“In closing the gender gap, your customers will benefit, your teams will benefit, and your bottom line will benefit — and it’s the right thing to do,” says Carol Cohen in an article co-written with Douglas A. Ready. 

Excerpts from MIT Sloan Management Review’s article:

“Women represent more than 47% of the corporate workforce, but at the C-suite level, that number drops significantly. Ultimately, so many promising young women never reach the most influential corporate roles.

Women are entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before. But companies aren’t doing enough to support their career development and advancement. Specifically, they aren’t providing educational and mentoring opportunities to help women ultimately progress to senior leadership and C-suite roles.

Women need champions — people who empower them to thrive — to advance their careers. But when 95% of senior leaders are male, do women truly have advocates enabling them to see a viable career path forward?

To address this, companies should:

1. Set a clear message and tone from the top that diversity and inclusion is a business imperative, not a corporate social responsibility program.
2. Commit to hiring at least at levels that reflect demography.
3. Pay attention to women’s career advancement needs, and put policies and practices in place to move them along.
4. Use data analytics and insights gleaned to help remove biases in your talent management and development decisions, ensuring hard data is used to support the benefits of gender balance in the workplace.
5. Measure progress and results.”

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