Keep Competitive: Making Gender Equity a Part of Your Economic Goals

Women make up 49.5 percent of the world’s population. They represent just nearly half the smarts, talents and possibilities available. You need to bank on the entire talent pool equitably to maximize the growth of your company.

Making gender equity a part of your economic goals can help you better prepare yourself for upcoming company growth and ensure your brand remains competitive in an ever-changing marketplace.

How Gender Equity Helps Your Business

Gender equity is good for business. Regardless of your stance on gender equity as a social issue, the facts show gender equity makes smart business sense when you view it through the lens of financial outcomes.

Profits

– Women in management leads to a 19-percent higher return on equity and 9-percent higher dividend payments
– Boards with a higher number of women are shown to make more “contentious, thorough and comprehensive” decisions and are “less likely to be characterized by acquiescence, rapid consensus or groupthink”
– An increase in corporate leadership to 30-percent female share is associated with a 1-percent increase in net margin, which translates to a 15-percent increase in profitability for a typical firm
– For every 7-percent increase in gender equality, there’s a 3-percent increase in revenue

Maybe it’s due to women’s proven skills in areas like initiative and innovation; maybe it’s because we’re finally accessing into a previously untapped talent pool. Whatever the reason, the numbers don’t lie — women bring better financial outcomes with them.

Talent

The labor force shortage is a real challenge for most companies in the United States right now and, while this is good news for employees, it’s bad news for employers, who must now compete to win top talent.

Meanwhile, women are an remarkable underutilized talent pool that is widely available, if you can attract them through the perks they’re looking for, such as leadership opportunities and female sponsors.

Women are the majority holders of university degrees. Studies show women frequently possess the skills needed to a unite a team and create better team dynamics, as well as those to multi-task and multi-focus efficiently. Women also frequently create a better work environment for everyone, through a greater sense of empathy and ability to recognize individual needs.

Despite this, female labor force participation has fallen from 59.4 percent in 2006 to 56.8 percent in 2016, with a projected fall to 56.1 percent by 2026, largely due to the inability to climb the corporate ladder past a certain point and the lack of a right corporate fit.

Engaging these women requires the creation of a work environment that is inclusive, recognizes their value and offers sponsorship and leadership roles, alongside fair pay and benefits.

Culture

When you have an inclusive work culture, everyone benefits. You retain top talent, attract new talent and create a more efficient and profitable environment that allows you to remain competitive.

Businesses with a balance of men and women are 15 percent more likely to outperform competitors. An inclusive culture promotes employee engagement and companies with higher-than-average gender diversity perform 46 to 58-percent better financial performance than below median companies.

How Gender Equity Helps Your Brand

Beyond gender equity increasing your financial outcomes and benefiting your culture, gender equity also helps your brand. Just as you would promote and publish your equity efforts to your staff in order to build a better culture, promoting and publishing your equity efforts and subsequent successes to the public helps you build a better brand.

If you’re sharing your gender equity stance in press releases and the media, you should also extend your gender inclusion efforts to your advertising and consumer relations. If you’re not already, this is a huge opportunity to enhance your brand’s effectiveness and public appeal, as female purchasing power is enormous. Women control over $20 trillion in worldwide spending and, beyond their own purchases, purchase more than half of the “traditionally” masculine products such as automobiles and electronics.

Yet, despite this, 91 percent of women feel advertising brands don’t understand them. Therefore, when advertising and consumer relations increase their progressive inclusion, ads can be up to 25 percent more effective and deliver better branded impact.

Focusing on this market segment in a way that works for them can win you female dollars and having publicized gender equity programs can increase your brand appeal to the most powerful spending group in the world.

How Pipeline™ Helps Businesses Compete Smarter and Faster

For either business or branding purposes, incorporating gender equity into your company can ensure you remain competitive in your industry, as you win over and retain top talent, increase your brand’s appeal and improve your financial outcomes.

Pipeline™ helps you reach your gender equity goals smarter and faster, by using your company’s data to assess your current state, show you where you need to go and how and when you can get there. See how it all works, with a free demo.

Pipeline Equity

Voices For Equity™

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