A few days back, I came across an interesting fact. According to a report, only 5% of all senior leadership positions in the Fortune Top 500 list of companies are being held by women. Does this mean that women are incompetent when it comes to driving business growth? Well, not really.
If the above fact were true, then companies like SAP and Accenture would not have set their targets to improve women participation in their companies.
Some Proven Areas Where Women Are Better Than Men
Taking initiatives: If someone asks me: What decides the success of a plan? I would say taking an initiative. Taking initiative is the first step to success. Most of the women take initiative. Different women follow different plans, but whenever a task is caught in troubled waters, women are always ready to take the driver’s seat.
Building relationships: Building relationships is something we all do, but the fact that women have far more Emotional Quotient (EQ) than men cannot be denied. Emotional intelligence leads to creativeness which also suggests that women are good at dealing with difficult situations than most men.
Collaboration and teamwork: Studies have found that people find it easy to collaborate with women. It was also found in a study that when deciding about opting for personal incentive plan, men chose individual incentive whereas women chose team-based incentive plans.
Drives results: The primary purpose of any business is to drive results. You may work with full dedication, but sometimes a situation arises when the results are not according to the company’s requirements. What to do in such a scenario? Various researches show that women are goal oriented and hence drive results. So, next time when you have a leadership position vacant then think of this.
Inspires and motivates: Women can not only inspire employees who are not able to understand a task, but they have the quality to get the most out of others. An organization which has more inspiring women could grow by more than 15% as per Peterson Institute of International Economics.
Impact Of Putting Women In A Leadership Position In Any Business Or Company
According to the Peterson Institute, having a female senior employee reduces gender discrimination in recruitment, during service, promotion and retention.
Understanding this, many Fortune 500 companies have started improving the count of their women employees. In many companies, including the majority of tech companies, the necessity has been felt along with the responsibility to improve gender diversity.
- Companies like Accenture has set a target of 40% growth in the number of female employees
- Pinterest has set a goal of 30% of jobs for women in engineering profiles
- BHP Billiton, Ltd has set a goal of having 50% women in their workforce
The above data shows the increasing number of women employees at executive positions for three years 2015, 2016, and 2017. Clearly, the number of women employees occupying senior positions is increasing. These are positive signs. Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, said in an interview that she focused on 4 major points throughout her life. Those are confidence, gratitude, flexibility, and education. She wants all the budding leaders to keep these things in mind before starting their careers.
Some Real-Life Examples
Joe Carella, who was an Assistant Dean at the University of Arizona, has worked with some top-level tech companies. He said he was asked by a company to reduce the high attrition rate. He simply asked the company to replace two senior women executives to manage employees that were being managed by men. This decision ended up making the company more transparent and reduced the employee attrition rate significantly.