In 2022, Phillip Morris International reached their goal of 40 percent female representation in management. They were also recertified as an EQUAL-SALARY organization, meaning female and male employees are paid equally for equal work, in 90-plus global markets in which they operate.
In 2023, PMI earned a place in the prestigious Bloomberg Gender Equality Index for the third year running, among nearly 500 other global companies committed to transparency in gender reporting and advancing equality in the workplace.
These achievements demonstrate an ongoing commitment to inclusion and diversity by the company. With these successes in gender equity as a foundation, PMI now recognizes the need to address ageism and gendered ageism to honor this commitment to their employees.
I recently interviewed Silke Muenster, Chief Diversity Officer at PMI, to better understand their approach and ongoing efforts in I&D.
Bonnie Marcus: PMI has accomplished much in the I&D space, especially in gender equity. What led to your new focus on ageism and gendered ageism?
Silke Muenster: When I started as chief diversity officer, I didn’t feel that ageism was a problem for us at PMI. I joined PMI at the age of 50, and I personally never experienced any negative feedback or comments. I openly talk about my grandchildren. It’s easy for people to guess my age to a certain extent.
This changed with discussions with senior women also my age who experienced feeling invisible and feeling no longer being taken into account when it comes to promotion, et cetera, and not really listened to. I think that was one element. Then the other element was our own data where we saw, especially for senior women, a gap in terms of their engagement and how well they feel included.
Then, of course, reading books like the one you have written, looking at outside research which also clearly shows there is an issue. I think that really made me change my mind and say actually it is a topic which is important to take care of. We had employees almost a year ago who were very engaged and very passionate about this topic. That’s also when we decided to launch an employee resource group on age and different generations. I think a lot came together to convince us or to help us decide to make ages also a priority within PMI.
Marcus: I know your company is data-driven. How do you measure the impact of ageism?
Muenster: It’s actually not super easy to do analysis by age because of the privacy laws at least in Europe. It’s very sensitive data. What we are able to do is look at generations and how well people feel included by generations. There we clearly see that baby boomers feel significantly less included than other generations. That is clearly a warning signal. The other one is, of course, female baby boomers feel significantly less included than male baby boomers. We see the biggest gap is between men and women in the top 200 senior positions with the women feeling less included than their male counterparts. Of course, that is also driven by the fact that in this group there are far less women.
Marcus: What is your goal in establishing an ERG focused on ageism?
Muenster: The ERG’s for us play a role in creating a safe space where people can discuss their issues. They are helping us create awareness and educate their colleagues. I think we need to increase cross-generational understanding. I think where we have to be extremely careful when it comes to ageism is all generalization.
Marcus: Do employees self-select for the ERG’s?
Muenster: Everybody can subscribe and everybody who feels interested in the topic and wants to help us bring this forward. We have a very clear structure for the ERG. We have a leading committee and always two co-leads and a sponsor from senior management. Very important. They define the vision. It is employee-led, but we give resources in terms of money or helping them organize events, make connections with other institutions.
We had an internal communication and asked for people interested in becoming a member of this leadership council for the ERG. We had a lot of people interested, and by the way, all ages. It’s really a topic people can relate to, and also men and women.
Marcus: How does ageism fit into your overall goals for I&D? How do you think addressing this and bringing more awareness to this will benefit your organization?
Muenster: We all know we need diversity and that includes age diversity as well. We always talk about diversity of thoughts and we need people who come from different angles. Age is one of the big variables. Therefore, if there are any tendencies that when people get older they don’t feel as included or welcome anymore, then this is clearly something we need to do something against.
We have to raise awareness. That’s also one of the things which we are currently doing. Really digging into the data and look from all angles whether we see that people from older generations are not treated as fairly as they should be. This analysis of data is always an important step to then change behavior.
Marcus: When does the ERG launch?
Muenster: The launch event for the ERG is a webcast for all employees when we discuss the topic globally. It is planned for June 29. We have the following objectives but please note that these are not necessarily final as an official mission statement is in progress; however, they’ll give you a good idea of the aim of the ERG.
- Promote intergenerational understanding between experienced employees and newer generations at PMI by establishing an ERG platform to i) speak, ii) exchange iii) and give back.
- Add business impact through cross-generational knowledge sharing and advising.
- Nurture people development (connect with younger generations).
- Overcome unconscious bias on ‘trained incapacity’ of experienced employees who may be perceived at times as less agile, less innovative, and not tech-savvy.
- Recognize and celebrate important career milestones across all levels of employees in an impactful and rewarding manner to motivate through small but memorable gestures.
- Facilitate preparation for a fulfilled post-career life.
- Support experienced employees in their physical/mental resilience and wellbeing.
Marcus: Do you anticipate that as the ERG develops you would have some type of training around this?
Muenster: The communication and training, awareness building, and education is for all employees always. We achieve results without a mandatory unconscious bias training. We have many trainings, but they are never mandatory. It’s always based on teams deciding themselves and raising their hand and saying, we would like to train. Especially when it comes to gender, I think the fact that we have made it very clear to everybody that managers had what we call aspirational target for female representation. And it’s up to them to achieve our female representation goals.
Marcus: When you have this type of focus, do you then look under the covers to see how bias may be affecting different hiring practices or compensation or promotion?
Muenster: Yes, exactly. We have equal salary certification. We look at promotion data, hiring data, attrition data on a monthly basis definitely by gender. When it comes to hiring, we have our talent acquisition team. They are very well trained. We do all the things according to the book, like having diverse candidates, diverse slates, making sure of any different bias. When somebody has dyslexia, for example, and they tell us before they get more time, because there’s always a test involved, they get more time for the test.
I think that’s where we are doing pretty well. The very interesting part is we have a process in the company, which is called like many others, talent review. Once a year you go through your talent, you identify who are your top talents and identify next roles for them. That’s where we always start the discussion by talking about the different sorts of bias. Then in the top talent review with our CEO, where I’m always present, I make sure to make them aware when I feel there is a bias.
I think that is still the best way to intervene if you have somebody in the room who is immediately playing back when they think there’s bias. There’s one person who plays this role. When you look for the next role for somebody and then someone says, ‘She just had a baby, I don’t think we should move her from one country to the other.’ Then you can jump in and say, ‘Can we ask her and leave the decision to her?’ Sometimes you are surprised and this happens again and again.
Bonnie Marcus, M.ED, is the author of Not Done Yet! How Women Over 50 Regain Their Confidence and Claim Workplace Power and The Politics of Promotion: How High Achieving Women Get Ahead and Stay Ahead. An executive coach and speaker, Bonnie is also host of the podcast, Badass Women At Any Age.
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