Here is a brief article by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for the Harvard Business Review blog. To check out the wealth of free resources and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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A German client of mine was complaining this week about a survey she received from the country’s leading newspaper. As the Head of Diversity at a large German multinational, she is the natural recipient of surveys asking how German companies are going to meet the 35% gender balance quotas that DAX 30 companies self-imposed in 2011.

It’s not the objective of the survey she objected to, it’s the assumption of solutions aimed at ‘fixing women’. “They are asking all the wrong questions”, she said looking at her options: a list of initiatives aimed at women: Did they have a women’s network? Did they offer coaching and mentoring to women? Were they sending women to leadership programs? Did they send their female employees to women’s conferences?

This is what the media considers “benchmarking best practices,” and they’re largely what American companies have been doing for the past 15 years. It’s implicitly assumed that they are the best way to achieve any kind of gender balancing in Europe as well, where companies are trying to figure out how to address the growing pressure for gender balance. From the DAX 30 in Germany, the Lord Davies report in the UK to the gender quotas on corporate boards in France, the Netherlands or Italy, the issue of gender balance is being taken seriously in Europe for the first time.

Yet as companies look at the combined impact of how women outnumber men in university degrees and the rising consumer and earning power of women, they’re increasingly finding that the traditional approach does little to help them realize the full business opportunities that gender balance can offer their bottom lines. In fact, because the surveys affect companies’ rankings on gender, which then impacts companies’ ability to recruit and their overall corporate image, the surveys may actually be preventing companies from realizing those opportunities.

Gender balancing a company ought to be a lever for performance, not compliance. If a company is to really get a strategic payoff from encouraging women in the workplace it needs to stop looking for ways to empower women so that they succeed in helping further leadership and HR practices largely predicated on a male mindset and culture.

Instead, companies should position ‘gender balance’ as a business issue requiring change management strategies led by the CEO. And it should make male and female leaders accountable for change, rather than blaming women for not getting promoted. This may not please the papers, but it will do a much better job of gender balancing your company.

So drop the women’s programs — and maybe drop the word “women” altogether.

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Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of the consultancy 20-first, one of the world’s leading gender consultancies. 20-first works with progressive companies interested in diversifying their leadership teams and optimising both halves of the talent pool and both halves of the market – the female and male halves. 20-first works with CEOs, executive committees and managers to build gender ‘bilingual’ organisations. The firm’s renowned Building Gender Balanced Businesses programmes and suite of online tools help companies harness the talent and market opportunities of the 21st century. Avivah is author co-author of the best-selling WHY Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution (Wiley 2008) and HOW Women Mean Business, A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business (Wiley 2010). To obtain more information about her and her work, please click here.

To check out Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s other blog posts, please click here.