While women are slowly gaining power in the workplace, they can only do so much in advancing themselves. Gender bias should be eliminated. Instead, leaders can focus on empowering their female employees.
From hiring all the way to mentorship, leaders have myriad of ways to implement support and empowerment for women. Women who feel empowered in the workplace have strong job performance and satisfaction and display heathy levels of commitment to the organization they belong.
Challenges that business owners have to work on when it comes to supporting women include:
- Equal representation – Women continues to be underrepresented at every level.
- Pay Gap – A study made in 2018 reported that salary of women is about 22% lower than the salary of men.
- Sexual Harassment – Women with full-time jobs in the corporate setting experience sexual harassment.
- Unemployment Penalty – When women take longer leaves, they have a more difficult time getting rehired.
Women Perform Better than Men
Women have skills to perform well like their male counterparts and they can succeed in all endeavors engaged in by men, according to the women movement organization Change for Equality. This includes areas such as employment, politics, academics and athletics.
Research has shown women can perform better than men in the workplace. In an article published by bbc.com, it was reported that when women make up more than one in three executive roles, profits are higher. The article referred to London-listed companies as subjects in the study.
In these companies, the profit is higher by 10% compared to the profit made by companies where women bosses are less than one-third.
This observation is upheld by the findings of Pipeline in a study they conducted in 2020. The study found that companies with no women with executive roles in their workforce generated only 1.5% profit. In comparison, companies with more than one in three positions in the executive level generated15.2% net profit margin.
And who works harder?
Women are more industrious and work harder than men. According to an article published by weforum, women work harder by about 10% compared to men although both genders accomplish 66% of the tasks assigned to them.
These data suggest that both men and women have the same accomplishment rate, but it is just that women are assigned more tasks and are more industrious than their male counterparts.
Gender Diversification Leads to Better Business Performance
Evidence shows that men and women complement each other in the production process and bringing in more women to the workforce produces larger economic gains. This is evident in every level – macroeconomic, sectoral and firm-level.
There are key benefits to narrowing gender gap including:
- Bigger boost to growth
- Higher productivity
- Bigger payoff to reducing gender barriers in the context of development paths
The Value of Diversification within a Business
Promoting diversity in business has good consequences but mainly as a safety net against downturns in a single industry. Diversification also promotes financial stability. Adding a new product line to your existing base is one great way to diversify your business.
If you need support on how to enhance diversity to eliminate gender disparity, spur business growth and maximize leadership potentials in your business, there are expert services available for that such as Bradley & Bray Lawyers.
One we can recommend is Mentoris, a business coaching service who stands by their clients offering tools, vision and clarity. To reach out to them, just click here.