On Tuesday the Women’s Business Forum, a gender balanced leadership conference in London, brought together 600 attendees from over 150 different leading companies to discuss the topic ‘Better Balance, Better Business’.
It was reassuring to hear a host of senior (male) leaders talk about the benefits of gender balanced leadership teams; almost all made the point that the business case for increased gender diversity had already been made and was now widely accepted.
Our data, presented in my opening session of the conference, also clearly shows that there are wide-ranging benefits to having more gender balanced organisations. Our data supports a business case along the following four quadrants:
- Organizational performance
- Growth and innovation
- The customers
- Internal processes
Part of the reason for my business case approach was to highlight my belief that we need a more holistic approach to gender diversity. We need to move beyond the single issue focus on the link between more women in senior roles and increased financial performance.
When we broaden out our data gathering, we find not only clear evidence of the direct benefit of having more women in senior leadership roles, but we also see evidence of powerful indirect benefits. These indirect factors include strong D&I cultures.
In an effort to bring more women into senior roles and to grow the female leadership pipeline, organizations are creating more inclusive and diverse climates to benefit everyone in the organisation. Our global WorkTrends™ data shows that organizations with stronger D&I climates report higher performance confidence scores. These scores of employee perceptions of the performance of their organization have been strongly linked to actual organizational performance. Strong D&I climate organizations also report lower turnover intentions, more emphasis on training and stronger collaboration.
While the business case for more gender balanced organizations may be clear, the event revealed that there remains more work to do if we are going to make gender diverse senior management teams a reality. A poll taken during the event showed that only about half of the 600 attendees felt that they personally did enough to ensure that their organization had an inclusive culture and less than a fifth felt that their organizations as a whole were doing enough.
I was encouraged by the energy and enthusiasm for change at this event. Much progress has been made and now insights from the data can show us the way to even greater achievements.
