Organisations Not Making Enough Efforts Towards Gender Equity At Workplace: Report

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Organisations Not Making Enough Efforts Towards Gender Equity At Workplace: Report

Since the start of 2020, the pandemic has disrupted the world economy and the lives of countless people with a force of historic proportion. A particularly withering blow was dealt to working women, with millions cleaved from the global labor force over a single year. IBM Institute For Business Value, recently released a report `Women Leadership and missed opportunities - Why organisations' good intentions are not good enough' In this report, IBV examined leadership ranks across 10 industries and 9 geographic regions. "What we found should set off alarm bells. Advancing women is not a top priority for the majority of global organisations. Employees feel "gender equity" fatigue over ineffective programmatic efforts to address the problem. And there is a clear need for new models of empathetic leadership," said Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Executive Sponsor, IBM Women's Executive Council and Constituency, and Senior Vice President, IBM Global Markets. "There are fewer women in the pipeline today than in 2019, a situation made worse by the pandemic," she said. Key takeaways of the report Organisations want to change. But most are moving too slowly. The number of women serving in senior leadership positions has barely budged over the past two years, with no gains in board seats or the C-suite. Perhaps most concerningly, today there are fewer women in the pipeline to fill executive roles than in 2019. Times have changed. But approaches haven't. Too many organisations continue to pursue gender equity and diversity using broad-based programmes that don't address underlying mindsets and lack a measurable path to value. Only 1 in 4 organisations make the advancement of women a top 10 priority. In a period when the pandemic has decimated many women's careers, relying on conventional approaches won't close the gender gap. Most organisations pursue incremental change. But leaders aim for breakthroughs. Organisations that see gender parity as a strategic asset are more successful. They outperform their competition on nearly every measure surveyed, from innovation to revenue growth to customer and employee satisfaction. We've (not really) come a long way, baby In 2019, IBM launched its first study on women and leadership. The goal was to see if the attention and resources devoted to supporting women's professional advancement had made a demonstrable difference in closing the gender gap. Despite increased awareness of gender imbalances, the lagging number of women in senior leadership roles has barely moved. The disruptions of 2020 brought renewed attention to the challenges women face as they endeavor to advance their careers, from the "second shift" that women work after their day jobs to the steep onramp many face when returning from a career break, and much more. These challenges are not new. Some organisations did step up interventions over the past year, expanding access to childcare and introducing flexible work programmes to accommodate women, who globally continue to bear majority responsibility for childcare and eldercare in their families. But the IBM survey found most gender-equity efforts move too slowly and, in some cases, are slipping backward. The sobering reality is that executive boardrooms and C-suites around the world look essentially the same as they did two years ago. The data indicates they comprise the same small percentage of women (8% for executive boards and 10% for C-suites) despite a heavy push for diversity, along with national mandates in a growing list of countries that includes Norway, Spain, France, Iceland, and Germany. Alarmingly, these low percentages risk shrinking further. Data indicates the pipeline of women needed to fill open executive positions has narrowed. Fewer women hold senior vice president, vice president, director, and manager roles in 2021 than in 2019. This contraction aligns with other dire statistics showing that women in the early and middle stages of their careers are most vulnerable to pandemic-related job displacements, with those aged 20 to 34 among the hardest hit. Without effective, immediate interventions, the loss of future leadership talent poses a long-term risk for organisations and for the economy as a whole. Yet, the events of 2020 showed organisations can move boldly when they want to. We keep inching our way, expecting breakthroughs Numerous studies confirm that organisations with high scores in gender equity gain not only a performance bump, but have happier employees. Organisations with the most women at the top can potentially deliver share performance and profits that are close to 50% higher than those organisations with the fewest, according to a McKinsey analysis. The IBV study found that more men who work for organisations with a higher ratio of female executives report being satisfied with their jobs versus men at companies with fewer women in top roles. These sentiments are all the more striking given that the survey was fielded during the stressful Covid-19 crisis. But despite best intentions, only a small number of companies are achieving these benefits. According to the study, efforts to improve equity and inclusion fall short in four ways.