From gender diversity to gender sensitivity coaching: finding new ways forward.
Christine Vitzthum and Judie Gannon report
Sustaining gender diversity has been high on the corporate agenda for several decades. For some organisations and sectors, there have been significant improvements regarding gender diversity at early career entry points, however maintaining gender diversity through middle and senior roles has proved to be a more intractable problem.
This is a challenge exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, when women have experienced an intensification of domestic and caring responsibilities.
Organisations have often deployed coaching to tackle and foster gender diversity (Bonneywell & Gannon, 2021; Yip et al., 2020). Examples include coaching to support women’s role transitions between mid-career to senior management stages or parental transition coaching to retain and support parents (Vitzthum, 2017). While these interventions can be beneficial, their impact may be limited by the implicit, intractable nature of gender diversity based on fundamental issues where, for example, gender assumptions shape management decisions (Baron & Azizollah, 2018).
The doctoral research undertaken by the first author (and supervised by the second author) explored coaching as an initiative to support gender diversity. It specifically sought to address the limitations of other research which have predominantly focused on clients’ perspectives, at the expense of other organisational stakeholders.
Based in Germany, this qualitative investigation researched coaches’ and organisational stakeholders’ approaches to coaching in support of gender diversity. Thirty semi-structured interviews (with 15 organisational stakeholders and 15 coaches) were undertaken using a critical realist lens to facilitate access to not only the participants’ subjective experiences and perspectives but also the causal mechanisms at play in organisational and social settings (Fletcher, 2017). The interview data was analysed through the use of reflexive thematic analysis.
Findings
The findings highlight that coaching in support of gender diversity has become synonymous with coaching for senior women leaders. However, this belies the fundamental complications of addressing gender diversity and may even bolster the binary male-female divide. In particular, the findings suggested that coaching to support gender diversity risked personalising structural issues – keeping them hidden and unaddressed, and creating a rhetoric that women could be ‘fixed’ through coaching to comply with structural, cultural and social norms.
Finally, the findings also identified that coaching to support gender diversity at times threatened to divide and eliminate the engagement of other genders. Coaches and organisational stakeholders expressed concerns regarding these associations and practices emphasising the inhibiting and dated ways coaching approaches may be viewed and deployed.
To address these shortcomings a revised concept of coaching with gender sensitivity was espoused, embracing a wider definition of gender diversity to integrate individuals with their numerous and intersecting identity categories in their socio-cultural contexts. Key distinctions in coaching with gender sensitivity include more explicit involvement with relevant organisational stakeholders, to ensure wider social and organisational structures and processes are imparted.
Key features
Coaching with gender sensitivity includes engagement with the ideas of belonging and uniqueness. Belonging has received significant interest in the diversity literature, where individuals try to accommodate tensions between wanting to ‘fit in’ to organisations but also feel alien to aspects of the organisational culture and norms. At the same time, they may also want to develop a sense of uniqueness and individual positioning. Recognising these concepts as based on a continuum offers the chance for coaches to work in ways that support clients’ complex needs and nurture their agency and personal development across organisational and social systems.
Organisational stakeholders: human resource specialists, equality, diversity and inclusivity champions and organisational developers, as well as other senior managers are pivotal in delivering coaching with gender sensitivity. By being more explicit about the intentions of specific strategies, policies and interventions, as well as specific roles and responsibilities, they can address some of the more hidden dimensions of diversity and inclusivity.
Additionally, as coaching represents a significant investment, they can maximise its value by carefully considering the intentions and purposes of coaching initiatives, identifying a diverse range of potential beneficiaries beyond senior women, establishing criteria for coach selection and matching, and assessing expectations of coaches. Stakeholders are encouraged to evaluate their involvement in the coaching process, their role in applying coaching insights to business practices, and the information coaches need to ensure their interventions are systemically impactful and transferable.
The development of an empirical coaching with gender sensitivity framework encapsulates the findings of this coaching investigation, incorporating the identified contexts, practices and implications of coaching with gender sensitivity and provides practical recommendations. The study furthermore contributes to theoretical knowledge by introducing the concept of moral anger (Lindebaum & Geddes, 2016) in the context of coaching with gender sensitivity. It explores how coaches’ moral anger motivates their engagement in gender-sensitive coaching in pursuit of social justice, while elucidating how they, in turn, can effectively redirect clients’ moral anger towards constructive, adaptive behaviours, and underscores its utility both as a catalyst for fostering political engagement in coaching and as an analytical tool for organisations to confront gender-related injustices.
Building on this enhanced understanding, the study delves into the efficacy of systemic coaching approaches (Lawrence, 2019) in coaching with gender sensitivity. It underscores the importance of considering gender as a dynamic social construct, with the research highlighting systemic approaches as particularly effective in navigating the complexities of gender contexts. These enable a comprehensive exploration of interaction levels, stakeholders, and structural challenges, aiding coaches and clients in identifying and addressing discriminatory behaviours and structural inequalities, and overcoming the limited approaches.
In conclusion, coaching with gender sensitivity declares the prospective for delivering impact beyond the individual, advancing inclusivity across the wider organisation and sector, and progressively contributing to social change.
About the authors
- Dr Christine Vitzthum completed her Doctorate in the International Centre for Coaching & Mentoring Studies at Oxford Brookes University. She is based in Germany and is an accredited EMCC coach at Master Practitioner level.
- Dr Judie Gannon runs the Doctoral programmes in Oxford Brookes Business School, which includes the professional Doctorate in Coaching and Mentoring.
References
- Baron, H., & Azizollah, H. (2018). ‘Coaching and Diversity’, in Palmer, S. & Whybrow, A. (eds) Handbook of Coaching Psychology: a Guide for Practitioners. 2nd edn. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 500-511.
- Bonneywell, S., & Gannon, J. (2021). ‘Maximising female leader development through simultaneous individual and group coaching’, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, pp. 1-17.
- Fletcher, A. J. (2017). ‘Applying critical realism in qualitative research: methodology meets method’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20(2), 181-194.
- Lawrence, P. (2019). ‘What is systemic coaching?’, Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal, 4, pp. 35-52.
- Lindebaum, D., & Geddes, D. (2016). ‘The place and role of (moral) anger in organizational behavior studies’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(5), 738-757.
- Vitzthum, C. (2017). ‘How can maternity-return coaching complement structural organisational benefits?’, International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching & Mentoring, 15(11), 44-56.
- Yip, J., Trainor, L. L., Black, H., Soto-Torres, L., & Reichard, R. J. (2020). ‘Coaching new leaders: a relational process of integrating multiple identities’, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(4), 503-520.