky Nissan CEO? Never mind, every man for himself in hard times.

The diplomatic crisis was managed by Bond, James bond (his friends also call him Carlos Ghosn). My colleague Camilla, much stronger than I and determined to cover the event, has already posted her summary of the risky debate those four men dare to host. A strong historical moment. That’s how a private men’s clandestine meeting was ruin in Deauville, October 12^th 2007 by the vikings of modern times, I mean, women.

In the Men’s Corner yesterday Friday, the question of why CEOs should be serious about sex was raised again. The interest of the audience in what the speakers had to say about this and in the speakers themselves was so big that the Men’s Corner had to move to the James Bond room (no pun intended). The Men’s Corner transformed into a room crowded with ladies and even the James Bond room was not big enough for all the people who wanted to attend. In the end, we had an interesting configuration, with three men standing in front of an audience mostly composed of women, some of them seating on the floor and with their shoes off.

The three speakers, Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Renault and of Nissan, Frank Brown, Dean of INSEAD, and Jean-Pascal Tricoire, CEO of Schneider Electric, France, were provoked by the journalist and editor of Les Echos Virginie Robert, who was very sharp and asked for precise answers.

All of the three speakers said that gender is an important question for their companies. Frank Brown reported that the percentage of women at INSEAD is around 28% and they are trying to increase this number in the next years. I interviewed an alumni student from this business school in 1977 and she told me that in her class they were 20 girls out of 220 students, which corresponds to 9%. This means that there has been a great progress in the last 30 years, but there is still a big space to raise this percentage.

Jean-Pascal Tricoire said that gender diversity started being a more important issue for the company in the last 10 years, more strongly in the last 5 years. Companies such as Schneider, a leader in electricity and automation management, have a historic of having less women, but they are making initiatives to raise this number. They began to give much more attention to the statistics of gender in the company and are making initiatives to recruit and retain more women.

Carlos Ghosn called attention to the fact that, when it comes to choose a woman to the executive committee, sometimes there are simply not women on the list. He thinks that the important thing to do is to prepare women so that they acquire the competencies to be on the list. Some women, he said, are just so competent that they are going up for themselves. Others, who are not very confident, need more coaching. He also said that today, if they have to choose between a man and a woman with the same competencies for the executive committee, they would certainly choose the woman. But he believes that the business plan is essential. He even proposed a study. He is willing to finance a study that proves that more diverse groups makes the company more profitable. Anyone interested?

UPDATE - See also The man’s version on the Men’s Corner, offering a different take by one of our male bloggers on the same event.

I, along with 10 other women, went into the Men’s Corner. So, I guess it is not really a Men’s Corner, although the decoration is very suitable for males (black leather couches, flat screen TV, a bar - see a picture in this previous post).

This place gives participants the opportunity to have very interactive and one-on-one conversations with executives of important companies.

Conversation and questions came up. Interesting subjects such as why is flexibility only geared towards women? Why can’t men participate in flexible programs too? Why are women stopping other women from climbing the corporate ladder? How to convince management this issue is important? What about husbands who move to another country with their wife because she got her dream job?

A question was thrown: Who do you hire when you have two great candidates with similar characteristics, one is male and the other female? The politically correct answer would have been the female. But an audience participant came up with an interesting solution “Let’s forget about fighting, women can bring different ideas, you should hire both. Opportunities are not limited”

Gender diversity is not about victimizing women or punishing men. It is not about dividing and separting or about having different benefits by gender. It is about complement. That is what many companies do not understand. That is what many men don’t understand and therefore, they see this as threatening or conflictive. Diversity is balance, diversity is taking what is good from each person and mixing it, thus creating an idea that would had never arised from one homogenous group.

So let’s stop talking about division and let’s start thinking about balance and counterparts.

How are women shaping the business environment of the 21st century?

In a panel on Thursday, Laura Liswood (Senior Advisor, Goldman Sachs) pointed out a telling observation. Men are taught: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Women are taught: If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all. The resulting challenge is that these are constitutionally opposed.

She went on to say that a key assumption is that critical feedback is core to career development. However, within that, “Like” is very comfortable giving critical feedback to “Like”. The direct opposite is also true – they are very uncomfortable giving critical feedback to “Unlike”, so they are more likely to mumble “just fine”.

The best leaders, Liswood said, move their leadership styles depending on the context, and have the most tools in their toolbox – including the command and control tool, and the consensus tool. She brought up the classic example from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink“: 16% of American males are more than 6 feet tall, and 57% of CEOs are more than 6 feet tall. She went on to remark that she has done extensive research on leadership, and has interviewed many women CEOs in the US, as well as top male and female leaders around the world - and she has never seen a correlation between skeletal structure and leadership capabilities.

Another quote: What’s the definition of an assertive man – someone who bombs a small country. Of an assertive woman – someone who puts you on hold for 5 seconds.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, vice-president of South Africa, introduced by Laurence Peyraut Bertier of Barclays, gave an engaged keynote before dinner tonight, describing the efforts her country has done to promote women in government (several ministers are women), although “we still have a long way to go, because those steps aren’t reflected in the quality of life of many women”. A few quotes from her speech:

“I truly believe that once women are located in a meaningful place in the economy, society will be a much better place. There is an intrinsic link between society and economy”.

“It’s important that we pay attention to the issue of patriarchy and how it continues to deny a crucial role to half of society. I don’t think that the world can continue to afford a situation where half of society is disconnnected. We just don’t have enough men to do all the work”.

“There has to be a recognition in society that there cannot be development and poverty eradication without a sustainable contribution of women. The development of women is the biggest event for humanity yet to happen, for everybody”.

“Can you imagine if one day all the women in the world would just stay at home, don’t do anything that’s called work. Just sleep. We all fall asleep, all of us at the same time. I’m not advocating for a sleep strike, but can you imagine how the world would be? We could change the world by sleeping”.

“We should not trivialize the role of men, but we also need to dismantle the paradigm in which men have kept women for years. We need to start a new paradigm for the world where men would have a great place and women would had a great place”.

“If you want to look at how developed a country is, the quality of life of children, women, old people and disabled people is a better indicator than GDP”.

We are gathered here at the Women’s Forum discussing issues that impact women in business, education, society and politics. Why is there never a case for non-diversity? As women, we network and participate in forums to find ways to improve our position in society. Thousands of research and studies have been done on the impact of either having a low or a high percentage of women in a company. Today, McKinsey came out with a study called “Women Matter” (despite the English title, the report is in French, here in PDF). As Laura Liswood appropriately said in today’s panel on Women and Competitiveness, there is no “Do Men Matter” research.

Will we ever get to the point when women don’t have to fight the business case for diversity? Will it ever become a given that women and men are equal but different and that they complement each other? Will it ever be OK for a man to participate in a flexibility program without being seen as not ambitious? Will the percentage of women who have children and have a position in boards increase over time?

The Women’s Forum is a perfect place to debate all of this topics. For sure, there will be no right answer to any of this questions and the next generations of women will be responsible to carry on the torch and hopefully, they won’t have to fight the business case for diversity.

Missed some key points of various speakers while having coffee at the bar? Confused with so many insights and perspectives after attending numerous sessions? No matter what’s your background, the below-mentioned core take-aways for implementing gender diversity will be extremely useful for anyone seeking to reap the full benefits of diversity in the workplace (for managers as well as non-managers) . Move over Management Gurus, here the new management mantra:

7 steps to make gender diversity successful in the workplace :

• Make gender a strategic issue
• Get the executive team to define the business plan
• Let people express dissent
• Appoint a respected senior executive to head the initiative
• Make change before making noise
• Don’t mix managers
• Give it a budget, not just volunteers

Like in all gatherings, some of the most interesting discussions happened behind the scenes, or rather in a suffused tone over lunch. One of the interesting chats your ears on the ground picked up was about the very core issue of the conference – diversity policy in corporations, or why so few women get into company boards.

A few untold truths emerged at a table of European and US female managers from a number of European multinationals. First, they all agreed a convincing business case for gender diversity has to be presented to the (male) senior management. Only a business case can motivate change, and not fairness arguments. Second, many companies, especially those with low women representation, are pondering what to do to attract more diverse talent. The long-sighted ones have tasked their women employees attending the Forum to come back with an actions plan, which is an interesting approach of bottom-up ideas generation. Other companies have put procedures and diversity teams in place to drive change top-down, with substantial budgets. So far, no surprises.

More surprising was the fact that many of these female managers were not sure the top (male) ranks of the company were really sold on the idea of the business value of diversity. It is all up to how the CEO sees the issue, said one. One manager even said she will bring back ideas from the forum to her top executives, but she will not mention gender diversity as part of those discussions. The company’s top management does not see the value of this debate on gender diversity, she said.

More cynically, or realistically perhaps in some cases, one senior woman manager said that she thought there is very little appetite for women board members within all-men boards. Women board members would challenge the way things are done, and once you let one woman in, a few more would follow, and then what happens? All the women managers at that table noticed that their company boards had members from all corners of the globe, but no single woman. What a shame that European shareholders haven’t noticed the research from diversity consultancy Catalyst. This shows exactly the opposite, that women in top management perform better than all-men driven companies. If this is not a business case, what is?

This is a kind of an irony. The great novelty in this edition of the Women’s Forum is the creation of a men-only area, where they can enjoy a relaxing time while waiting for their spouses to get out of their “feminist” conference. And the rules are very strict there: a security guy at the entrance makes sure only men get in there. Here is a picture of the “Men’s Corner”:

Men are a minority here at the Forum, about 15% of attendees – Aude de Thuin, the Forum’s founder and CEO, underlined in her introductory speech that complementarities were essential to our world today, but that to her, 30% of men is the top-limit to reach an ideal balance. Some women here find amazing that men would chose to join the Forum; other consider the dedication of a specific area to them as a provocation.

Crazy rumours have been spreading around this morning regarding this very selective and secret area. For instance, I’ve heard they were hiding a PlayStation somewhere…

But beyond the joke, I think we have a point. The WomensForum choose this year to welcome its male members with clichés – a huge TV screen playing rugby games, leather armchairs and possibly a hidden PlayStation – in the same way men welcome women back in the real world.

Nowadays, a lot of companies are trying to promote gender diversity among their Human Resources. Though the higher you are in the hierarchy, the fewer women you can find. Perhaps is it too soon to value the outcome of these women-friendly policies, and perhaps can they be improved. Indeed, behind the provocation, the purpose of the men-only area is to raise awareness towards all the differences between men and women in business, which a corporate day-care facility cannot erase. Men are invited there to discuss gender diversity issues and share their experience and best practices concerning the integration of female values in their managerial culture.

Of course, and according to the most recent rumour, until warrior women in the Forum have besieged the area.

A Women’s Forum? This sounds pretty threatening, doesn’t it guys?

Some of you did make the choice to come to Deauville, though… Why?

Beyond the usual jokes (”Well, 1200 chicks! What man wouldn’t come?”), I am impressed by the true interest these men are showing for this event, whether they come as partners, speakers, or attendees.

A trendy-dressed filmmaker working for the Women’s Forum smiles at the sight of the chattering ladies in the Discovery Moments space. “I’m glad to be here. I’m used to covering events, but this one is different: things are smoother, not as aggressive, more harmonious.”

Some men came as partners of the event, convinced of the importance of women in shaping the future of their company. Bain & Company partner Bertrand Pointeau, whose consulting firm runs the “Men’s Corner”, expresses the concerns of his company in attracting women at management levels and in meeting their professional aspirations and private constraints.

Gerald Lema, President Asia Pacific of Baxter International Inc., came as a speaker, to share his company’s experience on attracting women at management levels (an almost 50-50 ratio) and the great benefits of this balance. He expresses his enthusiasm in meeting inspiring women at the forum and definitely expects to take new ideas back to China. He will be debating on “Sustaining Corporate Loyalty”, on Friday.

A few men came as king consorts, as well. Claude G., a Belgian lawyer, accompanies his wife, and explains why there are so few of his kind. “Some men wouldn’t feel at ease with the idea of accompanying their wife to such a forum. It still isn’t in the mentalities. For others, it’s the wife who wishes to keep her own private space.”

All express their admiration for these women who, often on top of their family life, commit themselves professionally and in public life. Well, Messieurs, as women, we are very grateful that you came, and we are happy to welcome you!