Women are bridging the gender gap in corporate world
Friday, 26 March 2010, 23:42 IST   |    1 Comments
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Women are bridging the gender gap in corporate world
Bangalore: World economies are increasingly hiring women and nearly 50 percent of the U.S. workforce are women, says a report by Bain & Company. In the EU, women filled 75 percent of the eight million new jobs created since 2000. Globally, for the first time in a century, working women coped with economic adversity better than men: In the U.S., men suffered 75 percent of all the jobs lost in the recent recession. The author of the report, Julie Coffman, Orit Gadiesh and Wendy Miller say that even after such good results, something disturbing happens to women as they climb rungs up the corporate ladder-they disappear. Women have yet to rise to leadership levels at the same rate and pace as their male counterparts. Women enter the workforce in large numbers, but over time steadily "vaporize" from the higher echelons of organization hierarchy. In 2009, only 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO . In Europe, women constitute just 12 percent of the boards of directors of FTSE 100 companies -25 percent of these companies still have all-male boards . In recent years, while women gained ground on gender equality issues like discrimination and harassment, they continued to struggle on gender parity issues like career development and access to leadership positions. As they try to balance priorities such as career-building and care-giving, often they find themselves slipping behind in the race to the top. While many organizations offer myriad flexible-work programs to help women return to the workforce, few currently have innovative promotion policies or growth paths in place that rejuvenate the careers of employees (male or female) who return to the fold after a break of few years. Increasingly, instead of languishing in stalled careers, women opt to become entrepreneurs. Every day in the US, 1,600 new businesses are started by women entrepreneurs. Women-owned businesses are growing at twice the rate as all other businesses . As the economy picks up, management teams will again need to focus on finding and keeping top talent-men and women. Organizations will find filling the talent pipeline difficult if they do not focus on retaining the female half of the workforce. In interviews with the human resources directors at 25 large European companies, Bain & Company found that organizations pay a huge price for ignoring this issue. Our research shows that talent significantly bleeds away when an organization loses a disproportionate number of women employees at middle and senior levels: Even a 5 percent difference in attrition yields nearly two times the number of men than women after 10 years. A 5 percent decrease in female retention, after 10 years, results in the equivalent of wiping out the benefits of increasing female recruitment from 30 percent to 50 percent. And most shocking of all: If one-third of the women employees in an organization go part-time, 50 percent more men than women will tend to be promoted over the next five years . What prevents organizations from retaining their best female talent and promoting them to top management roles? To understand the hurdles in the path to parity up the ladder, Bain & Company recently conducted a worldwide survey-in association with the Harvard Business Review-on "Gender Parity in the Workplace." The survey attracted more than 1,800 respondents, with nearly 60 percent in senior management or executive positions. While more than 75 percent of the respondents are women, men actively participated in the survey-often providing a provocative and thought-provoking counter-point. The survey results show that while both men (91 percent) and women (82 percent) aspire to be senior leaders in their organization, fewer women realize their dreams than men. While 66 percent of the men report that they believe women share equal opportunity to be promoted to leadership and governance positions, less than a third of the women feel the same. The survey findings and detailed follow-up interviews indicate that three major issues block the way to gender parity in many organizations

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