Call it a glass ceiling, glass wall or a glass floor - there is still a barrier blocking senior women leaders in organizations. High-powered executive and professional women are increasingly opting out of, being bypassed, or otherwise disappearing from the highly professional workforce. While this exists, true diversity in organizations will not happen, at least in the U.S. and Canada.
Yet women's participation in workplace and education continues to rise. In the U.S., women comprise 57% of all college students but only 26% of full professors and only 14% of University presidents. Despite being nearly 50% of law school graduates, women make up only 18% of law partners and only 25% of judges. Only 9.4% of jobs of Vice-President or higher are occupied by women according to a study completed by Catalyst Corporation.
The World Economic Forum's 2010 Global Gendership Report shows that the U.S. ranks 19 among the 132 countries studied in gender equity and Canada a surprising 20th in 2010. What's interesting is that when the study was done in 2006, the U.S. was 23rd and Canada was 14th. Which countries ranked at the top? Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and New Zealand. Canada is now actually lagging behind the U.S. in promoting women as leaders of organizations, even though Canada's reputation as a more liberal and socially conscious country is widespread. In Canada, women comprise just 2% of CEOs at Canada's 1,000 largest public companies.
"Nordic countries continue to lead the way in eliminating gender inequality," said Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. "Low gender gaps are directly correlated with high economic competitiveness. Women and girls must be treated equally if a country is to grow and prosper." In Nordic nations, women live longer, have high employment rates and often enjoy generous maternity and paternity schemes. There are more than 1.5 women for every man enrolled in tertiary education.
Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Centre for International Development at Harvard University and co-author of the report, said "Progress will be achieved when countries seek to reap returns on the investment in health and education of girls and women by finding ways to make marriage and motherhood compatible with the economic participation of women." Melanie Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-large for Global Women's Issues, says that the report "shows a strong correlation between gender equity and a country's prosperity and competitiveness." Making reference to the report, Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a leading global IT company commented that the report "highlights serious gender inequalities that need to be rectified...not just out of fairness, but because companies are wasting talents and skills that can generate significant competitive advantage." Laura D'Andrea Tyson, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was among the report's authors contends, "The bottom line here is that you don't fully capitalize on the potential of your talent base" without the full participation of women in an economy....There is a link between how well a country does on competitiveness and how well it does with the gender gap."
This position is supported by a McKinsey study. A 2010 McKinsey survey has shown that as the number of women participating in the work force has grown, their potential influence on business has become more important, with 72% of those surveyed believing there is a direct connection between a company's gender diversity and its financial success. At the same time, the study concluded the t companies have not successfully bridged the gap between men and women in top levels of management, reflecting that diversity is not an organizational priority. McKinsey's research on gender diversity and financial performance began in 2007 with its Women matter: Gender diversity, a corporate performance driver. That report found the 89 listed European companies with market capitalization over 150 million with the highest gender diversity also had the highest return on equity, operating results, and stock price. Respondents in the 2010 survey who believe in the connection between diverse leadership teams and financial success have grown to 72%. It's interesting to note that respondents in the Asia-Pacific and developing markets rate gender diversity as a higher priority than North America.
There's evidence that female executives do more diligence than their male counterparts: A study by the Conference Board of Canada, found 72% of boards with 2 or more females conduct formal board performance evaluations, while 49% of all-male boards do. A study published by Harvard Business School found firms with female board members were more likely than companies with all-male boards to be leaders when ranked by revenue or profit. Research by Catalyst Corporation shows that Fortune 500 companies with the highest proportion of women in senior management significantly outperformed others with the lowest proportion in both return on equity and total shareholder return. Karen Lyness and Madeline Heilman reported in a study published in The Journal of Applied Psychology, that when women were promoted to upper-level management positions, they subsequently had higher performance ratings than men.
Why does the gender equity problem persist in North America and what can be done about it?
Pamela Stone's in Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett in Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, argue that women are forced out of their careers by inhospitable workplaces, dominated by the masculine competitive model of organizations. They suggest this model may be at the root of preventing real diversity in the workplace from advancing. . A study by the Toronto-Dominion bank identified motherhood as one of the prime reasons for still significant wage gaps between the sexes.
Part of the problem is still how women are portrayed in popular media. On the one hand we want and expect women to take an equal leadership role to men, yet in popular media women are still portrayed as subservient and objectified, which has a significant impact on young people. The Institute for Gender in Media released a report that showed 71% of the speaking roles for the 50 top grossing PG, G and PG-13 movies had men's or boy's voices. Further, in three years' worth of children's movies ranging from fictional narratives to dramas and cartoons, female characters are mostly young, sexy, beautiful and passive sidekicks. One quarter of the female characters wore sexy attire. One in five was partly nude. One in five is under the age of 21. In those same three years of children's' movies, the content creators were almost all men, comprising 93% of the directors, 87% of the writers and 80 % of the producers.
What can be done?
Among the respondents in the McKinsey 2010 survey in companies that have rated gender diversity important, actions such as flexible working conditions, family support programs, female networking programs and mentor programs were prominent. The McKinsey study concluded that one of the central problems in gender diversity progress appears to be the lack of championship by CEOs and senior executives, who appear to only support it for middle and lower levels of management.
