FEMINISM SHOULD BE EVERYONE'S ISSUE.

JOEL ON FEMINISM IN COURIER MAGAZINE’S FEMALE FOUNDERS ISSUE.

This isn’t a piece I’m sure I want to write. I’m doing it partly because Molly, my wife and co-founder, pushed me to. It’s not because I don’t have anything to say, it’s because I’m scared shitless of talking about it as a white, middle class man. Is it really my place to talk about feminism?

Until now, no one has ever asked me to. But it’s a topic I care deeply about. And, as the only male employee at my company until last week, it’s something I think about a lot. Feminism should be everyone’s issue. I also care because I believe that a healthier balance at all levels of business makes companies better places to work and also more successful.

When we started Desmond & Dempsey in 2014, we thought we’d sell a few pyjamas (mostly to our parents). Five years on and we have a successful business with a talented team of 11. Nine of them are women. Around 80% of D&D’s customers are women, while 90% of our sales are generated from our womenswear collection. Our wholesale buyers are mostly women and the team at our PR agency is made up entirely of women. The success of our business to date is literally because of an extended group of extremely talented women. I’ve seen first hand how that dynamic has benefited our company. Work is done with more discussion, thought and consideration than any company I’ve previously worked at, and the quality of that work is better as a result. Thankfully, it turns out that checking BBC sport to update everyone on the latest football transfer gossip, is no longer highly-valued in the workplace.

Yet we are lucky. This kind of gender balance isn’t reflected across the fashion industry. Lots has been written, by people eminently more qualified than me, about gender imbalance at senior levels of big business. Even if you put the common sense approach aside, there is a wealth of data that points to more gender-diverse senior teams outperforming their less gender-diverse counterparts on purely financial metrics. 

We need change. But a lot of the time the crucial conversations we need to be having only involve women. Molly gets asked regularly to talk on panels about feminism or to attend events celebrating women. I’ve not been invited to any of them, but I go to them all. Most of the time, I’m one of only a few guys there and I’ve never been to one where there is a guy on the panel. I go not just because I’m being a proud husband, but because I’m ultimately responsible for hiring our team at D&D. Currently, our biggest hiring challenge is actually hiring qualified men, but as a growing business, I think we have a responsibility to promote our current team and not see a dramatic gender imbalance at senior levels as we grow. To be clear, I’m not saying this to toot my own trumpet or to lament women for leaving us out. I'm saying it because whilst we have board rooms full of old white guys patting themselves on the back, we have panels of women sharing important thoughts that need to be heard outside of that room.

How can we change this? A good start would be to get more guys at events and involved in these discussions. We’ll probably have some ideas, we’ll definitely be able to learn something.

As startups, we have the opportunity to do this without the kind of bureaucracy faced by big business. Some of today’s most successful and exciting startups and VCs are owned or led by women and I think that over the next five years we will continue to see more and more of this. It’s my genuine belief that this is the future. Big business already looks to startups for inspiration in marketing and technology. It’s up to the young agile companies to show them how to do this when it comes to gender inequality.

Joel Jeffery, Co-Founder and CEO of Desmond & Dempsey.