#EmbracingEquity on International Women’s Day and Beyond
"We will never make progress of women at the top if we don't change the day-to-day experience of women at all levels."
—Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder of The Huffington Post, author, and businesswoman
At impact.com, we’re proud to commemorate a diversity of holidays throughout the year, and today we are celebrating and honoring International Women’s Day with a global day off for all employees. The day recognizes the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women while also promoting gender parity and pushing for a world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination.?
A Shoe That Fits
This year’s theme is #EmbracingEquity , which highlights the need for both equality and equity in order for women to truly succeed. Equality is giving everyone the same resources and opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities they need to reach an equal outcome. A great example of this comes from physician and justice activist Naheed Dosani who says, “Equality is giving everyone a shoe. Equity is giving everyone a shoe that fits.”
Gender Equality is Unfinished Business
While there have been major strides for women in terms of employment in the past decades, with women moving into jobs outside of the home in ways that our grandmothers and even our mothers could only dream of, we still have a ways to go in ensuring both equality and equity for women in the workplace and society as a whole.
Gender equality remains unfinished business in every country in the world and at every level of government, corporations, and public forums. Despite the progress that’s been made over years of hard-fought activism, women aren’t able to fully express their agency, whether that’s in the workplace, their communities, or their own homes.??
The United Nations says the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030, which is a stark, sobering wake-up call that more needs to be done now. As Nobel Peace Prize recipient and activist Malala Yousafzai said, “We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.”?
In the workplace, this plays out through unequal pay, fewer executive and managerial opportunities, pregnancy discrimination, unemployment penalties, sexual harassment, stereotyping, and more. All of these have permeated societies globally for far too long and still unfairly hold women back.?
This discrimination also unfolds in the biases we all experience or act upon every day. Whether it’s a performance bias where we underestimate women’s performance and overestimate men’s, or a likeability bias where we expect women to be kind and communal, so when they lead or assert themselves, we like them less. Societies around the world have very strong feelings about male and female roles, and it puts women in a double bind of either being viewed as shrill or motherly — never competent and capable leaders, never fully themselves.?
It could be attribution bias where we see women as less competent than men and give them less credit for their accomplishments, but call them out on their mistakes. It could be affinity bias , where men gravitate toward other men because they're similar in appearance or beliefs, which cuts women out of the conversation entirely. Think about your last work trip and who was out to dinner or drinks for example.
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While we may think we’ve surpassed the misogyny of the past, the United Nations found in their Gender Social Norms Index that 90 percent of men and women globally hold pervasive biases against women, which is incredibly heartbreaking. These biases and ingrained prejudices, like a gas leak in a home, pervade women’s daily lives, and while they can be hard to detect, they slowly poison all of us nonetheless.
Which is what this year’s International Women’s Day theme of #EmbracingEquity addresses. It’s not enough to say women are welcomed in the workplace — we must discuss how their individual circumstances, or a general lack of resources, or how our behavior as leaders affect their opportunities and hold us all back from true progress. We have to take concrete action for equity and equality.
As business leaders, we have to provide strong managerial and peer support for the women in our companies along with more opportunities to lead and meaningfully contribute. We must take the first step: build a pipeline of women leaders; provide women leaders positive reinforcement; show them respect in front of their peers; refuse to allow them to be interrupted or have their ideas taken credit for; provide training and support for management in order to teach people to manage their biases, change their behavior, and track their progress; and address biases immediately when they occur. And do these things all year, not just during Women’s History Month each March.
And the benefits of gender parity in the workplace are well-documented. From boosting financial performance, increasing productivity, enhancing collaboration, and inspiring organization dedication, to mitigating organizational risk and decreasing employee burnout, women bring some of the most valuable contributions to our workplaces. On top of that, closing the gender gap can increase GDP by an average of 35% .?
Being an Ally
Personally, as CEO of impact.com, I want to be a dedicated ally in closing the gender leadership gap at my company and in our industry. Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In organization has a great article on ways all managers can support equality , from challenging our implicit biases across all managers including me, encouraging female leaders to sit in the front of the room, to providing growth and advancement opportunities, to asking them if they feel they are being treated equally. impact.com’s Senior HR Business Partner Larna Ebden also wrote an amazing, informative blog post on how we can all break the bias and support women in the workplace that I encourage everyone to read.
Continuing these conversations and changing behavior as a result of them get us closer to that finish line. I take a pledge today and encourage other business leaders to do more to #EmbraceEquity in their companies. We should all aspire to elevate women to an equal status in the workplace — because they matter.
“I matter. I matter equally. Not 'if only,' not 'as long as.’ I matter. Full stop.”
—Chimamanda Adichie, bestselling author & MacArthur Foundation fellow