Some pointers that I've got are:
Unable to enter
- A number of sectors - especially automotive and industrial manufacturing, energy and basic materials, and technology - are unable to attract women for entry-level positions, so women are poorly represented throughout the talent pipeline. This problem usually arises from recruiting challenges or pre-pipeline problems, particularly the low graduation rates of women in industry feeder programmes such as engineering.
- Companies confronting entry-level hiring challenges can improve the health of their pipelines by making an up-front investment in the ecosystem of qualified female candidates and by focusing their efforts on achieving greater diversity in their recruitment process. To expose the root causes of gender disparity at the pipeline's start and to suggest solutions, companies should start by asking themselves questions such as these:
- 1. What would it take to improve pre-pipeline gender diversity, and how might we play a constructive role in that effort?
- 2. What quantitative targets could we track to improve the gender diversity of our recruiting pipeline in a meaningful way?
- 3. How can we maintain objective recruitment criteria while empowering hiring managers to spot and interrupt unconscious bias? As we do so, how do we make sure our lateral and experienced hiring programmes are also gender-balanced?
- Leading companies today are partnering with universities to cultivate talents early. Organisations such as Girls Who Code or initiatives such as TechPrep (launched by Facebook) nurture talent in early education, often at points where girls abandon paths leading to STEM degrees. One technology company struggling with diversity in recruiting used advance analytics in its resume screening process to identify and remove gender bias.
Stuck at the middle
- Failing to advance women into middle management roles is a common problem. Many organisation focus considerable time and energy on achieving greater diversity in the recruiting process, perhaps starting at or close to parity for men and women in entry level positions. Such gains, however, are often quickly eroded within the first few promotion cycles. The sectors experiencing these challenges most frequently include logistics and transportation, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and hospitality.
- Questions such as the following can help companies struggling with middle management promotions to understand why their pipeline abruptly narrows and how to unclog it:
- Which of our gender programmes, if any, specifically focus on support for early-tenure women? What is the utilisation rate for these programmes?
- How do we ensure that we are drawing on the organisation's full range of talent when making promotion decisions at the middle management level?
- How can we avoid incorporating biases into promotion decisions and thereby ensure a level playing field?
- Innovative approaches are emerging to address middle management pipeline stoppages. With the aim of ensuring greater gender balance in the slate of candidates put up for promotion, one company we know has reworked its job descriptions and advertising approaches. Another invited third party experts into its reviews to observe how it made promotion decisions.
Locked out of the top
- Companies in the third group are adept at attracting women for entry-level roles and advancing them into middle management but struggle to promote them to top level executive positions. Sectors that suffer from this challenge most seriously include retail and consumer goods, media and telecom, and financial and professional services.
- Questions for companies struggling to land more women in top job include the following:
- How can we counteract trends causing women to move away disproportionately from line roles and P&L responsibility?
- How do senior, external, lateral hires affect our pipeline? Are they diluting gender gains?
- Which executive men and women are using - and publicly supporting - work flexibility programmes? If none have done so, which leaders would be the most effective work-flexibility champions?
- Who is sponsoring and mentoring our senior high potential women?
- We've seen leaders grapple successfully with these questions. When the top team at one company took a hard look at the numbers, executives realise they were blocking their high potential senior women from advancing into top roles, by importing a high percentage of lateral hires, almost always men, for leadership roles. A course correction - simply applying the company's core recruiting principles and targets to external hires - helped clear the way for talented senior women.
- In another recent case, a business-unit head required his entire leadership team - men and women alike - to role-model flexible work programmes visibly, even if that meant working from home only preiodically. He also helped women on his management team to craft flexible work arrangements, going so far as to lure back a senior woman who had quit as a result of family concerns. And to encourage accountability, he carefully tracked and evaluated his team's progress against gender-balance goals. Within five years, the division had improved its performance in gender equality significantly more than the rest of the company had.
Yours,
Something Small Thinking Big
