“We’ve had some difficult conversations with men in the business about sifting who goes into the promotional process to begin with. Say you have 70 who are up for partner, 30 women, 40 men, then that is already unbalanced. At EY senior men have made it a priority to make the environment at the company a truly inclusive place to work, and to make the hard decisions to make that happen.”

Practically every company has an aim of getting to 50:50 – parity – when it comes to gender at the top of their business. But it is striking how tricky that is; we may have around 40 percent of women on boards in the UK now, but there are still only nine female CEOs of FTSE 100 companies and when it comes to C-Suite executives, particularly female CFOs, the numbers of women are stuck at 16%.

Alison Kay, Managing Partner for Client Service at EY, is one of those tasked with making true parity at the top of EY a reality. I was on a panel with her at the London Stock Exchange earlier this year for the 30% Club and was struck by how honest she was about “getting beyond the low-hanging fruit” on gender, and the grittiness of what she was doing to make parity a reality at EY. Here are her practical solutions on how to achieve gender parity and to take men too with you on the journey. A great topic for this International Men’s Day issue of the Inclusion Edit.

So where to start? “First we tackled the things which are not easy but are relatively straightforward to put in place such as mentoring programmes, policy changes around things like flexible working, and improving processes to create equitable outcomes.”

“The next phase was to ensure we were being as unbiased as possible when assessing performance. When I first started in EY sixteen years ago, there was less awareness about the impact of unconscious bias.  Assertive women could sometimes be described as ‘too aggressive’ in their communication style or criticised for ‘not speaking up'. Then in the same breath someone would say of a man: ‘they're very assertive and they speak well with clients’. That’s one of the reasons why we introduced independent moderators as part of our performance management processes. It was game changing in tackling the bias in the appraisals”.

When Kay started at EY 16 years ago, around “eleven percent of the partnership were women, now we are heading up to about 27%, nudging 30 per cent.”

It has not been easy. “Getting to 27% was a pretty big shift and I reckon we can get to 40% in the next five years. But not without some big proactive steps. The problem is that you shift the dial a bit and then you flatline, and you can even go backward, so we’ve got to shift again to keep up the momentum.”

What, I wonder, are the next steps? “Well, it’s the same with the 30% club, we’ve got to almost 40 per cent of boards being women but the Ex-co (Executive Committee) in UK businesses is still stubbornly lagging behind, we’re not really moving the dial there. We’ve got to turbo charge the interventions that we put in.”

Working for one of the Big Four, Alison returned to the data to investigate why more women weren’t making it up the ranks. “What we’ve found is that women and under-represented groups sometimes weren’t involved in the stretch projects, which meant less opportunity to shine in front of clients. We found that when managers come to resource a project, if you give them named CVs, bias was more likely to creep in. So we’ve switched to using blind CVs, which creates more of a level playing field, and a chance to shine.”

I say I’d read about research into orchestras where when musicians auditioned behind a screen and women were far more likely to be chosen. “It is the same phenomenon,” Kay agrees. “But blind CVs are a way of filtering out bias.”

Is there a backlash from the men in the organisation? “The reality remains that still seven out of ten of our partners are men. We’re only at 30% women. It is of course about having better conversations; this is not a woman’s problem to solve and we have many allies who are standing up for gender equality. We need to spotlight these examples and create an organisation where everyone can thrive.  In fact, research tells us that when we create equality and readdress the imbalance, men are more likely to thrive as well as women.”

EY is using detailed real-time feedback to change the culture. On all EY projects now employees are asked for feedback using software about how included they feel. This real-time feedback is sent direct to project managers, so their leadership is framed around people’s experience.

 “Are they feeling included, are they ok, are they stretched, or not? These are the key questions we are asking,” says Kay. “This is framed around people’s lived experience on the project. And then we use this information to coach our senior managers about how to lead change and how to do it in an inclusive, supportive way which makes women and those from underrepresented groups feel heard and included.”

How do male managers feel about the inclusivity aspect of their leadership being monitored so closely? “It is a key part of their performance, and the majority embrace it. For those finding it more of a challenge, we also provide extra coaching, education, and support for team leaders.

The final part of the turbocharging is the promotional pipeline itself. “We’ve had some difficult conversations when sifting who goes into the promotional process to begin with. Say you have 70 people who are up for partner, 30 women, 40 men, then that is already unbalanced. We’ve had some tricky conversations with the business to ensure we have balanced representation in the candidates that are put into the process because it has to be 50:50 of each gender going into the list if we are going to get parity of outcomes. That has been hard.”

Kay is clear though that the drivers for inclusivity in the company “are men, senior male leaders. You have to have buy-in from them for any of this to happen. At EY senior men have made it a priority to make the environment at EY a truly inclusive place to work and to make the hard decisions to make that happen. It is as much the male leaders in my team as the senior women who have made the difference.”

She sits back and smiles. “We all know it is the right thing to do. Truly inclusive teams just solve problems in more creative ways, there is a crackle of energy in the room – they produce great work for clients and I know we have won business because we have fielded truly diverse teams and that makes me proud. It performs for us and for them. It is a win, win. The right thing to do on every level.”