Editorial Team
By: Kat Sarmiento
As the value of inclusion and diversity is being highlighted as a prerequisite for growth, more and more businesses are working towards improving their policies and working conditions. This includes gender diversity, defined as the goal of having a fair representation of different gender identities in an organization. Unfortunately, not all workplaces have not yet pursued this inclusive framework. If you’re a business owner or a manager looking to adopt these policies, it might take some convincing before you get these wheels in motion. More than mere compliance, promoting and actively pursuing gender diversity in your own company can help give you these five benefits:
1. Gain access to different perspectives and resources
It’s no secret that men, women, and non-binary gender identities have different experiences, mindsets, and perceptions of different matters. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, promoting gender diversity gives you a wider perspective in general. Furthermore, being gender-inclusive opens your company toward understanding and challenging existing stereotypes, promoting growth in the organization.
Additionally, opening your organization to gender diversity lets you access more resources. Aside from their individual skills and knowledge, a more inclusive team allows you to access more sources of information, for example. For small businesses, it could translate to gaining access to your employees’ networks including professional contacts and potential clients.
2. Connect better with your customers
As society continues to move past its dated stereotypes regarding gender, you’ll most likely deal with a customer base that’s more varied in terms of gender, in addition to other factors such as race, culture, and age. As your customers come from different walks of life, finding someone like them easily establishes a connection between them and your organization.
As these employees are also customers to other businesses, you can use their individual insights to have a more representative view of the market–which works especially if your business regularly caters to different customers such as restaurants and stores.
3. Tap into a wider pool of skills and talent
Even until now, there remains a stigma of certain jobs being intended for certain genders. Worse, there are environments that discourage certain gender identities. This stigma prevents both employers and employees from exploring more options, with employees sometimes forced to make a career change, or in some cases prevented from doing so, because of this limitation in the opportunities available to them. As you open your workplace to a more gender-diverse setting, you get to access a wider selection of talents. Imagine a company not encouraging women to join them. This translates to half of the population or roughly half of the potential talents their company could have on board.
Furthermore, a company known for promoting and implementing gender-inclusive measures puts you in a more advantageous position, as applicants are more likely to choose your company. A study by PwC shows that 61% of women look at the diversity records of a company when considering their potential employer.
4. Improved collaboration
Aside from the fresh perspectives brought about by a more gender-diverse team, mixed-gender groups have been observed to perform better. There have been multiple studies showing how businesses with better gender diversity are found to be generally better-performing compared to their peers. Additionally, this lets you tap into each gender identity’s strengths such as physical strength or the ability to pick up on non-verbal cues.
This combination of skills and traits benefit the team overall, on top of using modern communication tools and platforms, could improve collaboration and in turn, improve their productivity.
5. Increased business performance
All of the factors mentioned above contribute to company growth. A famous quote from British business magnate Richard Branson notes that taking care of employees is the key to taking care of your business. Employee experience, the collective experiences of all your employees, has to be equally commendable among everyone, regardless of their respective gender identities.
The adoption of gender diversity measures helps create an improved employee experience, which in turn improves company productivity. On the other hand, poor employee experience can lead to a number of problems for your company such as high absenteeism, low retention rates, or even instances of delinquency among company members. Also, it’s important to note how gender diversity initiatives raise awareness among employees, which in turn reduces cases of discrimination or harassment.
Conclusion
Gender diversity in the workplace opens a lot of opportunities for both employees and employers. Working toward a fair representation of all gender identities gives a company access to new perspectives and resources, and can even lead to increased awareness, better collaboration, and an overall improved employee experience. All these factors work toward a better company performance, which in turn benefits the company. Just remember that the pursuit of gender diversity is not a one-time implementation; it is a continuously-evolving process that has to be integrated into all levels of the organization.