Diversity, Accessibility, and Respect: the MAS Approach
MAS Holdings has been piloting an ambitious program of initiatives to increase diversity in the workplace, focusing on building the representation of women in management and senior leadership.
MAS has always been recognized globally as an industry leader in worker’s rights, health and safety, and ethical manufacturing. Placing strategic importance on addressing issues related to women, considering that more than 70% of the workforce in the apparel industry is female, MAS launched ‘Women Go Beyond (WGB)’ in 2003 as an inclusive women’s empowerment programme to make a difference in the lives of their female employees, their families and the communities around them by empowering those in the workplace and at home.
While there has been a tremendous amount of work done, to educate, empower and support the progress of women in the workplace, the MAS Group, driven by its shareholders and senior leadership identified the need to increase its representation of women in management as one of its key social sustainability goals and set for itself an aspirational goal of 1:1 gender representation in management by 2025.
Understanding the Need
There has been a recent global shift in understanding the business case for diversity. Key research organizations and thinktanks (McKinsey, Deloitte and the World Bank among them) have published reports that make clear connections between diversity in leadership and business uplift, resilience in times of financial turbulence and especially financial benefits of better connectivity to your target end user. When majority of the global consumer if female, having women in decision making, becomes a business need.
For MAS, especially in the apparel industry which is driven by a female workforce and being an industry catering to a majority female consumer, having better representation in management and senior leadership is an important driver.
Change is Courage
Speaking about the initiative, Thanuja Jayawardene — Head of Women’s Empowerment and Advocacy at MAS Holdings, “Increasing women in leadership is not only the right thing to do, but it also makes business sense. While MAS has always had very good non discrimination policies and practices, we are on a journey to identify what we can do as an organization, to actively bridge the gender gap in leadership. The gap is a result of historical reasons and ideologies firmly ingrained in all of us and if we do not actively work to change them, the shift in representation will not happen organically.”
Many of the barriers to women’s participation in the workplace seem unsurmountable; maternity leave and the uneven distribution of household labour impacts women across the globe, and Sri Lanka in particular is a very family focused context. That said, the most meaningful step MAS has taken, has been to adopt a problem-solving mode of thinking. We are growing our childcare facilities, providing flexible work arrangements, giving paternity leave and continuously looking at improving the infrastructure to support women and men to stay and grow in the organization.
If a company is systematically having one demographic (be it gender, race, religion, dis/ability, and more) drain out of their talent pipeline then that means that they are likely losing brilliant people. We wanted to look at the common causes of how and why good people quit their jobs and see what could be done.
The Long Hard Reckoning
The most challenging, and probably the most important step of the diversity strategy at MAS was developing meaningful programs to identify and address unconscious bias in the workplace. We’re all human, we all come to work with a pre-existing set of beliefs and assumptions, and the nature of the workplace means that we’re often exposed to and work with colleagues whose backgrounds and beliefs are very different from our own.
The gender household labour gap and the self-selection of women entering the workforce, both contribute to the gap in gender at a leadership level, but challenging preconceptions is going to be an important part of the work it will take, to closing it. That’s why one of the key arms of the MAS strategy is unconscious bias training delivered to every single person who has a direct report of their own. In partnership with the UNITERRA program, Gender Equality Advisor Stephanie Shea from Canada has been developing trainers for MAS, not only from HR or Learning and Development teams but drawing in champions from the business end, who live immersed in our core roles and understand the challenges of operations. These trainers work with their colleagues to provoke meaningful discussion, answer the questions it’s natural for people to have, and begin to start the conversation about how we can stand up for each other in the workplace, against bias, bullying, and harassment of every kind.
A Few Steps in the Right Direction
While tackling unconscious bias and socialization, MAS has also launched mentorship and sponsorship programs for women, focusing on connecting young executives and also women in middle management to leaders in the organization, to support, guide and actively push for growth and development for women. We are also re looking at; recruitment policies to combat biases and attract talent into job roles that currently don’t have a lot of female participation, communication policies and training and development structures. We have resources and teams deployed to focus on this work and we partner with global organizations to draw on expertise and collaborate on best practices. When asked about this work, Suren Fernando, CEO, MAS Group, had this to say, “Empowering women at work strengthens teams and businesses; communities and countries. I am grateful to the teams across MAS who have been leading our company in this journey, and excited for what lies ahead.”
We are working on many diversity and inclusion interventions at MAS, but we feel that a focused approach to increasing women in management and leadership is necessary, in order to address specific needs and launch meaningful interventions. We also believe that the work we are doing in this space will make us a more open and inclusive organization overall and also prompt broader mindset change in our communities.
