8 tips to attract women to leadership at your company
In the STEM field, women are often told to "lean in" and embrace leadership opportunities in their careers. However, a 2019 AWIS Membership Report titled Transforming STEM Leadership Culture, shows that even when women are actively seeking out leadership development opportunities and actively showing up as leaders, the company culture makes it difficult to advance.
Research has proven again and again that diverse teams, especially in leadership, outperform teams with no diversity in innovation, research quality, decision-making, and complex thinking. Even though organizations are aware of the benefits of diversity in leadership, they are not addressing the difficulties women, especially women of color, come up against when trying to achieve leadership roles in the STEM field.
Women are getting STEM degrees but are not recruited or retained through leadership positions. A commonly held belief is that women, especially women with children, are not interested in leadership positions. The AWIS survey shows it's not a lack of interest, but It's actually a multitude of cultural issues.
On the whole, women are not able to just do their jobs. They have to spend extra time and effort, proving their experience and navigating biases.
Understanding the barriers to diversity in leadership is an important first step in building inclusive leadership cultures. Here are some ways organizations can remove the barriers recommended by the AWIS.
1. Broaden your network.
When doing a company is searching for leaders, a lot of the time, they miss out on talented leaders because the networks they use for outreach are inefficient and ineffective. Broaden your network can really help guarantee a diverse and skilled applicant pool.
2. Rethink how you evaluate leadership.
Your systems for promotion and evaluation must be transparent, implemented consistently, and based on evidence, not prejudice. Designing clear and consistent evaluation standards and guaranteeing that the people applying them are trained well will lead to more equal and diverse leadership hires.
3. Learn from your employees.
Companies can learn a lot from their employees about the opportunities they want, the experiences they've had, and how current systems and rules affect them. Incorporate employees' views to help update procedures and processes and add to a sense of employee belonging and inclusion.
4. Offer leadership development opportunities.
Employees are actively looking for opportunities to improve their leadership skills. Offering employees different opportunities for leadership development helps meet their needs and strengthens the company's leadership talent pool.
5. Equally divide and acknowledge service work.
Women, especially women of color, unevenly carry most of the service workload in their organizations, especially diversity and inclusion work. This is often undervalued and unrecognized and rarely leads to a promotion. Organizations should more evenly distribute the service workload and recognize the important role it plays in leadership development.
6. Address microaggressions and biases.
Microaggressions and bias undermine collaboration and fair evaluation. You need to train employees on microaggressions and bias because it builds shared responsibility for respectful workplaces. It also encourages employees to incorporate these values into their daily life, instead of looking at them as something separate.
7. Encourage accountability.
Companies that hold themselves accountable for inequalities in leadership are more successful at changing. Accountability means acknowledging where things are not going well, taking responsibility for them, and showing steps to commit to equity and inclusion.
8. Communicate.
Open communication about ways to achieve leadership roles, the reasons decisions are made, and promotion processes not only alerts employees about available opportunities but also builds trust that opportunities are offered fairly. Transparency also helps organizations hold themselves accountable.