It shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that nearly 50% of the world’s population is women. What’s unforeseen is simply how that statistic enlightens some of the most important choices made; choices like whom to employ and appoint into leadership roles in various corporate settings. However, anyone that has some knowledge about discrimination would know that it doesn’t begin at the time of interview. The issue of gender discrimination stretches from cradle to the boardrooms and selection panels.
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Right from birth, the females have always been treated in a different way. A girl child before she begins to understand words and put them together, she is told how beautiful she is and shown how important it is to always remain like that. These expectations are carried forward to grade school and further to college and university. Social gravities and anticipations lead parents, academic counselors and teachers to steer girls and boys in dissimilar directions.
Although women often get to those higher levels of education and graduate with higher grades and scores, they do so under a perception that it is just a woman’s work. Domination of corporate environments by the male starts long before posting the job openings. This makes things even harder and seeing in a different perspective becomes a burden. Nevertheless, there are places things are done differently.
Ways of Enhancing Women Leadership in a Corporate Setting
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Therefore, the solution can be found within these corporate environments and with our ability to help the women in their personal quests for leadership roles and responsibilities. It is also up to these organizations to assist women on how best they can manage these roles in one way or another. In this article, we look at ways to change how things are done and enhance female leadership in any corporate setting because they’ve got potential just like men. Read below:
Formal Mentoring Programs
Organizations should focus on getting a good number of high-ranking leaders to help in mentoring and assisting women with talent within the firm. There is a need for such organization to work toward creating women groups as this will give women the opportunity to express their ability to lead. At the same time, they get to spend much time with other women who face same dilemmas as they exchange ideas and solutions on how to cope with and handle such dilemmas.
In every meeting of organization’s managers, one thing can easily be told without doubt; women are the minority. Also, it can be predicted that the few women in these leadership roles often sit together in groups of three or four while in meetings. Everyone wants to associate and be with people they share several things in common with. For this reason, women groups can be very helpful when it comes to mentoring, coaching, and nurturing women leaders for business organizations.
Eliminate Unintended Favoritism
Intentional bias can be a hard nut to crack. On the other hand, unintended favoritism is even harder since for most reasons; the guilty lots are not aware they are biased. Nevertheless, it has been studied and found that knowing applicants name before making a decision is a reason enough to steer it in a different direction. Some names get favored while some are pushed to the very bottom of the stack insentient. This unintended bias runs all through the whole operation from decisions made on bonuses and promotions, to employee evaluations and work assignments. This form of favoritism can be moderated using the right software.
Apposite talent management system can help in tracking mobile and in-office talent, measuring crew and product listings efficiency and identifying challenges before they turn into problems. Human capital can be managed better from application level to promotion with more accuracy and less guilt where unintentional bias lives.
Development of Opportunities
Other than greater development opportunities, organizations could encourage expansion of channels for women holding managerial and supervisory roles. From these ranks, senior executives and VPs are picked, and you never know a woman could be picked. Without sufficient supply at the first and second management levels, the problem is seriously compounded.
Also, because women are fewer in these corporate managerial roles, upcoming women leaders have no role models to emulate. If the organizations increase its influence and exposure of their veteran women, the bigger their success will be when it women are promoted to senior positions.
Accept to be a Mentor (Be a role model to the females)
If women are not doing well in your business organization, take it as your role to mentor them. Take it as a personal issue if you think or feel they are not as prosperous as you want within your corporate setting. Instead of prolonging the blame cycle, be a mentor and make the most of your workforce and the gender human resource.
Beyond certain steps, a mentor is someone who takes personal responsibility for other people’s success in your corporate environment. You must not leave any stone unturned. Mentorship programs have been proven to be a great way of nurturing women leaders.
Active Internal recruitment
It has been suggested that adding more women to the leadership roles of an organization potentially increases the effectiveness of that particular leadership team. Studies have also shown that business organizations with boards of directors consisting of women have impressive financial performance than those with just men. Besides, it is wise for organizations to conduct internal recruitment when there is need to fill leadership pipeline instead of enlisting executives from opponents.
Consider the visuals
This might sound more like a controversial notion, but it is self-descriptive; the visuals really matter in every corporate setting. If your organization is depicted as racist, it will remain racist. If you are told your company is discriminatory, it will always be discriminatory. If it is portrayed as misogynistic, it will be misogynistic, in the face of the shareholders and the world at large. However, this will not be digging deep to see what is happening behind the obvious visuals. Maybe there is a good reason for all that. If none cares about what you have to explain and your business organization has an apparent imbalance in the area of gender, it is important to think and do something about it.
Raj Kumar is a qualified business/finance writer expert in investment, debt, credit cards, Passive income, financial updates. He advises in his blog finance clap.
