Since setting up the Executive Coaching Company in 1994, Geraldine Gallacher (MBA 1981) has become renowned for helping companies attract and retain female talent.
With current clients including Deutsche Bank, Reckitt Benckiser, Viacom, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Geraldine and her team help organisations increase their board diversity and grow, what she calls, "gender intelligence".
For Geraldine, the benefit for companies to address the gender imbalance is about innovation. "I think it's really tempting to surround yourself with people like yourself. But I know from running a company, the best things happen when I work with people who don't think like me. The neurodiversity is the most interesting thing and having diverse teams leads to better decisions."
Geraldine's expertise is borne of decades working with an exceptionally wide range of businesses and industries. These range from automotive marketing (she joined Ford as a graduate trainee after completing her MBA) to fashion retail and investment banking.
Geraldine sees that there is a fundamental business case for gender diversity. "Having different genders in the room is critical. Nowadays something like 80% of consumer purchasing decisions are made by women, so it's just a bit short-sighted to run a company without proper gender representation."
This short-sightedness can have serious implications. A high profile case from November 2019 saw Apple's credit card run in to problems when it was noticed by users that men were being offered bigger credit limits than women. Tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted that he had been given 20 times the credit limit of his wife when applying for the credit card and called the card sexist.
Geraldine believes that while Apple hadn't intended for this to happen, the outcome was related to gender imbalance.
"Algorithms are coded based on past experience, and past experience has quite a lot of bias in the system. It's an example of where it pays to have more women around the table and had that happened, maybe they would have picked up on that."
Geraldine also feels that there needs to be a societal shift in the way we think about work to enable greater gender diversity. "We need to get away from thinking about work as being a somewhere you go to, and much more about something you do", she explains.
"We need to measure outputs rather than inputs. Being a 'successful' employee in a lot of organisations requires people to be there for too many hours a day. That is going to preclude a lot of people. If you want to have a rich life, then you're not going to want to do 14-hour days that have—historically—become a 'cult' of hard work. I think we need to move away from that and I don't think it's helpful psychologically for employees. It doesn't produce good work and it definitely ends up skewing the success towards the people who have support at home so they can be in the office all day and evening. It's just not sustainable."