Uschi Schreiber has long been a champion for gender equality. So it's not surprising perhaps that she's dismissive of Google software engineer James Damore's infamous 10-page memo in which he argued the view that women are less suited to coding jobs than men are due to unique feminine traits including "neuroticism".
It's not that EY's global vice-chair of markets isn't concerned such views exist, but rather that such views expressing "deeply held biases" shouldn't be given legitimacy.
"That memo was just an expression by just one guy of a lot of views that are not often [publicly] expressed," says Schreiber, who is based in New York but will be coming to Melbourne in November to speak at the C2 conference.
After six years in Montreal, Melbourne will host a C2 event on November 30 to December 1, pulling in some of business world's most creative minds to hear speakers, including Schreiber, who sits on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council.
"That's why there are pay gaps. That's why we have so few women at CEO level. That's why we have so few woman in senior leadership roles."
The memo led to Damore being fired by Google's CEO Sundar Pichai. And Damore, who argues it is free speech, has now mounted an unfair dismissal case against Google.
"Do I think it's unfortunate that this is a view he holds? Absolutely," Schreiber says.
"But do I think that it's fundamentally going to set us back? No. Because it's one guy and I think the real barriers we are facing as woman are much more systemic. And in some ways this gives expression to it."
She says business and government need to continue to challenge attitudes around gender.
"At a time when you have so many other issues swamping the agenda, it's really important," she says, noting that other big issues like geopolitical uncertainty and technology disruption will be debated at the C2 conference.
"A lot of the discussion that will take place at C2 is about what the future will look like," she says.
"We're trying to solve problems here that we have not yet fully grasped ... which means that we need men and women at the table; we need younger people and older people at the table, and we need people from different cultural backgrounds.
"It [the future] is not going to be an environment in which it's business as usual with lots of middle-aged white men running the show."
Globally and locally the corporate landscape still lacks diversity.
The World Economic Forum's gender pay gap report forecasts it will take about 170 years to close the pay gap between men and women.
In Australia, there's still 13 companies on the ASX 200 that have no female directors, and now, less than 10 female CEOs.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors' voluntary target of at least 30 per cent women on boards by 2018 isn't going to be met.
The sky meetings at the C2 Montreal business conference, which is coming to Melbourne later this year. July 2017. Photo: Supplied Photo: Supplied
But Schreiber says Australians aren't overall accepting of quotas and there would be a public backlash.
"We know that quotas work in societies where people actually believe that they can work," she says.
"If you set quotas in a society where people think it will given an unfair advantage to women, I don't think it's going to work.
"I think the backlash is greater than the advantage of it."
Schreiber advocates powering on and doing the very things that Damore questioned as legitimate in his memo.
"It is very much about recruitment processes, making sure that, for example, on interview panels you have at least one, preferably more, women in order to look at [interview] candidates," she says.
"It is about challenging unconscious bias ... be that in the process of recruitment or in the process of rating performance.
"We know that the tone from the top really matters. If people at the C-suite level don't challenge thinking around gender, unconscious bias will prevail.
"It is about setting [diversity] targets within an organisation."
Much more also needs to be done to encourage women into STEM, she says.
In Sweden they are teaching educators to avoid early stereotypes of what boys and girls can do, or should act like, she says.
Fairfax Media is media partner of C2 Melbourne
