Creating gender equality in the workplace is a goal for many employers. However, it can be more difficult than you first think. Even when employers think they are doing the right thing, they could be making mistakes that prevent equal opportunities for everyone. If you want to support women in business, there are many things you could do to help them.
From your recruitment process to how you deal with time off work, taking a good look at how you as an employer do things can reveal some barriers that you perhaps did not even realize were there. Check out some of these ways to support women at work.
Offer Favorable Benefits for Parents
Thinking about how you treat parents can help you create a better workplace for both all genders. While not everyone has children, many people do, and they need to fit their career around their life as a parent. When you consider how you treat women who work for you, two of the biggest things to think about are maternity leave and returning to work after having a baby or adopting. Offering favorable maternity leave and pay (as well as paternity leave) can attract more women to your company. Supporting them when they are parenting helps with employee retention and performance, and improves your company image too.
To Support Women in Business: Provide Training
Helping women to advance in their careers is another thing you as an employer could be doing in the workplace. If you notice a lack of women in senior positions, you might want to redress the balance.
One of the best ways to offer training to employees today is to use LMS solutions to provide an online, computer-based way to learn. It can make it easier for people to complete training courses, and usage can be tracked to check performance and progress. Employers that offer training can improve employee retention, and it’s a great way to help women up the ladder.
Start to provide valuable industry experience to those who are passionate about their new career. That can open many doors for them over years.
Consider Hiring and Promotion Tactics to Support Women in Business
Also, take a look at the methods you use during the hiring process, as well as when choosing people for internal promotions. While many employers recognize that unconscious bias exists, they often believe it’s not a problem for their own company. But even if you don’t think it’s something you need to worry about, you can still take precautions to be certain it’s not an issue. You can do things like circulating job applications without names, which can also help to eliminate unconscious bias when it comes to gender inequality.
Take the Gender Pay Gap into Account
People will blame the gender pay gap on many things, including that women just aren’t assertive enough to ask for a raise. However, even if that is true, is it fair to leave women on lower salaries because they don’t ask for raises as often? If you want to try and ensure better salary equality, there are a couple of things you can do to support women at work.
First of all, start with a salary range for each position, instead of asking someone what they were last paid. Secondly, perform salary reviews and increase pay for anyone who has gotten a raw deal.
Top photo via Pixabay
Such a great post and clear steps forward, albeit, harder to implement due to existing culture. Cultural change is hard and takes long to achieve. It is awful that we still thinking about this while women are out performing men in academia and presenting higher percentages of graduates, this makes it clear that the work place is hostile to women, unfortunately. The steps noted in your post are indispensable, with companies empathizing on work / life balance , establishing mentoring formal process and looking at demographics while recruiting. In construction industry, women are still way unrepresented, despite the great benefits they bring along to a male dominated industry.
Excellent points made here, Christy!
Great post Christy. The more we speak about and create awareness. the sooner this happens organically. :) <3
These are some great points – and another point I would want to have is the maternity AND the paternity leave. In India, it is compulsory to give 24 weeks of paid leave to new-mother but no law for paternity. So many companies do not give – we are talking about MNCs which further enforces that taking care of children is the mother’s prerogative only!
It’s insane – the world we live in.
I’m angry that all of these topics are still issues in 2017. America has a long way to go to catch up to Europe and Canada, although not is all perfect in those countries. Then what about the rest of the world? Humanities is a no-brainer. However, it seems the un-humanities are in charge.
Lovely and self awakening post !!
Always find your post informative.
hopefully one day we will reach the stage where all employers are working towards equality in the workplace
Dear, Christy
In my companies, nearly half of employees in our company are women and honestly often they more productive than men employees.
paradigm that women work more on feelings than logic is no longer valid in this era. A modern and highly educated woman could work more professional than man :) My father said, don’t ever underestimate women because there is always powerful woman behind the great man. Thank you for this inspirational post :) God Bless.
exactly