Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Gender Diversity – Not just a tick in the box!!

If someone was to draw up a list of the top 5 priorities that companies are expected to focus on… I guarantee you that somewhere in the middle, right after ‘meet financial commitments’ and possibly before ‘data privacy & compliance’, we would see the words ‘gender diversity’.

It’s one of those things that organizations are supposed to solve for. We train for unconscious bias, strive for inclusive leadership, run sponsorship programs, set up diversity councils, track promotion and recruitment targets (while treading the thin line between ‘tracking’ and ‘quotas’!!) and finally write blogs on this topic J As cynical as my tone may sound right now, I do believe all of that is important.

But there is something else… that’s even more important than being focused on gender diversity. And that’s understanding why it is important to be focused on gender diversity. Sure it’s the correct and fair thing to do and plays a big role in being an equal opportunity employer. But as the CEO of the company, those are not the only drivers I consider when crafting company priorities.

Fact of the matter is that having women in leadership positions makes better business sense. Data proves that that gender diversity improves financial and talent performance.

Research from The Catalyst and NCWIT shows that companies with the most women board directors outperformed those with the least on return on sales by 16% and return on invested capital by 26%. Companies with the highest representation of women in their senior management teams had a 35% higher return to shareholders. On talent performance parameters, women outperformed men on 12 of 16 measures of outstanding leadership competencies as rated by managers, peers and direct reports. Also, a better diversity climate is related to lower attrition rates for both women and men.

At Genpact, our data shows that business verticals with more than 10% women in leadership roles grew significantly faster than those with the least women. On talent retention parameters, businesses verticals with a higher percentage of women in leadership roles did a better job of retaining other women compared to businesses with a fewer number of women.

And for these reasons as well as other reasons including the fact that clients are interested in how diverse we are, diversity is connected positively with innovation and an increase in women has been linked to a group’s effectiveness in solving difficult problems, we drive gender diversity even harder as a business-critical mission vs. a “nice-to-do”.

Our recruitment teams have aggressive goals of ensuring balanced representation of women in the talent funnel, our leadership development programs target at least 40% representation from women and our promotion data shows that we promoted twice the number of women vs men as a % of their populations/overall last year… obviously driven by pure merit but tracked to see how we’re doing. And finally, our operating teams drive our robust family-friendly policies like flexi-timings, work from home, day care facility, security measures and stork parking to make life easier for women which helps them focus on what’s important.

The results of these efforts are encouraging but far from where we want to be – 16% of our leadership (VP+) are women while representation is at 38% for the VP and below … while these numbers are on the higher side in certain geographies, globally we still have a long way to go. But it’s a fantastic indicator that we’re on the right path to creating a more powerful team that helps us meet our business goals.

And really – at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about. Not that there are any public naysayers out there… but this should be an eye opener for the closet skeptics who think driving gender diversity is a just a tick in the box.

2 comments:


  1. Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gina Fratarcangeli, Hi Tech Global Sales LeaderFebruary 10, 2015 at 9:55 AM

    Thanks for your leadership on this front Tiger. It is only with executive support and sponsorship like yours that our company will continue to experience the true benefits of a diverse culture. I am so proud to be a part of the Genpact team!

    ReplyDelete