Women in Financial Services
How E2W can help you boost gender diversity in your organisation
Mark.Freed / 12 Aug 2018
Are you an organisation struggling to tackle your gender pay gap? To attract women into senior roles? To retain women? Read on to see how E2W can help…
Like the common cold, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the best way to ‘cure’ the issue of under representation of women at senior levels in the workplace. The list of solutions is seemingly endless and includes the likes of gender balanced short lists, unconscious bias training, gender neutral job descriptions, improving workplace flexibility, recruiting returners and introducing mentoring schemes.
In the wake of the Gender Pay Gap reporting, this week, the government chipped in with their guidance - Actions to close the gender pay gap – clearly responding to cries for help and trying to help organisations reduce their pay gaps for future reporting. These suggestions are good and as they say, have achieved success in real life situations but, in my opinion, they treat the symptoms rather than the cause.
E2W’s advice is more profound and encourages closer examination, like a doctor who refuses to prescribe antibiotics until they understand more about your lifestyle, diet, stress levels. Quite simply, senior management within an organisation must firstly consider where and why there is a lack of women at senior levels. This may take time – gathering data, examining recruitment practices, speaking to senior managers, etc but if the situation isn’t given due thought and attention then organisations are likely to implement ill-considered, knee jerk reactions, such as …
- Implementing gender balanced shortlists in recruitment – this is not the solution if the problem manifests itself in poor levels of female retention and progression.
- Trying to increase the number of female applicants with gender neutral job adverts – which are unlikely to have an effect if they’re placed in media predominantly read by men.
Like a good doctor, to prescribe the correct ‘cure’, you need to really understand the problem; you need to work off more than just anecdotal evidence. To understand the problem, you need facts - statistics and insight.
Through our work with financial institutions that are leading the field in the diversity stakes, E2W has developed a framework – diversity consulting - that enables us to collect the necessary data, allowing us to understand the problem and work with you to find the right solutions for your organisation.
So if you’d like to speak to a gender diversity specialist, someone with in-depth knowledge of the subject matter and someone willing to dig deeper to find the ‘cure’, please contact Mark Freed
Back to blog