To Honor International Women's Day, Consider These Three Meaningful Steps

For last year’s International Women’s Day, I wrote a post about steps we can all take to promote gender equality. As March 8 approaches again, let’s consider what else we can do.

While we continue to make progress on the gender equality front and women continue to gain ground, there's still a lot of work to be done.

I noted in my prior post that, for the first time since the World Economic Forum started issuing its Global Gender Equality Report in 2006, the gender gap actually widened in 2017. Fortunately, the 2018 edition of the report shows slight improvements.

Instead of achieving workforce pay parity in 217 years, as the 2017 report predicted, we’re now on track to get there in 202 years. It’s not everything we’ve been striving for, to be sure, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Small steps add up

As much as my Monster colleagues and I would like it to be, social progress isn’t linear. It happens through leaps, starts, and occasionally even backslides. Remember that the women’s suffrage movement spent 70 years fighting state-by-state battles before women gained the right to vote in national elections in 1920.

To make 2019 a year of leaps for women in the workforce, each of us can:

Be the mentor you wish you’d had

Where would I be in my career if I hadn’t had help from other women? Without their mentorship over the years, I likely wouldn’t have enjoyed as many opportunities to grow in my career.

Although I’ve long known I was lucky, I didn’t realize just how lucky until I saw Development Dimensions International’s “Women as Mentors: Does She or Doesn’t She?” report.

Despite the fact that 67 percent of women surveyed saw mentoring as critical to their career success, a whopping 63 percent of them never had a mentor. If women are to become equal members of the workforce, then we need to do a better job of helping—and asking for help from—our female colleagues.

Use inclusive language

One of the best ways leaders can set a good example and model gender equality is to use inclusive language. By choosing words that emphasize the value of experiences or traits that are often diminished, we can help women see themselves in a more empowered light.

For example, compare the two following exchanges:

Employee: What does your wife do for a living?

You: She’s a stay-at-home mom.

versus

Employee: What does your wife do for a living?

You: She’s a full-time parent.

Although it might seem like splitting hairs to say “women who are full-time parents” instead of “women who are stay-at-home moms,” remember that work status is often the central pillar of a person’s identity. Other examples include saying salesman instead of salesperson, and people power instead of manpower.  

“How leadership speaks is imperative to the employee’s perception of themselves that extends far beyond the workplace,” notes Julia Rose, women’s advocate and marketing coordinator at Ledgeview Partners.

Build a “confidence blacklist”

Recently, women leaders at Monster were discussing various ways we support other women and the different strategies we use as women to empower ourselves. One of the tools my colleague Katrin Luzar of Monster Germany shared was called a “confidence blacklist.” In short, it’s a list of things she finds helpful when thinking about building her confidence at work, such as avoiding overthinking.

“Every woman has the chance to change things in her daily life for the better,” Luzar told me.

By keeping this list in mind during meetings and in conversations, it helps her to avoid behaviors that she’s observed in her own work interactions. Your personal list may be slightly different, but you can use hers as a starting point.

Gender inequality won’t be solved overnight, but we shouldn’t let ourselves get discouraged from fighting for fairer workplaces. We can all be more inclusive. Rather than undercut each other, we can build confidence together. Standing up for one another is what International Women’s Day is all about.

At Monster, we’re taking on that mission. Are you?