Unlike most tech companies, Fairphone has a workforce with an almost equal gender split, and a majority of women in leadership. So is its ethical mission the secret to achieving parity?
Eva Gouwens had heard that the tech industry was male-dominated, but it wasn’t until she attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the first time that the extent of the gender imbalance really hit her.
“I hadn’t really noticed it as an issue until I saw the line for the toilets,” says Gouwens, chief executive of the ethical phone manufacturer Fairphone, which creates phones with no “conflict minerals” (ie from areas of the world with violence and human rights abuses), manufactured in a factory where workers are fairly paid. “It’s the first event I’ve been to where the queue was longer for the men than for the women.”
Her initial lack of awareness has its reasons. For one, Gouwens is relatively new to the sector. A veteran of the food industry, the 44-year-old business development expert only switched to tech two years ago – first as managing director of Amsterdam-based Fairphone and then, since last October, as its chief executive.
Second, she stepped in at the helm of what was already a fairly egalitarian ship. The gender split of Fairphone’s 75-person workforce is almost straight down the middle (52% male, 48% female). On the firm’s executive management team, meanwhile, six of the eight members are women (including the commercial and operations directors).
Such atypical parity partly owes to the Dutch way of doing things, according to Gouwens. Rules on shared parental leave, childcare and other types of care provision are “quite progressive”, she says. That said, the Netherlands only ranks 19th on the Women in Work Index (six places behind the UK). The report also points out that females make up a mere 14% of ICT specialists in the Netherlands.
So, is Fairphone doing something especially different? Not really, Gouwens admits sheepishly. Sure, the firm is gender-blind with respect to pay and promotion, but it doesn’t go the extra mile to accommodate childcare needs, say, or to extend maternity pay.
More influential in creating a balanced workforce, she conjectures, is the phone manufacturer’s mission and backstory. The firm’s origins date back to the hackers’ movement and a long-running activist campaign around human rights abuses in the supply chains of large mobile phone manufacturers.
In 2013, the organisation switched focus, she explains: “At the beginning, our focus was on disclosing the influence of mobile phones on society and on your life, but we realised that, while we were raising awareness, we weren’t offering solutions, which is why we decided to make our own ethical phone.”
It is this singular purpose (“dare to care” is how Gouwens phrases it) that resonates so powerfully with Fairphone’s female workforce, she argues: “I think adding this angle to tech might well attract more women to Fairphone than to other tech companies.”
The testimonials of Fairphone’s website give credence to the claim. Finance manager Mariana da Costa credits her job to her sense that “positive changes are possible”, while supply chain expert (and ex-human rights worker) Laura Gerritsen is cited as saying that the firm’s ethical ambitions make her “happy to work crazy hours”.
In the lead-up to a recent buck’s party, the group chat turned to the age-old question: will there be strippers? After some back and forth (for the record, I was opposed), the groom-to-be stepped in with the veto. “No strippers!” he declared.His reasoning demonstrated a remarkable level of self-knowledge. He explained that he was planning on the weekend being filled with inhibition-reducing substances and didn’t trust his addled self to make smart decisions.In doing so, he gave voice to a basic moral principle: better to avoid temptation than to overcome it. From Mufasa to Gandalf – and the Lord’s Prayer – we’re told that while it’s good to be able to resist vice when it calls to us, there’s wisdom in arranging our lives in a way that minimises our exposure to vice altogether Unfortunately, that advice is nearly impossible to follow when it comes to participating in the market. Increasingly our decisions around what we buy come with a trade-off: the more sustainable, ethical, fair trade option or the cheaper,
In 2008, Sallie Krawcheck was CEO of the Global Wealth Management division at Citigroup. Her company sold clients what Citigroup firmly believed were low-risk investments. After these investments unexpectedly lost most of their value in the market downturn, Krawcheck felt that Citigroup should offer its clients partial refunds.
Her position, at odds with that of her boss and the rest of the management team, led to a lengthy debate within the company that culminated in her dismissal.
In an NPR interview, Krawcheck recalled, “If you’d asked me at that point in time, ‘Sallie, did you get fired because you’re a woman?’ I would have said, ‘What, are you kidding me? Absolutely not.’”
