At a time when the gender pay gap persists, and women comprise only a fraction of corporate leadership positions, the importance of gender equality can’t be overstated. Over time, a combination of hiring, promotion, and compensation practices has left some women with stalled careers and fewer opportunities for advancement than men.
Though many organizations have made strides in developing a more diverse workforce and creating opportunities for women leaders to break through the “glass ceiling” into leadership roles, there is much more work to do. By implementing effective strategies to address gender pay gaps and leadership disparities, your organization can create a level playing field and turn gender diversity into a significant competitive advantage.
6 Major Obstacles to Achieving Gender Equality in the Workplace
Though many organizations understand the benefits of a diverse workforce and want to improve in that area, they struggle to make significant and lasting progress. Part of what makes gender inequality in the workplace so challenging is that there isn’t one single cause of it. Factors such as organizational culture, how promotions are decided, recruitment practices, and the life choices available to working women all have an impact on the makeup of teams, right up to the C-suite.
To promote the importance of gender equality in your organization, you also need to understand the challenges you may face. Here are six major obstacles to know as you prepare to create change:
Gender Equality Challenge #1 – Recruiting and Hiring
Outdated recruiting and hiring policies are some of the largest systematic barriers to elevating the importance of gender equality. Particularly in male-dominated industries, it’s crucial for a company to position itself as an employer that welcomes female candidates. However, attracting a diverse candidate pool is only the first step. You may also need to train hiring managers to evaluate women fairly, ensuring that unconscious bias and gendered language are eliminated from interview questions and other forms of assessment. A standardized interview process and blind résumé reviews can also be helpful.
Gender Equality Challenge #2 – Internal Leadership Development
While your organization may already have a leadership development program in place, it may not be structured to provide equal access to growth opportunities for men and women. Many female employees indicate that leadership development in their own careers has consisted of informational interviews and feedback but little else. In her observations, our CEO, Lauren Herring, notes that “women are often over-mentored and under-sponsored.”
But what is sponsorship? Sponsoring is less concerned with providing career guidance and advice and more focused on giving employees access and exposure to senior leaders. In fact, sponsors actively advocate for the inclusion of an employee in innovative projects. They also frequently speak of the employee’s potential in front of other leaders. When women have access to mentorship and sponsorship, they’ll have more opportunities to apply for and attain senior leadership roles.
Gender Equality Challenge #3 – Workplace Culture
Within many industries, building relationships—internally with coworkers and externally with clients—revolves around networking and professional outings. Often, these activities take place in places where women may be less likely to visit, such as a driving range or a sports arena. While some women don’t blink an eye at a golf outing or racing event, others may view this as an unwelcoming sign. In fact, many women feel they’re missing out on career opportunities because of long-standing corporate culture practices.
Humans naturally want to spend time and build relationships with those who share their interests and point of view. However, this often results in a one-sided perspective and a detriment to business success. To ensure women feel accepted and welcomed in your organization’s culture, examine whether any corporate practices might be having the opposite effect.
Gender Equality Challenge #4 – Lack of Opportunities
Not all women aspire to senior leadership, but many are ready to lead and express their desire to do so. However, they don’t always know how or where to apply their leadership skills. If their current roles provide little to no insight into key initiatives, they’ll need help learning about new opportunities. In addition to sponsorship and mentoring opportunities, women aspiring to become leaders can also learn about growth opportunities via network events and employee resource groups (ERGs). All of these provide an outlet for ambitious women to make themselves more visible and vocalize their desire for growth.
Gender Equality Challenge #5 – Self-Confidence
In some cases, women may have the access and the leadership skills to fill senior leadership roles, but they aren’t raising their hands due to a lack of confidence. In fact, a Hewlett-Packard report found that a woman’s confidence in her qualifications has a significant impact on how likely she is to apply to a role.
Without negating women’s responsibility for improving their self-confidence, it’s possible they may receive mixed signals about which attributes are truly valued and expected in leadership positions. For instance, assertive or decisive women leaders are sometimes labeled as “combative” or “bossy,” which can create confusion about expectations and undermine their confidence.
Gender Equality Challenge #6 – Life Choices
Even if a woman is confident in her abilities, personal life choices might lead her to decide against pursuing a leadership role. In particular, the unspoken expectation that professional growth means putting in more hours dissuades many women, especially women who also want to dedicate time to parenting.
Gender roles vary in homes, but women usually act as primary caregiver and homemaker, regardless of their work status. In recognition of this reality, many companies have implemented paid parental leave and flexible or compact work schedules. As a result, women are likely to feel supported during life transitions and not penalized for their choices.
Strategies for Achieving Gender Equality
Just as there are many obstacles to achieving gender equality in the workplace, there are many possible solutions to explore. Here are six strategic initiatives that can help your organization emphasize the importance of gender equality, achieve gender equality, and maximize 100% of your talent pool:
1. Scrutinize Pay by Gender
It’s been more than 50 years since the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and 1964’s Civil Rights Act, which included Title VII, prohibiting discrimination in employment based on age, race, or gender. And yet, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy and Research (IWPR), women still only make $0.84 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts. The gap is even more significant for women of color.
Many factors contribute to the gender pay gap, including occupation segregation based on gender. However, experts agree that the wage gap is not just a straightforward matter that can easily be cured by women “choosing” STEM fields to launch themselves into higher-paying careers. And while occupation and job type might account for some of the gap, they aren’t the only factors. Educated women still earn less than men with similar educational backgrounds. According to data from the Pew Research Center, in 2022, college-educated women earned 79% of what college-educated men earned.
To tackle gender equality, it’s essential to grasp the scope of the issue by analyzing your own data. Examining the compensation data submitted in your organization’s EEO-1 report (submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is an excellent starting point. This review can help you identify trends and assess the extent of gender pay gaps across various roles and job functions.
2. Conduct a Blind Study of Performance Reviews
Performance reviews have become a cornerstone of the modern workplace. However, while they seem an effective way to ensure fairness, research suggests that performance reviews may be fraught with gender bias. To determine if women in your workplace receive harsher or even differently worded feedback than men, you can (with help from a neutral third party) analyze a sampling of performance reviews with names and identifying data removed but sorted by gender. You could also look at how performance review type may be impacting gender equality in the workplace. One study found that women consistently rated themselves lower on self-evaluation than men, even when their performance was similar, making self-evaluation a less reliable source of information.
3. Watch Out for Machine Learning That Favors White Males
A well-publicized gaffe at a major tech giant illustrates the critical need to evaluate processes to ensure they don’t inadvertently favor men in awarding opportunities. The company’s new artificial intelligence (AI) tool was designed to sort and score resumes to identify high-quality candidates among a large volume of applicants. However, as in any AI project, the machine had to “learn” what to look for. Unfortunately, the algorithm was trained using data from mostly male candidates. As a result, the AI tool “learned” that men were the preferred applicants, resulting in the tool being scrapped.
The Importance of Gender Equality in Leadership (and How to Achieve it)
Gender diversity in leadership remains an elusive goal for many organizations. Though women make up about half the workforce, their representation falls the further they climb the corporate ladder. According to McKinsey and Leanin.org’s 2024 Women in the Workplace study, women hold just 29% of C-level positions across corporate America. Women of color account for only 7% of these top-level roles.
The McKinsey Leanin.org study explains why women are so underrepresented in senior roles: There’s a smaller pool of women than men being promoted from entry-level to manager positions, resulting in even fewer women candidates available to be promoted at the next stage. At every subsequent level, the pool of available female talent is smaller, which perpetuates lower representation of women at senior levels. However, there are actions you can take to reverse this trend.
Here are five ways your organization can balance the leadership diversity scale and create opportunities for all employees to lead:
1. Find a Visionary Leader Who Sees Leadership Diversity and Success
A visionary leader dedicated to gender equality can imagine what’s possible for your organization. This is someone who can realistically imagine your organization with a diverse team of leaders who are also achieving record success in earnings, market share, and brand reputation. In other words, it’s someone who understands that gaining diversity is not a trade-off with winning in the marketplace. In fact, organizations have an opportunity to actually boost performance with more diversity. As Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsi, noted, “Most companies target women as end users, but few are effectively utilizing female employees when it comes to innovating for female consumers. Marketplace success improves by 144% when women are empowered during the design and innovation process!”
2. Set Leadership Diversity Goals
Visionary leadership must also put a stake in the ground by setting stretch goals for the organization. Sharing these goals and obtaining buy-in from other leaders can be a challenge, but it is possible, especially if you have strong partners to help you set milestones and track your progress.
At IMPACT Group, our clients get results through our Women in Leadership programs. With the support of professional coaches, HR, and their direct manager, women have greater support for excelling in leadership roles. Over time, we begin to see a culture change that empowers a company’s entire workforce, from executives to HR departments to hiring managers to female employees.
3. Share the Current Data on Diversity & the Importance of Gender Equality
As you set these visionary goals, you can also take steps to help others understand the importance of gender diversity in leadership. By analyzing employee and leader demographics, you can use real-time data to tell the story of diversity in your organization. For example, if 50% of your workforce are women, but far fewer women are in leadership roles, there’s a gap to address. Sharing this information allows everyone to see where the gaps are and begin discussing options for addressing them.
4. Tap into Job Boards for People of Color
Existing organizational practices can sometimes be a barrier to the advancement of women and minorities. However, you can identify these barriers by looking at where your organization recruits and the overall diversity of your applicant pool. If you recognize a need for more diversity, you can broaden your talent attraction efforts to include diverse job boards and networks such as Diversity.com, BlackJobs.com, iHispano.com, BlackCareerNetwork.com, BlackCareerWomensNetwork, and HBCU Connect.
Another area to analyze is your current employee development programs. What percentage of the people who are enrolled in your highest leadership development program are women and people of color? Determine if the criteria for those programs promote career growth for women. You can do the same for your interviewing and hiring practices, committees, and stretch assignments. Unearth diversity issues that have gone overlooked by analyzing your current practices.
5. Institute Manager Involvement & Executive Sponsorship to Increase Leadership Diversity
Involving managers and executives in leadership development efforts increases diverse candidates’ visibility. Keep in mind that an employee’s direct manager can be their top advocate for future growth opportunities or their chief barrier. To ensure it’s the former, pair diverse employees and their manager with a professional coach throughout their participation in leadership development programs. This third-party coach can help your managers understand how to maximize their role in supporting career advancement for minorities and women.
If women and people of color don’t have relationships with various executives within their organization, they’re likely missing out on opportunities for growth. Executives are aware of opportunities for new departments, new roles, or new products. With the right support, they can play a stronger role in sponsoring women and minorities for these opportunities.
Dig Deeper to Attract & Retain a Diverse Workforce & Leadership Team
Promoting diversity and the importance of gender equality isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s the right business strategy. And to get there, you must ensure all organizational talent is equally positioned to succeed. That means that women and people of color get hired, get growth opportunities, and are considered for promotions.
IMPACT Group helps businesses develop talent through proven methodologies involving a dynamic curriculum and expert coaching for leaders at every level. You likely already understand the importance of gender equality, but if you need assistance in achieving it, especially within leadership roles, contact us to discuss how we can help.
