Women’s Equality Day Special: Four Ways You Can Create Gender Equality and a Sustainable Workplace

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Remove the Gender Pay Gap
2. Train New Technology to Stop Gender Stereotypes
3. Shift to a More Inclusive Company Culture
4. Promote Women’s leadership
Conclusion

Introduction
The equality between women and men in the workplace has seen some encouraging improvement, but the progress on closing the gender gaps has stalled. These continuous disparities between women and men include labor market participation, equal pay for work, representation of women in high-paying professions and administrative roles, and the allocation of unpaid care work. Therefore, achieving economic empowerment and gender equality for women requires transformational policies from global stakeholders to civil societies.

This Women’s Equality Day, women demand change by uprooting the stereotypes and seeking equality in all sectors of society, including the workplace. In today’s exclusive HRTech Cube, we will focus on how the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) can create a gender equality and sustainable workplace.

1. Remove the Gender Pay Gap
Achieving gender equality and women’s financial empowerment in the workplace demands that the assignments done by women and men are valued equally, either through equal remuneration or appreciation from their colleagues. However, even though numerous principles support equal pay, a survey points out that the gender wage gap persists at about 20% on the global level. The remuneration gap persists at all ranks of employment, including management, and gap rates vary based on employment level and region. Unfortunately, the gender pay gap further widens when women are discriminated against depending on their age, race, ethnicity, migration status, and other categories of disadvantage.

Therefore, it is high time global stakeholders start implementing strict policies in their workplaces, which includes proper and constant communication from the senior leaders who will ensure equality and inclusion as company prerogatives, along with contributing to forming an organizational culture and ensuring that all initiatives are succeeded properly.

2. Train New Technology to Stop Gender Stereotypes
With emerging technologies, organizations make determinations in areas such as job candidate preference and mortgage eligibility with the help of AI and ML algorithms. However, it was witnessed that these algorithms may reflect gender bias while making business-related decisions; for instance, Amazon’s AI recruiting algorithms exhibited discrimination against women applying for software developer jobs and other technical roles; consequently, after coming to the HR professionals, they noticed the old algorithm was eradicated and a new algorithm was introduced by the algorithm engineers that was more gender-responsive and diverse.

Apart from training in new technologies, CHROs must also focus on creating a diverse workplace where there is no violence and harassment due to gender stereotyping; this also includes ensuring that criteria to prevent and address these challenges.

3. Shift to a More Inclusive Company Culture

Before implementing policies related to gender equality, companies must be encouraged to have a social dialogue and collective bargaining. Social dialogue and collective bargaining promote inclusive and gender-equal employment strategies, where bargaining implies coordinated and conducted at different levels. Companies that have implemented this mechanism have witnessed this as an excellent platform that aids management in acquiring the best information about the existing obstacles to gender equality and developing solutions that will improve inclusivity in the workplace.

4. Promote Women’s leadership
The best way to enhance gender equality in the workplace is by allowing women to mentor at a leadership level. This mentoring will not only improve the workplace for learning more about different working and leadership styles but also help break the barriers of stereotyping women in senior positions. If geographically spoken, companies in Canada, the United States, and Japan have a lower proportion of women in the workforce, whereas, in France and Italy, these ratios improve as women move into higher-level positions such as directorships, while these numbers are descending for Japan across all ranks.

To thrive on this idealogy, organizations must be committed and engaged while taking meaningful action to ensure that women are equally represented and valued in executive and leadership positions and on boards. This also implies that women’s voices are heard and respected while making critical decisions, further opening lines of communication that are free of gender bias.

Conclusion
To sum up, just increasing the proportion of women on the committee is not enough to create a gender-equal workplace; there are further steps required to improve gender equality in the workforce, such as eliminating gender stereotyping, and equal pay, and creating regulatory frameworks for women’s safety at the workplace. Yet, these frameworks often take time, but it is never too late to start and stand apart from your competitors.