March 8 is International Women's Day, and a great opportunity to think more about the status of women in the workplace and ways we can improve so that everyone benefits from the clear advantages offered up from equality and fairness.
To that end, we've spent the day reading some fantastic articles around gender diversity and making workplaces better places for women, and we're so pleased to share with you some of the highlights of what we've found. Happy reading!
GENDER-DIVERSITY: DOES YOUR WORKPLACE HAVE WHAT WOMEN WANT?
"Gender-diverse teams perform better than single-gender teams for several reasons. Men and women have different viewpoints, ideas and insights, which improves problem-solving and ultimately leads to superior business performance." [Read more on Jostle]
10 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR WORKPLACE BETTER FOR WOMEN
"In order to promote more opportunities for women in your business, it’s vital to have strong female role models as leaders in your current corporate structure.Having several female managers can help your other female employees feel like they could advance within the company as well. This also sends a message that your workplace and management team are more representative of your employees." [Read more on Wealthy Gorilla]
THREE WAYS TO CREATE A WORKPLACE THAT WORKS FOR WOMEN
"... the culture of an organisation determines how easy it is to attract talented women into the organization and keep them there. “Build culture of growth and support. We tout that we're this fempire. We are women managers and we are women employees, I think that really helps in being emphatic in terms of how we deal with each other,” she says." [Read more on Forbes]
TO SOLVE AMERICA’S SEXISM, MAKE WORKPLACES MORE LIKE ICELAND’S
"For the past nine years, the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index has deemed Iceland the best place on earth to be a woman. Early this year, it became the first nation to require employers to prove they are paying women equal wages for equal work, fining business that fail to do so. Last year, the country elected its second female prime minister, a 42-year-old raising three young kids. As of February, a course in gender studies was compulsory in 27 of the country’s 33 high schools.
What’s more, Iceland’s big companies exceed legal requirements by investing in training female workers in technology in equal numbers to men. That’s especially notable this Labor Day in the U.S., where bosses insist equality is bad for business, and pay lobbyists like the National Federation of Independent Business fight workplace progress in Washington. There’s policy, and then there’s practice — and both in Iceland seem like fairy tales when compared to reality for women in the U.S. workforce." [Read more on HuffPo]
7 STRIKING FACTS ABOUT THE STATE OF WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE IN 2018
“I was in the elevator and pressed the button for the executive office,” one Asian woman relayed as part of the study. She was a director who’d been at her company for four years. “Someone said to me, ‘Um, no honey. That’s for the executive offices. The interns are going to this floor.’”
She’s one of 20% of women who’ve been mistaken for someone far more junior. Only 10% of men have had similar experiences. Women are also nearly twice as likely to report needing to provide more evidence of their competence, and are more likely to have their judgement questioned in their area of expertise and to be the targets of demeaning remarks." [Read more at The Muse]
WHAT WOMEN WANT — AND WHY YOU WANT WOMEN — IN THE WORKPLACE
"... research shows that Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women on boards financially outperform companies with the lowest representation of women on boards. Moreover, gender-diverse teams have higher sales and profits compared to male-dominated teams, and a recent Gallup study found that gender-diverse business units have higher average revenue than less diverse business units." [Read more at CCL]
WOMEN IN WORK: AUSTRALIA AT LEAST A DOZEN YEARS SHORT OF GENDER EQUALITY
"As the nation marks International Women’s Day (March 8), the research shows women make up just 7 per cent of big-company CEOs, do the lion’s share of unpaid care work, are over-represented in part-time and casual work and are woefully under-represented in the halls of power. And it will remain so for years, unless governments and workplaces rise to the challenge and address structural inequalities, experts have told The New Daily." [Read more at the New Daily]
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