How to Recruit and Advance Women in the Workplace
By Wei Zheng, Richard R. Roscitt Chair in Leadership, Stevens Institute of Technology
Why Focus on Promoting and Advancing Women?
The presence of women in top management teams is associated with better company performance, including improvements in work environment and values, level of innovation, organizational capabilities, and financial performance. Though these benefits have been confirmed through years of research, as Lean In and McKinsey concluded in their 2018 report on women in the workplace, women’s professional advancement remains stalled.
In response, incentives to promote gender diversity have begun to emerge. On January 23, 2020, Goldman Sachs announced that it would refuse to take a company public unless it has one woman or non-white board member. Under a 2018 state law, all public companies in California face a $100,000 fine if they do not have at least one woman board member.
So what can you do to ensure that your company is taking effective steps to increase gender diversity?
What We Know About Increasing Gender Diversity in the Workplace
I systematically reviewed more than 150 published research papers on gender diversity practices (in collaboration with Drs. Yang Yang and Jasmien Khattab) to determine the best evidence- based strategies to help your organization make meaningful progress.
Effective Ways to Increase Gender Diversity Through Organizational Policy
If you can influence organizational polices and structures, these guidelines can help inform your priorities:
Most effective: CEO commitment.
Most effective: Establishing responsibility structures such as diversity plans, committees, and high-level diversity staff positions.
Moderately effective: Networking and mentoring.
Least effective: Diversity training and evaluations. However, organizations that have responsibility structures in place see better results from networking, mentoring, diversity training, and evaluations.
Effective Ways to Increase Gender Diversity Through Micro-Strategies
Gender diversity policies and structures are critically important, but what about other approaches?
“Women Just Don’t Apply”?: Assess Your Gender Cues
If your candidate pool lacks diversity, it’s time to check your cues. We may not explicitly think of specific jobs or workplaces in a gendered way, but the cues associated with a given environment, position, or task—including those associated with leadership—can implicitly suggest a better fit for a specific gender.
The Research
When a computer science classroom replaced their Star Trek posters with nature posters, female students experienced a higher level of belonging and interest.
In a study of job descriptions, when wording such as “competitive” and “dominant” was replaced with wording such as “collaborative” and “communal,” women felt a higher sense of belonging and perceived higher job appeal.
Highlighting the communal goals of a STEM job (such as team communication and mentorship of new scientists), instead of emphasizing independence, elicited women’s positive attitudes toward the job.
Take Action
Review your job descriptions with an eye toward using inclusive language and emphasizing communal goals.
Take a look around: are there visual or environmental cues that might implicitly undermine your diversity goals?
Design Mentorship Programs With Gender Diversity in Mind
When it comes to retention and advancement, mentorship is a powerful tool. It pays to ensure that your mentorship program is in line with your diversity goals.
The Research
Mentoring can increase women’s perceptions of their own capacity, the promotions they receive, and the proportion of women in management positions in an organization.
Having multiple mentors can lead to women’s higher work satisfaction, and having close relationships with their mentors narrowed the gender-based earnings gap and boosted women’s career advancement.
Women mentors helped with social psychological support, and male mentors helped with women’s career outcomes, such as advancement and resources.
Take Action
Structure your mentorship program so that multiple mentors of different genders is the norm for everyone.
Redesign Jobs to be Gender Inclusive
In traditionally male-dominated occupations, jobs that might be thought of as gender-neutral may be biased in favor of men’s gender-role expectations and life experiences. The design
of a position may inadvertently undermine your diversity goals by not giving women the chance to fully leverage their strengths.
The Research
Women tend to have lower motivation than men to enter individual competition, but that gender gap decreases under conditions of team-based competition.
Women tend to be less likely than men to enter into negotiations for themselves and tend to achieve less success than men when they do, but when women represented others in negotiations, gender differences tended to disappear.
Take Action
Redesign tasks to leverage women’s strengths in collaboration and teams. Creatively building in communal elements can make the tasks more attractive to women and increase their performance.
Create opportunities to utilize women’s talents in negotiation by having them negotiate on behalf of others, or frame it so.
Expose Everyone to Counterstereotypical Role Models
Increasing women’s representation and visibility in top management positions can help change explicit and implicit biases, for both men and women.
The Research
Seeing women in nonstereotypical professions or high-level leadership positions decreased both genders’ stereotypes of women, and increased women’s career aspirations.
Even if the exposure is temporary, such as reading about a woman leader, or unconscious, such as being exposed to media images of women athletes, women’s self- efficacy increased and their behaviors become empowered.
Take Action
Consistently expose everyone in the organization to counterstereotypical role models, such as women in senior leadership positions, women engineers, women professors, etc.
Underscore women’s qualifications and achievements in counterstereotypical roles within the organization, so that people perceive them as credible occupants of those positions rather than beneficiaries of diversity policies.
Reinforce Cultural Change
When it comes down to it, organizational gender diversity policies are indicators of a desire for an evolutionary shift in an organization’s culture. To make that shift—and put policy into meaningful practice—people need to be consistently reminded that gender diversity is an important goal.
The Research
When people were reminded of employment gender equity—the organizational goal of hiring more women—they were more willing to hire qualified female candidates.
When there is a diversity-positive climate, managers are more likely to select women as their successors.
Perceiving stereotyping as prevalent in an organization actually increased stereotype use, whereas perceiving it as non-prevalent decreased stereotype use.
Take Action
Build regular reminders of gender diversity goals into your daily interactions.
Nurture a climate of gender diversity through leaders’ explicit commitment and buy-in at all levels.
Take A Multi-Layered Approach to Achieve Gender Diversity
There are many ways to close the gender gap in the workplace. Intentional effort and an open mind are needed to uncover hidden cues that tilt the playing field. By deploying multiple macro and micro strategies, an organization can achieve a gender-inclusive climate that ultimately unlocks women’s talents, enhances their well-being, and amplifies their contributions.
Around the topic of gender diversity, what has your organization been doing that you find particularly helpful? What are some strategies that you wish your organization would adopt?