10/24/2022

Why the Office Gender Gap Persists

Even after #MeToo, office inequities exist

The gender gap at the office hasn’t gone away, and organizations aren’t implementing strategies that could address it.

Those are the two main takeaways from LeanIn.org’s latest Women in the Workplace report, released last week. In some ways, it’s not news that the gap persists. As ever, the percentage of women in senior leadership roles is disproportionate to that of men: They occupy only 26 percent of C-suite positions. Nor is it a surprise that many women leaders are sending a message to their organizations by walking away, either to a new job or out of the workforce. “For every woman at the director level who gets promoted to the next level, two women directors are choosing to leave their company,” according to the report. (The numbers are generally worse for women of color.)

What’s striking about this dismal, if familiar, news is LeanIn’s findings about the implementation piece: Despite roughly a half-decade or so of high-level, public conversations around #MeToo, DEI, microaggressions, broken rungs, glass cliffs, and issues that exacerbate the gender gap, traction has been subpar, and “companies are struggling to hold on to the relatively few women leaders they have,” according to the report.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.