Women in today’s workforce continue to face hindered career growth, underrepresentation in leadership and wage gaps, which impact their ability to thrive in the workplace. Though significant progress has been made, organizations must continue to improve their policies and processes to ensure employees across the organization are treated fairly.
Though Women’s History Month is an important time to reflect and spotlight women, organizations must prioritize and promote women’s equity year-round. To do so requires focusing on several key areas including internal career development, amplification, and equitable pay.
Support Employee Growth Through Internal Career Development
According to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace study, roughly 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level, and three in four women under the age of 30 aspire to become senior leaders.
Internal career development programs are critical to create an equitable environment for employees and to support women’s career and leadership journeys. Strong, successful programs begin with access to the tools and resources needed to grow skills in alignment with individual goals and business needs. For example, if an employee is looking to become a sales leader, companies can provide upskilling programs that focus on human skills needed to reach that level, like communication and problem-solving, while also tracking against company-wide sales KPIs.
Beyond access, successful career development requires personalization to evaluate current skillsets and address skills gaps and growth areas at an individual level. Personalized career pathing, for example, can map women’s career trajectory by evaluating future career goals and determining the skills needed to meet those goals.
From there, organizations can develop personalized upskilling programs that align to employees’ individual career development, supporting women’s upward mobility to leadership positions.
At Cornerstone, all employees, including women, have access to the Achieve Program, which is designed to help individual contributors interested in being leaders to home in on core skill sets, such as building relationships, adaptability, feedback, and goal setting. The program gives individual contributors the opportunity to see if they are interested in leadership by allowing them to gain practical experience and develop critical skills.
Access to internal upskilling and career development opportunities, is just the start. From here, it is on employers to encourage participation in these programs and follow through on commitments to advance internal mobility and leadership within their organizations.
Amplify Women’s Voices and Establish Mentorship Programs
To create a culture of lasting equity for women within the workplace, organizations must make advocacy a company-wide effort. This includes amplifying women’s voices. “Amplification” is a meeting strategy implemented by Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice during the Obama Administration in which they would specifically highlight a woman’s key points within meetings, ensuring her voice is heard while giving her credit for the idea. This is an extremely powerful tactic that organizations can use to encourage women to participate in meetings, increase their exposure across the organization and empower them to take credit for their own work or ideas.
When implementing amplification across the organization, it’s important to start by educating managers on how to amplify the voices of their team members and encourage them to do so. To be successful, it is key to develop a plan that gauges employee comfort levels to ensure they are confident participating. From there, employees can discuss cues or signals with mentors and managers to support discussion participation.
Establishing workplace mentorship programs can also further support an equitable workplace. Even if individual’s voices are amplified, it can still be challenging to speak up, ask about promotions or salary increases or navigate daily office interactions. Having a mentor to provide support and guidance through these interactions can make the workplace more equitable.
Mentors are important support systems in the workplace, providing support, guidance, and an ally to openly discuss challenges, the business landscape, career advancement and leadership development.
Mentorship can take multiple forms within an organization, and to get started, companies can create specific mentorship programs, or they can support managers and other leaders to upskill on how to become mentors to others.
Ensure Pay Equity Across the Organization
Amplifying and empowering women within the workplace is a strong step to creating an equitable work environment, but the final step is arguably most important: ensuring women receive equitable compensation.
In 2024, women earned 85% of what their male counterparts earned, on average, according to the Pew Research Center While providing women internal development opportunities is important to achieving equity in the workplace from a growth and leadership standpoint, fair compensation will further emphasize equity by valuing women’s skills at the same compensation rate as male counterparts. It is impossible for an organization to actually be equitable if women are not getting compensated the same.
Pay equity is a critical piece to the puzzle of achieving gender parity, as it continues to impact women’s careers and lives by minimizing their value within the workplace and making it more difficult for them to succeed financially outside of work.
Pay equity is not just about numbers, it is a key component to committing to equity within the workplace, as it will foster an environment where women feel equally valued and will help to eliminate gender-based biases, particularly at the leadership level.
Looking Ahead at the Future of Equity in the Workplace
For true equity to be achieved, organizations must integrate it throughout all aspects of the talent ecosystem, ensuring all employees feel their value within the organization.
As women continue to face disparities within the workplace, organizations must make an active effort to improve equity through access to opportunities, advocacy and pay equity throughout Women’s History Month and beyond.
Explore Hrtech Articles for the latest Tech Trends in Human Resources Technology
