An interview with Dr Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj

We talk to academic, author and keynote speaker, Dr Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj, about the challenges the gender gap still poses for women in business. Shaheena is a co-author of the book "Take the Lead: How Women Leaders are Driving Success through Innovation" (Kogan Page, 2024), which combines academic rigour with corporate expertise and features first-hand research and interviews with female leaders within global organisations. It offers strategies, insights and inspiration to help boost leadership skills and propel women to success.

Nicola: Today I'm going to be speaking to Dr Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj, who is an academic, author and keynote speaker. She is recognised in DEI, women's leadership and innovation, working with global leaders across public organisations, NGOs and top-tier businesses. Her expertise in transforming workplace cultures has positioned her as a sought-after consultant and speaker.

She was honoured as one of Inc Media's Trailblazing Women for Change in 2024. A prolific author and thought leader, Shahina has been a Forbes contributor for six years and has published extensively in the fields of family business and women's leadership, including most recently her latest book, "Take the Lead: How Women Leaders are Driving Success through Innovation" (Kogan Page, 2024). Shahina, thank you so much for joining me here today.

Thank you so much, Nicola. It's such a pleasure to be with you. Well, let's jump right in.

Research shows that female leaders and CEOs globally has stagnated at about 10%. It's not very promising. Why is this?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: It's a really tricky stat we're talking about. And of course, this is overarching. If you go into certain sectors and regions, then clearly the number is higher.

And in other areas, it's lower. We know that when we talk about women's leadership, particularly at Exco level, when we talk about board leadership, it is particularly challenging. And we then have to look along the pipeline to understand where women leave the organisation or why they don't progress.

And really, the biggest challenge that still persists is the culture and the challenges within the organisation. So the institutional barriers that we do really need to recognise and acknowledge that they still make it very difficult for women to move into leadership roles. I think when we recognise that and then start to talk about systemic change, we need to recognise that in order to get more women into leadership, this needs to be a very, very clear business imperative.

It needs to be very strategic and alignment with the business. And it really needs to feed into succession planning and human capital. And we can certainly see that in some parts of the world where there is a really significant push on human capital development and women are at the heart of that.

We look at the Middle East, for example, this is where we're seeing a lot of women undergoing training programmes. There's still a time lag before they'll get into leadership roles. But there's a very, very clear focus on building and strengthening that pipeline.

Whereas in other parts of the world, if it doesn't have that clear business imperative and that very focused succession planning piece, it becomes difficult to see that through. And I think what we also see, if I could just also pull back to research that is almost 50 years old by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, you need to get about 30% of any minority group in a team or in a leadership team in order to shift behaviour. That's the tipping point.

And so getting one woman into a leadership role, it kind of breaks the glass ceiling and it's the one and then done approach. But actually, we really need to be aiming for 30%, which we know has been done enormously well in the UK. 30% is the bare minimum, because that's when you really see the shift in conversations, behaviour, culture, decision making.

And that's really how you start to unpack those institutional barriers that are really still stifling the potential for women moving into leadership.

Nicola: Has the recent dropping of traditional DEI initiatives made it even more difficult for women to succeed in business? And if so, can anything be done?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: There's been so much said about the DEI, the backlash, we know that this has been a big area of focus, particularly because of decisions made in the US and then subsequently how companies are behaving and reacting to it. Again, depending on where you are in the world, we're seeing very, very different perspectives on this, which I think shows the level of complexity and fragmentation. And actually, if you take a step back, and I look at this almost both as a person who's had about 15 years of experience working in this space, but also from an academic lens, there's a maturity going on, there's a maturation in the field.

So when DEI first started up, so diversity, equity and inclusion, when it really started to gain traction, you saw a lot of people coming into the space with a huge amount of energy and wanting to be able to bring about change. It's almost like, you know, starting up a business, you start it with a huge wave of energy and enthusiasm. But at some point, it needs to move into a much more strategic approach.

And that's what I think is happening within the field, that it is becoming much, much more strategic. And I think we're seeing a shift from passion-led DEI to purpose-led DEI. When it's purpose, it's much more strategic, it's aligned with the business imperatives.

When it's passionate, people are trying lots of things, experimenting, building awareness, getting people on board, but we also know that's had very high rates of burnout. So I think what we're starting to see, organisations that are dropping it, they're not dropping it full stop, they are reconfiguring it, the language has certainly been changed. But for other organisations, particularly in the corporate world, it has become baked in to the way that they deal with decisions at key points in leadership development or career transitions.

So you don't actually need that separate DEI role or function because it is becoming baked in. Clearly, there are other organisations that are not at that level of maturity, and they're the ones that I think we'll see real struggles going on in terms of how they maintain and protect resources for it. But this is some work I'm working on at the moment, actually, around how you measure the maturity and then evolution of what organisations are doing around DEI and where they need to be paying attention, because it is far more complicated than simply running a series of events or calendars over the year.

And I think that's really where some companies get it, and some have really still struggled with it.

Nicola: When it comes to women fulfilling their leadership mandates and having successful careers, what part exactly does purpose and passion play?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: That's a really, really interesting point and a really, really interesting question as well. I think we often talk about women bringing high levels of energy to their work. It's interesting, even when you talk about purpose, because we often talk about women being purpose-led and purposeful leadership.

And there is certainly a point in that because women are much more, or can be much more holistic in the way they see problems, the way they see the organisation. And that's the value of the different perspective that kicks in. At the same time, purpose-driven leadership can lead to very high levels of burnout because it is about putting that 110% in.

The book you mentioned that I co-authored with colleagues, Take the Lead, I looked at a lot of different elements of research in there to understand why we come up with this terminology. So even things like purposeful leadership, there's nothing academically grounded that talks about women are better at purposeful leadership. It doesn't come from research, but it is certainly something that's come up from the business world in terms of how we see women.

So I think the point here is also we start to think about language slightly differently. So when we talk about purpose, purpose is increasingly being aligned with sustainability, with the values, the North Star, the guiding principles that run across an organisation. And you can only do that when you're able to step back and look at the bigger picture.

We know that women will take higher risks or push themselves further for the bigger purpose. I mean, that is certainly there. So when you align these two things, then you can certainly see women are more likely to be the ones who will push the purpose agenda within an organisation.

It can't just be women. You need men to be doing this as well. But I think what we need to also encourage the narrative to move towards is being intentional about where you're paying attention as a leader, making sure that what you intend to set out, you've got the alignment across the organisation and also working for your career.

So being really intentional about your career. And that also means being really clear about the energy you're investing into your leadership, both in terms of you as an individual and for the organisation. And I think sometimes we get mixed up to think you need a lot of energy in order to be purpose driven, but actually it's about preserving and being conservative with that energy.

So you could go into high performance when you need to, but you can also go at a more balanced pace when you don't need to so that you can perform as you need to. So I think we've got to start shifting the conversation around purpose into values, alignment in the organisation, but also recognising you've got to manage energy and even then to some extent resilience when you have these conversations.

Nicola: Yes. And when it comes to strategic leadership for women, have you found any intergenerational tensions among female leaders?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: I think the workplace now is a really complicated area because in some cases you can have the intergenerational perspectives, the differences across the generations are very, very strong. I don't think it's necessarily that it is specifically a gendered piece. Having said that, what I do think is different and more nuanced is younger women coming into the workplace have a better sense of how they want to operate as leaders.

They've still got to go through that curve of understanding the workplace, thinking about their own career path as well, but they have a better sense of what leadership looks like, how they want it to be. Also a more collaborative space in terms of really supporting each other and providing connections to each other. And I think clearly that comes from a number of reasons.

So from the work I've done, from companies I've worked with, from conversations I've had, there's sometimes a pushback from generations coming in who look at older women who might be in their 40s, 50s, possibly even 60s and look at them and say, I get why they've done what they've done, but I don't necessarily want to have that model of leadership or I don't want to have to make sacrifices my mother made or what I see these women making in the workplace.

And I think that's where the wider conversations about the work culture, the benefits within balancing work, balancing what their personal desires or requirements are, those become really valid conversations. At the same time though, as they move through the workplace, they're still seeing that some of those barriers that they thought had been lifted, they are pretty much still there. And that's really when you see the value of women really providing support to each other as they move along the pipeline.

I coined a phrase, building platforms, not pedestals. So we need so many more women in leadership roles, so much diversity of women in leadership roles, women who are very experienced to women who are recently in the workplace, but demonstrating leadership potential because you need to look at the widest range of what makes a role model and build composite role models so women can look at these diverse groups and say, actually, I can pull bits of these women and feel that there's a place for me in a leadership role.

Nicola: In terms of the challenges that women face, you've referenced this as a double bind previously. Can you unpack that?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: That's a great question. The double bind is a concept that's been around for about 40 years, but actually it still hasn't got better. It's actually got worse.

And when we talk about the double bind, it's really the paradoxical situation where women are expected to demonstrate leadership qualities and capabilities, but still behave in a very feminised way. So when we think about the language that's used, where a male leader will be described as strong and decisive, the female leader will be described as aggressive. Where a male leader might be described as assertive, his female counterpart will be described as pushy.

Where he might be described as disciplined, she might be described as selfish. The research shows individuals who are doing exactly the same actions, activities, when they are assessed by their peers, even by HR in appraisals, the language that's used for them is very different. So through that lens, the actions women take as leaders in order to get their jobs done, the way it's perceived undermines their capabilities.

When women behave in the way they need to behave as leaders, it undermines their credibility as strong leaders. And so this is where it becomes really difficult. And this is something I've recently brought up again in a Forbes article I wrote, because you would assume by now with the amount of education awareness, all the work that's been done in the space of women's leadership, that these will have been areas that have managed to erode over time.

And again, a lot of it is societal. It's very cultural as well. But we're actually seeing a resurgence of this, particularly when you've got very polarising views coming about the roles of men, the roles of women in society, and then attitudes towards them.

When I look for the spark of light in this, and there is something really positive, it's about if we focus more time on leadership capabilities, and we're very, very clear on what leadership capabilities are needed today, in order to deal with the highly turbulent and volatile environment we're in, then as you focus on the capabilities, it doesn't matter whether these come from a male or a female leader, and you remove the labels of feminised or masculine leadership, but you're really focussing on those leadership capabilities and the body in which it's in becomes irrelevant.

Nicola: Yes, it's something that we don't really like to admit still exists, but it does. Do you find that there are certain parts of the world or certain types of organisations where that attitude is more prevalent?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: Yes, it does, where you have fewer women in leadership roles and less exposure to women in senior roles, leadership roles, decision making roles. Now, actually, what we're seeing at the moment is there's more pushback around this, and female leaders are experiencing more pushback globally. We're even seeing it in Western Europe, we're seeing it in North America, as a result of the attitudes, the behaviours linked to the D&I backlash that we talked about earlier.

But where you have sufficient normalisation of women in leadership roles, and this, I think, really comes down to sectors and companies, you start to see a different behaviour and attitude. And again, linking back to what we talked about earlier, this is where when you've got that 30%, that tipping point, you start to normalise the behaviour and the understanding of what good female leadership looks like. So it is a journey.

We're seeing certain parts of the world are certainly moving out of that space. But I think rather than trying to address it by region, I think what I've seen from my work globally, and I've done work across 53 countries on women's leadership, it's actually the macro environment, the regional environment does play a part in terms of cultural norms. But that is changing when you've got a lot more women going through education.

And that really starts to shift the needle. But where you see the challenges, it's really in the sector. So if you think about very male dominated sectors, and one of the strongest ones is still the energy sector, oil and gas mining, where you don't have enough women and a track record of women in leadership roles, that's where it's particularly difficult.

We've seen huge strides in banking and finance, the huge improvements there, not so much in private equity. We've also seen some really, really big strides in technology. There's still a long way to go.

But some of these organisations that had struggled have got better. But I'm hesitating as I'm saying this, because we're also seeing even in the tech sector, we clearly have seen the emergence of the re-emergence of the bro culture kicking in with some of the companies. So again, the big message here is progress can be made, but it's not taken for granted.

There's sometimes two steps forward, one step back, and you have to keep working at it until it's really embedded in the culture of the organisation.

Nicola: You've delivered programmes impacting nearly 300 women in Europe and across the GCC region in recent years. Are women optimistic that they can be the agents of change that we need in these complex times?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: Yes, but there is a caveat to it. So the programmes I deliver, the way in which they're delivered and designed is very intentional. Because the first thing I do in the programmes is to actually set out the barriers.

So we've just talked about the double bind. There are lots of other barriers that we know women face, but biases, double bind really are at the heart of most of the attitudes and the behaviours. And laying out the institutional barriers is absolutely necessary because it allows the women to recognise a couple of things.

First of all, when they are pushed back or when they don't get the career advancement they're expecting, it's not about them. It's not them. It's not about their levels of confidence, which has been the dominant conversation that you need to be more confident, you need to be more assertive.

And that's incredibly hard to do when you just keep getting that message and you're trying it and you're still not progressing. So being able to understand the barriers, understand that these are institutional, they're not, it's not about you per se, that's a really big one. The second point is once you know what the barriers are, you then start to develop the tools to navigate around them.

And in the book, when we wrote the book, Take the Lead, we used the idea of a ship. We developed the leadership campus as a boat. Because again, if you know that boat's heading into a difficult weather storm or there's a, I don't know, there's something that's going to cause a collision, you don't keep going in that way.

You navigate around it. And that's the immense strength women actually do have. And I've had it for a very long time because of all the other things that go on in their careers.

Whether it's having kids or looking after family members and so on and so forth, you learn to become more agile and navigate around things. So calling out the barriers is a really important part. It shifts the narrative from waiting to be saved.

So I talk a lot about the Cinderella syndrome, for example. Rather than waiting to be saved, waiting to be seen as the person who's got leadership potential and a great team player, the sense of agency becomes more of an onus for them. They may get promoted, but with all the biases you work through, you also have to put yourself out there and ensure that people see you at your best.

And I can tell you almost, almost consistently, I have seen the women really take what they're learning in the programme, applying it, and you just, you see them running with this and really understanding how they're able to position themselves into a stronger position of strength.

Nicola: As you continue your support for women in leadership roles, what's in the pipeline for the remainder of the year?

Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj: So I work within a triangle of innovation, diversity and leadership, and clearly in the diversity space, women feature very, very heavily. And I'm exploring these areas in more detail, but unpacking them a bit more. So I'm really keen to look at how we strengthen innovative behaviour in organisations through collective intelligence, having more cognitive diversity, different groups coming together.

And particularly today, when there is so much polarisation and it is harder for diverse populations to even be together, the workplace is still really fundamentally important in terms of bringing diversity and using that as a baseline to get to really good quality innovation. So innovation is a really big area for me. My other areas around women in leadership, strengthening the work I do on evidence-based approaches to be able to demonstrate change.

For me, data is absolutely sacred when you talk about bringing about change, ensuring that DE&I initiatives really bed down within organisations. And even for women, I'm a big fan of looking at the language, the behaviour that surrounds women in leadership and challenging assumptions, challenging myths that become normalised and internalised for women when often there isn't the evidence behind it. And we had that example earlier when we talked about purpose-driven leadership.

And then my final one, this is the one that I'm really close to my heart, finding a way to get more women into that mindset of platforms, not pedestals. So finding ways and enabling women to actually create even stronger connections with each other and seeing each other as huge allies. Women benefit from having men as allies, men who are in senior leadership roles, but as more women move into senior leadership roles, their role to be bringing more women forward becomes absolutely critical.

And I'm working and developing projects with really interesting groups that are really focussing on that connectivity and supporting women. And that's really where for me, that is a combination of passion, but with a very clear alignment of purpose as well.

Nicola: Shaheena, thank you for all the work that you're doing to help support women and for taking the time out today to join me for this conversation.