"What are men scared of?" asks Natalie Wainwright, Groups Operations Director at Diamond Logistics.
Diamond Logistics has spent the last five years fulfilling the very objective of this year's International Women's Day theme - and truly broken the bias. James Evison discovers how they did it.
As a journalist, you occasionally interview people such as Natalie Wainwright. The enthusiasm comes down the phone line and her positive tone is infectious. After speaking to her, I felt upbeat, motivated and feeling like any company in the UK can #BreakTheBias – the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day.
To some extent, this attitude explains how companies like Diamond Logistics and Kate Lester, the founder and CEO – who has discussed ‘generational misogyny’ – have achieved the seemingly impossible: broken the bias and created gender parity in a sector where less than 1% of HGV drivers are female and 26% of women are employees, on average. It is cultural, psychological, and driven by management who truly believe and are passionate about creating a change of workplace culture.
The genesis
Starting at the genesis of this process, Natalie explained the long journey the company has been on in the past four or five years to remove the unconscious bias that can hold back gender parity – or even women taking a leading role within it.
She says: “Essentially, I was working in a male-orientated business without really thinking about the fact that it was male-orientated at the time, to be honest. Kate (Lester) had contacted me and I thought, ‘OK, female entrepreneur at the workplace and with women on the board’.
“And that really got me thinking. I thought it over and what a completely new and different challenge it was.”
This sense of radical challenge is enshrined in Kate Lester’s philosophy. Natalie talks about how Diamond was about “a desire to really empower women in logistics, particularly at that point in time”.
She continues: “We had females within the team, but we didn’t have any females on the board and we didn’t have many women in management positions. And it was for no real particular, reason. Again, I think it was just logistics is a challenging industry. Anyway, from an outsider’s perspective, I think because you don’t necessarily think as a woman, that logistics is that attractive.
“We thought, ‘We have to change this’”.
What were the barriers?
So, they knew the challenge and what they wanted to do. But now the big question: how did they go about actually breaking the bias? She explains how being a business that was expanding both enabled change – and acted as a barrier.
Natalie continues: “We started from within. So, with the existing team we already had, we made sure they knew there was career pathways available to them. And now this is a blessing and a curse, because we were scaling up and we were growing.
“We don’t necessarily have these pre-defined positions available. But we are agile and we’re dynamic, so when somebody is ready to progress, we can almost create roles for them.
“It encourages your team members to learn, grow and develop and encourages that retention. So, with those women that we did have within the business, we really encourage them to think about where they wanted to go: whether they were part-time or full-time, whether they had children or they didn’t have children, whether they were single, married; we cemented they had a place within Diamond Logistics.”
This internal work had a dramatic impact – but breaking the bias is also about the external factors, especially recruitment and looking at why women might not be applying for roles in the company.
“We rewrote our ads to try and encourage both men and women to apply. We said we can be flexible around the school run. You can work shifts, you can work part-shifts – eight to twelve, whatever you need. We advertised to our target market, both in terms of both men and women. And it worked.” She says.
Small shifts to great change
This raised an interesting point – they had the vision and the philosophy for cultural change. But what about those traditionally more male-focused companies: how do they go about breaking the bias?
She continues: “I absolutely think it’s a challenge for them because they focus too much – or that they’re forced to focus – on the way they currently are.
“I think small shift in terms of how you communicate with your audience is what draws in the team member that you’re looking for.
“But then equally, I think, particularly in big businesses, there’s a lot to be done internally around positive PR around the fact that: you can have balance, you can have it all in there.”
Journey not an end-point
Breaking the bias is also a journey and not an end point – and this was something that Natalie was keen to stress – and bringing men along on the pathway is critical to success.
“It is an ongoing issue. You have to consciously think about it going back to unconscious bias,” she continues.
“If you aren’t doing and saying the right things, then you attract the wrong people. And if you aren’t doing or saying the right things internally; you give people the wrong impression. So we have to be very careful and very conscious of the language we use, what we communicate with the team, and the things that we encourage them to do.”
This led to the development of discussing a topic which would work for both men and women – and act as an enabler for change applicable to all employees.
Natalie explains: “So, we started talking about shared parental leave. This is about breaking the mould. Let people know what’s available to them. Don’t hide behind the fact that women might get pregnant and have babies because actually the men within our business can go and take the shared parental leave for half the time.
“And, in fact, we had men take advantage of that, which is absolutely great. So, this has done us a lot of favours because you get respect from both sides. The men don’t think we’re just focusing on and championing women.”
“We’re getting their buy-in in terms of their support to empower the women within the business because we get them to understand that women are being left behind for no reason.”
Being truly radical
Shifting the expectation of parental leave and the school run away from being perceived as traditionally female concerns was critical – but what was the next step to breaking the bias? Natalie explains how there was even more radical thinking going on within Diamond.
She says: “We really did encourage the existing team members that we had, particularly with women, to move into, roles that have been traditionally male-focused.
“For example, in our fulfilment centre, we have a woman who heads it up. We’re talking about full lifting heavy loads, lifting heavy objects or heavy shipments and things like that, which, typically speaking in the past, you wouldn’t expect a woman being hands-on in that role.
“But manual handling guidelines are for everybody, not just men.”
And it was possible to even use a traditional sexist trope about childcare to break the bias. As Natalie explained.
“So you have to lift something that’s 25 kilos – how many of us have picked our children up daily?” she laughs, “So, that weight is no different to lifting a child. These are the small things hat help break down that unconscious bias.”
Sharing is caring
The other big issue was caring. Again, this is a role which women have traditionally had to disproportionately do and which the pandemic reinforced as women returned to home working and supporting dependants – itself a highly loaded term with a focus on children and not adults.
Natalie explains: “As the pandemic hit, I think it just really hit home how many different people we have in our business with different care needs in the additional requirements of their families.
“We’ve got people with vulnerable partners, with disabled children, with elderly parents, with vulnerable parents. And we realized the HR policies and procedures are about dependent care, but often referred to children, for example, having time off if your child had chickenpox, but not about time-off for elderly or vulnerable parents.
“But your families can be blended, your families can be extended families, you’ve got childcare requirements, people have young children, stay with grandparents – all these different things became really relevant during the pandemic and the dynamic changed.
“The thing that was really so prevalent to me was people didn’t know what support wTs out there. It was almost this weird, taboo topic that no one wanted to talk about: the fact I’ve got to go and care for my elderly parents or I’ve got a child with a disability. And what we did was work with these team members on a one-on-one basis to ensure they knew what support was available to them.”
The pandemic
The pandemic also unfortunately created a real example of why breaking the bias is so necessary in 2022: women found themselves reverting to traditional sexist roles, becoming primary, domestic caregivers. Diamond noticed this quickly, and took action.
“ I remember thinking at the time, it feels like the women in our business have gone back to the 1950s.” she says, “All of a sudden they’re talking about homeschooling and getting dinner on the table.
“And I’m not saying that just the men should do that. But where’s the shared responsibility? Where’s the balance with the children learning, and why?
“The women in my team were asking me about trying to strike a balance between home schooling and still earning their wage. Yet, my male team members aren’t coming to me and asking me the same thing? So we went through with an exercise with the men within the business and said, ‘Step up for your women.’”
“You can count them to do their jobs from home. You take over some of the home planning. And it’s really uncomfortable to say out loud, really, because they was a bit of a divide. And when that first happened, we nipped in the bud really quickly.
“And I think our team members personally, and in terms of work, are in a much better place now.”
The Glass Ceiling
All of these issues helped address gender bias at a company-wide level – but what about at the top table, in the boardroom? What did Diamond do in terms of putting it together and breaking the unconscious bias?
“When you look back on our journey,” she continues, “Kate definitely had it in her head before she recruited me, that we needed more women on the board.
“She was really passionate about it, but she was internally torn. We made mistakes along the way – for example, we went down the consultant route and had a female CFO, but that didn’t work out.
“So, we ended up with a male. But then, we realised it was around championing internal promotion. And I became part of the board. And we ended up settling down really nicely with Kate and myself and Daniel, the chief product and innovation officer, and Marie our MD. And we got there through some those hard learnings.
“And actually, if we hadn’t tried so hard, we would have actually just finished there. But because of our values, and because of the culture that we foster and promote internally, we were able to continue pressing forward.”
Succession planning
The finance director role reveals that, sometimes, breaking the bias can be tough – especially in job roles which may be skewed along gender lines. But Natalie offers a solution that she has alluded to with internal promotion.
“I think this is about succession planning as well,” she says, “We have an excellent financial controller who is female and South African, and she she’s very direct. She works totally flexibly. The other day I called her and she had just got back from a run. The traditional 9/5 day isn’t applicable – she’s got twin girls and a young son in preschool age, and so she makes it work for her.”
But Natalie is realistic that such flexibility can’t work in all roles, especially in the logistics sector – and there are limits, as she says: “That wouldn’t work in a fulfilment centre, but there are other things we can do to be flexible for those roles – it’s about looking at each role and area.”
Flex to break
So does she think that the traditional nine to five day is a kind of a barrier – and having a much more flexible approach to the working day is a really powerful tool in breaking the bias?
“No question at all on that one, ” she says, firmly, “Absolutely. I think that that is actually the epitome of that unconscious bias.
And what would she say to those men who say ‘why should I employ more women?’, especially those with dependents?
“What are men so scared of?” she laughs, “who wouldn’t want to have someone in their company that can care for their vulnerable dependants, be proactive and constantly learning, and be creative and flexible with their time, and generally multi-task all of the time?”