If you ask some of the most powerful women in business today what the future looks like, most of them agree on one thing: It will be better.
Some days, it can feel like women have hit a plateau professionally. The number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 has gone up only ever so slightly in the past few years (the proportion of female chiefs hovers around 5%), and even when women do manage to break certain glass ceilings, there’s that pesky glass cliff waiting for them if they make one wrong move.
Yet business leaders like Case Foundation CEO Jean Case, Ellevest co-founder Sallie Krawcheck, and Mattel CEO Margo Georgiadis remain hopeful that women will see better days.
“I think we’ll all feel equally excited…when women are equally represented in the workplace as they are in our population,” says Georgiadis.
The reason for that optimism? “The business world is not static,” says Krawcheck. “If it were then we’d have to continue to play the game the same way that we have, but things are changing—driven by technology—at a quite rapid rate. Whereas before, if there were issues in the workplace, a woman had a choice: Stay gutted out, go without information to another company, or go home. Today, there’s a fourth really important choice, which is start your own thing.”
By Valentina Zarya
Source: Fortune
At a recent training I was facilitating, I invited people to ask me anything anonymously using polling technology. While the questions always give me great insight into where people are struggling with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), this question seemed more universal: “What do I do if my manager is not inclusive?”
Our society’s tendency to look to men for expertise is one of the things that holds women back in our careers. But we can all help give women’s knowledge and accomplishments greater visibility, which will cause people of all genders to view women as experts and turn to women for expertise more.
Right now, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are under growing scrutiny. Some companies are pulling back from DEI initiatives amid nervousness around shareholder activism and possible investor or customer pushback. Highlighting the benefits of DEI to an organization’s performance and the wellbeing of employees is the best way to address this negativity.
