GENDER DIVERSITY

A Toolkit to Track Gender Diversity at Your Workplace

A free and open Google Sheet to help you track the facts

Know that gender diversity is good for business

Creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce makes good business sense, positively impacting your bottom line. Diverse leadership teams boost innovation. Research by McKinsey shows that more gender-diverse companies do 15% better financially and companies with greater ethnic and racial diversity have 35% greater financial returns. According to the Boston Consulting Group, companies with more diverse management, experience 19% higher innovation revenue compared with companies with below-average leadership diversity.

The commitment gap

I hear entrepreneurs asking me time and again for tips on how to achieve a more diverse workforce. I see many signals pointing to the fact that company commitment to gender diversity is at an all time high. According to LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace 2019 report: “87% of [US] companies say they’re highly committed to gender diversity. That’s a big jump from 74% four years ago, and 56% seven years ago. However, only 2% of companies have all best practices in place to support diversity in hiring and promotions.”

All of this signals a need for more action. Everyone wants to have a diverse and balanced team, but are often at a loss on how to turn that commitment into action. Here are 4 actionable steps you can start taking today.

1. Start by tracking the facts

My advice to anyone trying to build a more diverse team is to first and foremost start tracking your numbers. Be as objective as possible about what is happening in your organization today.

Inspired by the work of organizations like LeanIn, I worked towards these goals as the COO of a 100-person SME. Since using it, we have changed our approach to recruitment, mentorship, and promotions. It has resulted in an improvement of our gender representation ratio by 15%. Perhaps most importantly, it has meant that the leadership team see and discuss the numbers frequently; gender diversity is no longer an afterthought when HR and talent are considered.

I want to share these lessons and methodologies, so anyone can do the same. Gender diversity is a complicated, dense topic; I hope using this spreadsheet makes it actionable in an easy way for you.

Here is a spreadsheet I have made that anyone is free to copy, use, and improve.

Using this spreadsheet will help you do the following:

• Set objective definitions around what people should be paid: our unconscious bias often affects how we value employees on our teams. Included in the toolkit are salary scales and definitions to help you decide the seniority of an individual at your organization. You can set your own salary scales in this spreadsheet.

A snippet of how an individual’s seniority in an organization can objectively be determined.

A snippet of sample salary scales for any job role and any seniority within an organization

• See your organization for what it is. Just enter names, salaries, select a job title, and seniority level. The Gender Diversity sheet will auto-populate summary tables and visual charts so you can see how you are doing from every angle.

Sample graphs that will be generated from the data you input

2. Set targets and talk with your leadership team about how to achieve them

Use the toolkit to better understand what (and who) you need to work on. Some questions to ask:

• Is your recruitment process inclusive? I like this Harvard Business Review article “How to Recruit More Women to Your Company”
• Is there disparity company-wide? Or is there a particular department/manager where the disparity is greatest? If so, be fair in your assessment of why. Other than unconscious bias, maybe they are struggling to get more women to apply for the jobs they post, in which case go back to examining your recruitment process.
• Look at the disparity in seniority as well as pay. Are women not being promoted fairly, or can you do more to mentor women to grow into senior/leadership positions in your organization. I really enjoyed Susan Colantuono’s (CEO of Leading Women) TED talk about this: The career advice you probably didn’t get. Ask yourself about the advice you give women in your organization. Women are more often given tactical advice like “speak up more”, “be more confident” etc. Whereas men are given more strategic advice and insights about the organization.
• Hold open conversations, workshops and trainings for the entire team to discuss issues like unconscious bias. Every organization has a unique team culture and I balk at cookie-cutter approaches to these, you will need to put in the work to adapt or develop something that works for you. Here is an example of an unconscious gender bias workshop.

From the graph in the top left, you can see this sample company has a “broken rung” in the “promotion ladder” for women progressing to senior positions

Once you understand the facts, time to get to work.

3. Frequently share key metrics with your board, leadership, and team

Do not think of this toolkit as a one-time effort towards achieving gender diversity, it needs to become a continuous part of the conversation and a constant metric you work towards. Keep going back to the data. Look at it from every angle and get as many sets of eyes to derive insights and ideas around how to make improve them.

There are 4 key areas where they will have inputs on how to drive drive progress:

• Talent
• Culture
• Marketplace
• Leadership

Of the 329 companies surveyed in LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace 2019 report, Nordstrom hugely increased the representation of women across their leadership. It makes a lot of sense for a company with a women-focused customer base to have more women running the show.

4. Ask how you can best hold yourselves accountable to progress

Make sure your commitments to diversity are backed up with action. Decide with your leadership team early on how you will hold yourselves accountable to progress.

I look forward to hearing ideas from the community using this toolkit on what kind of incentives and accountability measures work best. Good luck!

Improving this toolkit

• I’m working on adding genders other than “male” and “female.” Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
• Track other kinds of diversity: racial, tribal, disability, whatever matters most in your cultural context.
• Let me know if you have difficulty implementing this, I’ll be happy to help, and make changes to the toolkit so it’s easier for others to adopt.
• Make suggestions on how to make this better!

I hope this toolkit will be useful for your organization!