Moving Toward Gender Equity in Business: Is Your Company Up to the Challenge?
Policies, Reviews and Best Practice Guides to Help
The damning statistics about women in business, and especially in business leadership, are out there. In 2017, when Fortune Magazine released its Fortune 500 list, only 32 of the companies, or 6.4 percent, were run by female CEOs. Women in the Workplace 2017 reports, “Women make up more than half the planet’s population. But you wouldn’t know that looking at the average C-suite. In fact, only 20 percent of C-suite roles are held by women — meaning only one out of every five executives is female. … Women of color have even less C-suite representation. Despite accounting for 19 percent of the U.S. population, they fill just 3 percent of C-suite seats.”
Women in leadership positions has an impact that reaches beyond those in the top-level roles. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, the effects could have positive outcomes for all women: “For women, the issue of having more female leaders goes far beyond equality in the workplace. Four-in-10 of them (38 percent) say having more women in top leadership positions in business and government would do a lot to improve the quality of life for all women. An additional 40 percent of women say this would have at least some positive impact on all women’s lives.”
But, there is good news: The recruitment funnels and the hiring, leave and training policies that we implement and uphold at our businesses are malleable. Humans designed them and humans can modify, adapt and improve them.
B Lab launched the Inclusive Economy Challenge in 2016, calling on business leaders within the community of Certified B Corporations to take steps to improve their positive impact. The Inclusive Economy Metric Set was built into the B Impact Assessment (the assessment companies take to qualify as B Corps). While the challenge was directed toward B Corps, any business can make use of the tools, articles and free best-practice guides.
Participants in the first year of the challenge, which wrapped up in September 2017, set goals that included improving supply-chain screening, worker ownership, living wage, and — most relevant to the conversation about women in business and leadership — workforce and board diversity and primary-caregiver leave policies. The companies also addressed metrics related to increasing women in leadership: board diversity, management diversity and worker-ownership diversity.
An Example of the Role of Workplace Policies
Parental leave policies, in general, need to be reframed to support all parents and their partners and encouraging more equal co-parenting. According to an article by Nina Bernard in in Conscious Company, “As much as 40 percent of the U.S. workforce doesn’t qualify for any policy-mandated time off and relies on the goodwill of employers not to replace them should they take any. This typically leaves the most vulnerable workers rushing back to work within days of giving birth or being forced out of the workforce at a time when their expenses increase significantly.”
B Corp UncommonGoods, which advocates for parental leave reform, adds: “Without paid family leave, one in four new moms in the U.S. returns to work within just two weeks after childbirth. But newborns need round-the-clock care. And, as every woman who’s had a child knows, that is not enough time to recover. It’s also not enough time to form that all-important bond with a newborn child. Of course, this is also a men’s issue, because it affects the entire family. But when 70 percent of mothers with children at home are now part of the workforce, women bear the brunt of the out-of-date policies we have now.”
In addition, research shows that limiting policies based on primary-caregiver status doesn’t cut it. Take this finding, published in a report by Harvard Business Review: “Primary-caregiver policies are also counterproductive to employer efforts to recruit and retain women, who leave industries like tech at twice the rate of their male counterparts. Research shows that the more parental leave fathers take, the more likely mothers are to return to work full-time. Gender-neutral leave policies allow families to take parental leave equitably and are the better bet for employee retention.”
Reforming leave policies is only one piece of the equation to improving gender equity in the workplace. Flexible scheduling, redefining roles and career paths, unbiased hiring and employee-retention strategies, leadership and professional-development training, and more play a part and are within our control to change.
Companies Taking Measurable Action
Of the 154 companies that reported at least one measurable improvement as part of their participation 2017 Inclusive Economy Challenge, 39 companies increased the diversity and inclusion of their workforce, 3 companies increased the diversity and inclusion of their management, and nine increased the diversity and inclusion of their board.
Twenty-one businesses adopted or improved family-friendly policies, including caregiver leave and job-flexibility options. Five companies specifically addressed gender-pay equity (non-manager positions), and nine B Corps increased the diversity of their board (including but not limited to gender diversity).
Of course, a more inclusive economy isn’t built in just one year. So far, in the first quarter of 2018, participants in the second year of the Inclusive Economy Challenge have set multiple goals relating to gender equity, including: “We aim to have gender balance on our board of directors,” “We’re reviewing our current recruiting processes to successfully attract more women/minorities,” “We will conduct a gender pay-equity analysis,” and “We will increase gender diversity on teams where they are underrepresented.”
Tools You Can Use
Inspired? (We certainly are!) If you are, too, we have resources to help get you started. B Lab has created a best practice guide, “The Basics of Diversity and Inclusion in Your Workplace,” to help steer your company through getting buy-in from leadership on inclusion-focused programming, integrating inclusion goals into your existing strategy, creating an effective training plan for your team, and more. You’ll also find case studies from B Corps that have already made changes and implemented more inclusive policies, including the Business Development Bank of Canada.
B Lab has also gathered a group of relevant resources focused on the management of inclusion, equity and diversity. The page offers tools to measure, calculate and analyze diversity and inclusion metrics, including a gender pay-equity calculator.
What are you waiting for? Let’s work together to make a new paradigm of business — business that works for everyone.
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