A German client of mine was complaining this week about a survey she received from the country’s leading newspaper. As the Head of Diversity at a large German multinational, she is the natural recipient of surveys asking how German companies are going to meet the 35% gender balance quotas that DAX 30 companies self-imposed in 2011.

It’s not the objective of the survey she objected to, it’s the assumption of solutions aimed at ‘fixing women’. “They are asking all the wrong questions”, she said looking at her options: a list of initiatives aimed at women: Did they have a women’s network? Did they offer coaching and mentoring to women? Were they sending women to leadership programs? Did they send their female employees to women’s conferences?

This is what the media considers “benchmarking best practices,” and they’re largely what American companies have been doing for the past 15 years. It’s implicitly assumed that they are the best way to achieve any kind of gender balancing in Europe as well, where companies are trying to figure out how to address the growing pressure for gender balance. From the DAX 30 in Germany, the Lord Davies report in the UK to the gender quotas on corporate boards in France, the Netherlands or Italy, the issue of gender balance is being taken seriously in Europe for the first time.

Yet as companies look at the combined impact of how women outnumber men in university degrees and the rising consumer and earning power of women, they’re increasingly finding that the traditional approach does little to help them realize the full business opportunities that gender balance can offer their bottom lines. In fact, because the surveys affect companies’ rankings on gender, which then impacts companies’ ability to recruit and their overall corporate image, the surveys may actually be preventing companies from realizing those opportunities.

Gender balancing a company ought to be a lever for performance, not compliance. If a company is to really get a strategic payoff from encouraging women in the workplace it needs to stop looking for ways to empower women so that they succeed in helping further leadership and HR practices largely predicated on a male mindset and culture.

Instead, companies should position ‘gender balance’ as a business issue requiring change management strategies led by the CEO. And it should make male and female leaders accountable for change, rather than blaming women for not getting promoted. This may not please the papers, but it will do a much better job of gender balancing your company.

So drop the women’s programs — and maybe drop the word ‘women’ altogether…