What initiatives can shape employees’ views of gender equality?

It goes without saying that there is still a room for improvement in the way that gender equality rules are developed, implemented and popularized by organizations. It is a role of talent management to shape the corporate culture that will promote the diversity as a part of a company’s strategy. There are examples listed below of initiatives supporting women development that I find helpful in promoting gender equality. Here are short comments and highlights of the challenges that can be associated with each of them.

Positive discrimination

There is a debate around whether positive discrimination is a fair concept as it happens to be criticized by both female and male representatives. The main aspect under discussion is the question if it is actually helpful to artificially define the percentage of women that should compose either senior leadership or executive board levels in an organization. This approach, from one side, ensures the minimum number of female leaders but, at the extreme, may become a risk as it may prevent from hiring more talented women for executive roles than the required percentage imposed. Although it may seem controversial to impose a number of women to be in charge of political, social or business organizations, it can make people get used to women presence so that it will gradually stop being seen as unusual and will just become natural.

Women development programs (WDP)

The trend of designing development programs dedicated to women brought new insight into female leadership perception. The initiatives have both their strong supporters and opponents. Following the article: ‘Taking gender into account: Theory and design for women’s leadership development programs’, the benefits are that WDPs build the framework for diagnosing women workplace experience and taking actions. As female leaders’ perception can be, for instance, too aggressive if they are decisive or too nice if they chose not to, they need to learn rules of the game and change their behaviours accordingly. Another argument for WDPs is that they help women to shape who they are and can become. They show how to handle gender bias effectively. WDPs encourage work on identity and leadership purpose. [Ely, RJ., Ibarra, H. and Kolb, DM; 2011].

Mentoring by female influencers

The importance of promoting female role models in the organizations cannot be ignored. What companies can do is to support mentoring programmes with high engagement of women as influencers. Business environment requires diversity to stay healthy. The design of mentoring programs should encourage leaders of both genders to share their mentors’ experience and the mentees should have an opportunity to understand different leadership perspectives through their career journeys. 

Networking

In terms of building wide and informal relationships in any business environment, networking is said to be a powerful tool. Ability to make a connection is based on our predisposition to socialise and the gender impact on this is minor. The networking challenge, where a gender matters, is different. Women are less willing to use their business networks for their own benefit. It is easier to present yourself and make a connection than call your network member to ask for an advice or favour or simply to start business cooperation.  

All in all

What I truly believe we need to understand is that everyone can contribute in our own business setting. Organizations cannot ignore the importance of gender equality. They ought to actively shape the employees’ views if they aim to create working environment, where not only do people feel respected but they cherish equal opportunities to learn and grow. Ammplify helps its customers to take this challenge.

REFERENCE:

Ely, RJ., Ibarra, H. and Kolb, DM. (2011), ‘Taking gender into account: Theory and design for women’s leadership development programs’, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10(3): 474–493