Why I’m still going on about gender equality

Shortly after I co-founded Business Women in Surrey with our local Chambers of Commerce we put on our first International Women’s Day event. Over 200 women attended, listening to (and relating to) the stories told by our influential female speakers. I discovered that my experiences in the corporate world wasn’t just a series of isolated issues, but instead that there was an endemic problem, and over a decade later I’ve been passionately driving gender equality ever since.

A lot has moved on in the business environment in that time, including multiple reforms, gender pay gap reporting, the Rose Report and more. There’s lots to celebrate and there are numerous enlightened employers, some are who are joining me in the UK's Best Workplaces for Women lists, but I’m delighted to say there are many, many more too. But before we celebrate too much, I want to take this opportunity to focus on why this is still an issue and the work we still have left to do.

Why representation is so important

Representation has improved, but women still only make up 30% of management and leadership roles in the UK, globally this figure is just 24%. Only 7% of CEOs are female in Europe. Only 21% of government ministers globally are female, limiting the power women have to make change.

This critical lack of visibility at the top slows progress down the line. Research by Deloitte suggests that for every woman added to the C-suite, three more women rise to senior leadership posts, and there’s evidence that female-led organisations have twice as many women at executive level than those led by men. You can actually see this concept in action in the finance sector, an industry that lagged behind others struggling with a predominately male power base, whilst Natwest, headed by Alison Rose bucks the trend with multiple female board members.

There’s now plenty of evidence that male hiring managers demonstrate a gender bias, a recent study even suggesting that when presented with equal-performing candidates, men were 1.5 times more likely to be hired than women. Women are more likely to be asked about their children or families, and are more regularly called on to prove their worth or staying power than their male counter parts. An analysis of the notes taken by hiring managers showed a difference in the language used between genders with significantly more references to personality traits in female interviews as opposed to qualifications and experience in male interviews.

So, while there is progress being made, it will be slow unless we fix the representation gap. Brian Klaas, author of ‘Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us’ sees this as a challenge of widening power as opposed to deepening it. Simply put, if those doing the hiring are similar, they’ll recruit more people that are similar, and the bias becomes deeper, diversity suffers, and the cycle becomes harder to break. Instead, increasing the diversity of those in the hiring seat reduces the bias, increases the recruitment of more diverse candidates, increases diversity of the business, and helps break the cycle.

What we can (and must) all do

1. Continue to take gender equality seriously, the work is not done yet.
2. Speak up on issues, not just the stats, and not just moaning about what’s broken but being part of the solution to fix it.
3. Pay particular attention to the hiring process, aiming to reduce bias. Increase the diversity of hirers and review your hiring processes.
4. Mentor, sponsor and champion women as leaders, be that internally in your organisation or supporting others externally. Remember every successful female leader will encourage three others.
5. Review your maternity and paternity leave policies. Supporting women as they start their families enables them to continue to push their careers.??
6. Increase your awareness of the menopause, removing taboos and considering how you might support your female workforce at this critical time in their careers.
7. Consider providing some support and awareness training around self-doubt. Mandy Green has some excellent material on imposter thinking that is useful for both genders.
8. Identify great female role models in your organisation and encourage them to share their stories, honestly and authentically (not the filtered Instagram version) speaking up on the challenges they faced, how they overcame obstacles gives vital support and encouragement to others.
9. Increase management and leadership skills training, across the board. Training increases confidence as well as competence, a vital step in encouraging women to consider themselves for promotions to senior roles.
10. And finally, keep listening to women, giving them a voice to share their challenges from flexible working to the bias they come up against so we can keep moving forward.

I’d love to hear how you are supporting women in your organisation, from your hiring process to mentorship initiatives. If we all work together we can break the cycle.