In 2010, eBay embarked on a journey to bring more women into its top ranks. It found that commitment, measurement, and culture outweigh a business case and HR policies. Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Michelle Angier and Beth Axelrod for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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During the summer of 2013—about two and a half years after the start of a major effort to increase the number and proportion of senior-leadership roles held by women at eBay Inc. —we conducted a global gender-diversity survey on the attitudes and experiences of our top 1,700 leaders. The survey revealed some good news: for example, our leaders—women and men alike—consider gender diversity an important business goal. Moreover, we found no aspiration gap: women and men, in roughly the same proportion, want to move up.

Many of the findings, however, were troubling, for they suggested that men and women experience the company in strikingly different ways. A majority of women, for instance, felt that their male colleagues didn’t understand them very well, though a majority of men felt well understood by the women. Likewise, women were significantly less likely than men to believe that their opinions were listened to and more likely to doubt that the most deserving people received promotions. Finally, we did not see any significant differences in the survey results across geographic regions. Our gender-diversity challenges (and therefore opportunities) were global ones. We were both frustrated and motivated by these survey results.

But they didn’t necessarily surprise us. The company’s gender initiative really had significantly increased the representation of women in leadership roles. Between 2011 and 2013, in fact, their number rose by 30 percent annually, and we increased the proportion of leadership roles held by women every year. This early progress exceeded our expectations and showed that it is possible to make a difference.

Nonetheless, we believed that our demographic results ran ahead of the cultural reality—the numbers were moving in a positive direction, but the experience of women at our company wasn’t yet notably different. At the root of the challenge, we believed, was the pervasive mix of unconscious mind-sets, behavior, and “blind spots” that color anyone’s perceptions of gender. Now, with some wind at our backs from the progress on demographics, and armed with the data from the gender survey, we committed ourselves to addressing our cultural challenges.

“This is personal”

Even getting to this point took significant effort. Gender diversity has long been a passion of our CEO, John Donahoe, but it wasn’t something he could tackle immediately upon assuming the role, in 2008. The global recession and a business turnaround at eBay came first.

By 2010, the turnaround was succeeding, and John was keen to sustain it. In a competitive marketplace for talent, he argued, eBay should create a business climate where talented women could thrive. At the end of that year, he launched our Women’s Initiative Network (WIN). Although today this effort includes women at all levels, we began with leaders, defined as directors and higher, because we wanted to start with something manageable that we could do well. Besides, if you don’t have role models at the top, it’s harder to encourage women at earlier stages of their careers to pursue their aspirations.

At our first global WIN Summit, in January 2011, eBay’s 200 highest-ranking women met with our senior-executive team for three days of professional development and networking. At the outset, John went onstage and described, in quite personal and moving terms, why gender diversity matters so much to him. He recalled one of his wife’s more challenging career experiences and concluded, “I just remember thinking: my God, she has a tougher row to hoe than me.” He went on to discuss her career experience over 25 years, the issues she has faced as a successful professional woman, and how it felt to observe all this. John finished by explaining his aspirations for WIN and his desire for a more supportive, inclusive environment at eBay. “This is personal,” he told us.

Indeed, from the outset, John’s personal conviction rather than a conventional business case inspired our gender-diversity initiative—not because the case is irrelevant but because it can’t, in itself, generate enough passion and conviction to sustain gender diversity as a priority. Our company’s experience thus far suggests that a committed chief executive and C-suite are essential to telegraph the importance of the effort. When senior leaders engage with something, others are encouraged to make individual commitments, establish shared goals, and accept collective accountability. Real change can’t happen without a commitment from the top, because that’s where people take their cues.

Soon after the WIN Summit, John publicly demonstrated his commitment by proposing to eBay’s board that he be held accountable for the effort’s success. The focus areas he chose included increasing the number of women in leadership roles, reducing their attrition rate below that of men, and improving women’s satisfaction with their jobs and work. He also committed himself to mentoring five women leaders. (We should note here that we do not set quotas, which we philosophically oppose; we simply aim to achieve progress.)

John’s role modeling had a remarkable effect. About a year after he had taken on the goals—a year when the initiative was broadly discussed internally—he was in a meeting with our senior vice presidents. John was reviewing his annual goals when someone spontaneously suggested that they all adopt a similar set of gender-related ones. By the end of the discussion, all our senior vice presidents (about 20 of our most senior leaders) had agreed to include gender-related items in their annual goals. Later that year, we rolled out a modified version of the goals to all our vice presidents (about 170 leaders). These included:

o All open leadership positions should have a diverse slate of candidates and interviewers.

o Top-talent women, at every level, should have career-development plans and discuss them with their managers.

o Leaders should monitor the diversity of their promotion pipelines to ensure fairness.

o Each senior vice president and vice president should help to develop top-talent women by mentoring or sponsoring five of them.

o The company would continue to measure progress on our demographics regularly.

Why did we wait a year for this to happen? After all, we could have mandated goals right away. We didn’t, because we strongly felt that senior leaders needed to find and “own” their roles in our gender diversity effort at their own pace. John called this “meeting everybody where they’re at in the journey.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Michelle Angier is the global leader of eBay’s Women’s Initiative Network. Beth Axelrod, the company’s senior vice president of human resources, is an alumna of McKinsey’s London and Stamford offices, where she was a principal. In the late 1990s, she was a leader of McKinsey’s War for Talent project, which quantified the challenges that leading US companies faced in finding talented executives.