International Women’s Day 2023: The Best Way to Embrace Equity is to Act on it.
International Women’s Day, and Women’s history month broadly, is an empowering time for women to reflect on our accomplishments, how far we’ve come - and also the importance of continuing to push for gender equity - because we still have a long way to go. While the theme this year is “embrace equity,” there has been a pushback from many women pointing out that what WE as women need is not about embracing, rather we need our male allies to walk the talk toward action and change for any chance at seeing equity in our lifetimes.
It is still projected to take 132 years minimum to reach gender parity at the current rate of progress. Women remain underrepresented in leadership, on boards, in product design considerations and still earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns - a number that has hardly budged in twenty years. While women already received a disproportionately low percentage of startup and VC funding, in 2020 it dropped from 2.8 to 2.3%.
The Covid-19 pandemic took a brutal toll on women and slowed progress. Women lost an estimated 54 million jobs during the pandemic, as not only jobs were eliminated, but with women bearing the disproportionate burden of child and elder care and other unpaid domestic labor. Women of color were hit the hardest. The rising cost of child and elder care has highlighted the need for a more mainstream focus on the care economy as a critical part of working toward gender equity.
Proactively working toward gender equity should no longer be viewed as optional – it is and should be viewed as imperative to smart business practice and risk mitigation. S&P Global research finds, for example, that if women entered, and stayed in, the workforce at a pace in line with Norway, the American economy would be $1.6 trillion larger than it is today. There is a lot to do at the national policy level in the US and elsewhere, but since I work with private organizations, I’m going to highlight some ideas for what orgs can do independently, starting now. I challenge each one of us to push ourselves and our organizations to take at least one action this month that will move us toward gender equity even – especially - in the midst of crisis.
Lastly, men: please use your privilege and power to take action in these areas and beyond as advocates - this isn’t only women’s battle to fight and we can’t do it without you on board. Below are some ideas for action.
Continually review and update your organizational gender-related policies and culture
Including hiring, paid parental and family leave, childcare benefits, flexible work conditions, wage equity, ongoing and relevant diversity education and training. Diverse teams are more productive teams, and healthy and balanced employees are more productive ones. Keep asking - are the policies of your organization not only centering women but actively working to undo systems of patriarchy and white supremacy culture? For example, an inclusive parental leave package is more inclusive and gender smart than a “disability” framed maternal leave. Different groups of people in your organization have different needs from the white male archetype in order to work at optimal productivity. Check in on and with your women and minority team members for regular feedback. Ruchika Tulshyan’s book Inclusion on Purpose is an excellent resource.
“One size fits men,” or a simple “shrink it and pink it” approach is not only exclusive, but also bad for business. Make sure that the design and development teams for your proposed products, services and solutions are diverse. Seek diverse feedback to ensure that your offerings don’t actually reinforce gender roles and stereotypes, as so many “gender neutral” products and services unconsciously do. Consider implementing gender metrics tracking and benchmarking to hold yourself accountable, in addition to constant feedback from diverse perspectives.
Ensure that your products and services are truly inclusive.
Invest in women -owned small businesses and funds.
You can do this through personal investing but also advocate to moving organizational investments into gender smart, social impact funds. This is a move that many mission-driven organizations are moving toward, as they acknowledge the disconnect when organizational investments don’t match your purpose and mission. The GIIN has a list of various gender investment funds and their approaches to using a gender lens. I’m personally excited to be part of a recently launched fund to catalyze women’s health entrepreneurs using a gender lens in Latin America with partners Linked Foundation, New Ventures, and others - Empodera Impact Capital.
Women globally perform 3-5 times as much paid and unpaid domestic and care labor than men, which impacts our ability to perform other paid labor and advance in our careers. How can you or your company work to improve conditions in the care economy that would recognize, and reduce, redistribute and reward unpaid and paid care and domestic work? There are social enterprises you can support, HR policies to reduce these time and financial costs for women, and much much more.
A focus on the Care Economy is long overdue, and increasingly critical to gender equity.
What other steps are you taking? What are your commitments? Feel free to reach out to share your feedback, other ideas and let me know if I can help!
