What Listening Data Tells Us About a Gender Gap in Career Equity
In June, Perceptyx’s Center for Workforce Transformation released a report highlighting 2024’s biggest Employee Experience trends. One of the themes that our data — based on 20 million employee responses from 528 enterprises across 19 industries — shows has reached “megatrend” status is belonging. While Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) programs have seen rocky support as of late, belonging remains critical to fostering a successful employee experience in any organization at scale.
Prioritizing belonging means fostering a work environment where employees feel connected to, accepted, and valued by their colleagues and leaders. But how can organizations effectively meet employees' needs for belonging? Findings from our megatrends report suggest there are four important opportunity areas for boosting belonging in today’s organizations. One of those areas is addressing the gender gap in career equity. Our analysis reveals that while career equity initiatives are working, a significant gender gap persists.
Despite the critical role people leaders play in the overall health and performance of the organization, many L&D teams struggle to provide effective, scalable support for more managers within their organizations due to limited resources and outdated tools.
Perceptions of Fairness
Career equity is key to fostering belonging in organizations. When employees feel there is an equal opportunity for people to have a successful career at the company, and that advancement opportunities are awarded fairly, they are better able to envision their own success at the company. In other words, cultivating a culture of belonging is not just about making sure employees feel like part of the team today, but also helping them envision their contribution into the future.
The good news is that our data shows an overall increase over the past five years (from 2019 to 2023) in fairness perceptions of growth and development resources offered by organizations. This means that, overall, employees are feeling better today about career equity than they have in the recent past.
However, we’ve also identified a concerning trend in the data. There seems to be a gender gap, such that female employees are less likely than their male counterparts to report advancement opportunities are fairly awarded and accessed in their organization. This gap has persisted over the past five years despite overall increases in career equity perceptions.
Source: 2024 Employee Experience Trends
How can we close this gap? The first step is understanding how this overall trend is (or is not) showing up in your organization, because closing the gap will require a deeper understanding of what caused the gap in the first place.
To improve women's career equality, we suggest focusing on two key areas:
- Addressing work-life balance issues that affect women disproportionately and
- Reducing gender bias against women in leadership roles.
Closing the Gender Gap in Career Equity
Address Gendered Work-Life Balance Challenges
Female employees may report lower career equity because they are experiencing more work-life balance-related challenges than their male colleagues. The global uptick in remote, hybrid, and flexible work arrangements in recent years has further blurred the lines between work and life, bringing new challenges — especially for women.
While working at a distance from colleagues and relying on technology to collaborate poses challenges for all workers, remote work tends to serve as a double-edged sword, specifically for women. In other words, the work-life balance dynamics that come along with remote or hybrid working present both pros and cons for women’s career equality.
Many of these tensions lie in setting boundaries between work and life. For example, the opportunity to work from home can increase opportunities for women to participate in the workforce by allowing them greater flexibility to handle non-work demands, such as caring for children or parents. However, managing the boundaries between work and life when working from home can become especially difficult for women as they are often expected to respond more to family and household demands. Thus, working from home, even just some of the time, presents unique challenges for women and may even work against women’s abilities to progress in their careers.
To help close the gender gap in career equity, offer flexible work arrangements that meet women’s needs for work-life balance while ensuring appropriate resources and support are in place to allow everyone to set the boundaries they need to be successful in their careers.
Addressing Gender Bias Toward Women Leaders
Female employees may report lower career equity because they are experiencing more gender bias as they move up the corporate ladder than their male colleagues. Unfortunately, many decision-makers possess a “think leader-think male” bias, whether they know it or not. Such unfair (and unfounded) biases or assumptions about what makes an effective leader may be preventing female employees from being able to envision success for themselves.
One tell-tale sign of gender bias against women leaders is a lack of representation. A decade ago, women made up a mere 4.8% of chief executive officer (CEO) positions at Fortune 500 companies. Today, this number has jumped to a record 52 women in CEO positions when the Fortune 500 list was published in 2023, exceeding 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs for the first time. Despite this victory at the largest companies in the U.S., that 10% representation remains nowhere near the actual percentage of women in the United States workforce (over 50%) and 94.6% of CEOs globally are men.
Despite progress, there is still a long way to go to achieve career equity and “break the glass ceiling” for women aspiring to leadership positions. However, representation is just the first step. It is just as important to examine the types of leadership positions and contexts that women are typically selected for to avoid what has been termed the “glass cliff” where women and employees from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds tend to be put into leadership positions with more likelihood of failing than men — also known as the “think-crisis-think-female” phenomenon.
To help close the gender gap in career equity, consider the impact of both formal leadership expectations (e.g., leadership competency framework) and more subtle yet powerful cultural artifacts of what great leadership looks like at your company. For example, are women leaders given as much airtime as their male counterparts? Does the proportion of women in senior leadership positions match the proportion of women throughout the company?
By understanding the explicit and implicit messages being sent to female employees, you can work to provide women with the leadership development opportunities necessary to advance their careers within and beyond your organization, setting the groundwork for championing women's leadership.
Perceptyx Can Help You Listen and Act to Build a More Equitable Workplace
Closing the gap in women’s career equity is key to improving the state of belonging in today’s workplaces. Work-life balance and leadership are just two examples of how women’s employee experience may be starkly different from their male colleagues; however, making improvements in these two areas has the potential to catalyze huge strides for women’s career equity. To learn more about how an experienced employee listening partner like Perceptyx can help your organization, schedule a meeting with a member of our team.