How To Support Women In Your Business
For seven years, McKinsey has conducted the largest study in the United States centered around women in corporate America. The study, Women in the Workplace, analyzes a series of issues surrounding women in a corporate setting, such as human resource policies and programs, diversity, equity, inclusion, and multiple other segments.
This year, the study had a significant portion conducted around the COVID-19 global pandemic. While there were many gains made for women, they were found to have experienced burnout significantly more than men and at a far greater scale.
According to the study by McKinsey, one in three women in 2020 had to consider leaving the workforce entirely or downshifting their careers due to the pandemic. That has increased the gap between men and women by almost 50%.
Women have long battled issues throughout the workplace as they fought long and hard against their male colleagues and peers. It’s more important now than ever for companies to find more ways to continue improving the support of women within their businesses.
As a business looking to thrive and work to become more inclusive, here are a few ways your business can better support women.
Participate and Offer Training
Great leaders are people who are constantly training and educating themselves. They believe in the power of improvement and that there is no such thing as “knowing it all.” For a company to become more inclusive of women, they need to better understand the challenges women face daily in the corporate world, along with how companies can thrive with the proper support of women as business leaders.
Taking regular training or offering online courses is a great way for both yourself and the entire company to learn more about women’s issues in corporate America. But the training shouldn’t stop there. Offering online courses for women to become business leaders is an excellent way to encourage and inspire women to excel and develop their own personal growth plans in their personal and professional lives.
Take Into Consideration Their Other Identities
Business owners and leaders can often shy away from learning more about their employees outside of work. But what’s important to recognize is that women, more often than men, have several roles they are playing along with other various considerations such as marital status, race, culture, or immigration status.
Current policies in several corporate companies have little consideration for single mothers or for women whose family lives outside of their current country of residence. It’s important to remember that employees are more than numbers and gender. They are human beings.
Hire More Women of Color
It’s an obvious statement at this point to say that women are discriminated against in the workplace. But the group of individuals who suffer more is women of color. By providing more opportunities to include diversity in the workplace, you are opening a significantly more open-minded workforce with room for innovation, collaboration, and inclusivity.
Review Your Current Policies and Programs
As you begin to recognize that changes need to be made within your business structure around the development and support of women, it’s important to do a proper review of your current policies and programs. This is an incredible time to bring top leading women with your business to work with them and learn from them. If we want women to succeed in the corporate world, then the world needs to provide them an open seat at the decision-making table.
Let their voices be heard and listen with intent. Their input is valuable towards making change, and you will then be supporting them by providing them a platform to help implement some of those changes.
