Despite the fact that women earn almost 60 percent of undergraduate degrees and 60 percent of all master’s degrees in the U.S., they comprise only 25 percent of executive- and senior-level officials and managers, hold 20 percent of board seats and only 6 percent are CEOs, according to the “Women’s Leadership Gap” report by The Center for American Progress.
According to a 2017 study by Lee Hecht Harrison, “Elevating Women in Leadership,” most organizations see this as a problem but haven’t been successful in fixing it. The study found that 82 percent of organizations surveyed believe advancing women is a critical business issue — yet only 28 percent of HR leaders are satisfied with their organization’s ability to do so.
Structural Barriers
AAUW researcher and author of the “Barriers and Bias” report Kevin Miller said paid family leave and child care offerings would make it more possible for women to meet their care requirements at home while also meeting their obligations in the workplace.
According to the report, only 12 percent of U.S. workers in the private sector have paid family leave through their employer. Further, women without access to paid leave are significantly more likely to quit their jobs after giving birth than those with paid leave.
Miller said equal pay also would help advance women in leadership. As women gain higher levels of pay, they are subsequently perceived as better candidates for senior positions and are less likely to take time out of the workforce, he said. “When a couple has two incomes but one is higher, the person with the lower income is more likely to take time out of the workforce to raise children or for some other purpose. By giving women higher pay and equal pay, it makes them less likely to take breaks out of the workforce, which means they will continue to climb ladders more quickly,” he said.
Miller argued that instead of training women to demonstrate these attributes, the focus should be on making sure that the environment and the institutional culture structures are what they need to be to promote women in leadership. “I don’t think the problem has ever been that women aren’t interested in leadership positions or higher paying jobs,” he said. “The problem is there are these really complex layers of barriers and bias that are preventing them from achieving them.”
Training Against Bias
Miller said there are many ways companies can proactively address the issue of gender bias. He said learning leaders should train to reduce implicit bias among employees — the tendency for people to have a subtle or sometimes even unconscious bias against women leaders. Learning leaders should consider evidence-based diversity training that focuses on bias and stereotypes to retrain people to instinctively think about not just men as natural leaders but women as well, he said.
Learning leaders can also encourage mentorship and sponsorship programs. Sponsorship is a form of mentorship in which sponsors share both status and opportunity. According to the AAUW report, this type of professional relationship has been shown to be more effective than traditional mentorship.
In changing workplace culture to address the lack of women in leadership, Miller said specific issues differ from place to place but the one thing that remains constant is the need for buy-in from the very top, which often consists mostly of men.
“Where we see faster progress is where existing leadership takes ownership of the problem and chooses to invest energy, time and money as needed to fix it,” Miller said. “Some of the solutions may be common, some may be specific to a particular workplace or sector, but it’s important to recognize that it’s a societywide problem and as a result our solutions need to be careful, deliberate, complex and multipronged as necessary.”
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