Gender Diversity: Top Five Signs You Have a Problem

Diversity problems can be hard to spot, especially in well-intentioned organizations. For companies who aspire to build an environment where women leaders thrive, here are signs that it may be time to examine your culture and practices and their impact on diversity objectives.

Homogenous candidate pools

When companies struggle to find a diverse set of candidates for a role, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing there just aren't enough diverse candidates out there. While limited supply is a legitimate challenge, it's often the cultural practices in place that pose a more significant obstacle. The companies who succeed at attracting diverse candidates overcome the challenge of limited supply by examining their recruiting practices and creating new hiring and development pathways.

Lack of diversity in certain job families

A company may see gender parity when it looks at data in aggregate, but diving deeper reveals large variation in gender diversity by role type. This type of gap can create career path blindspots since some jobs are on the leadership track and some are not. Not only can this impact leadership diversity long term, but it can also affect people's feelings of value. For example, if your organization values technical expertise and most technical resources are men, it can result in women feeling undervalued.

Lack of gender diversity in leadership roles

Achieving diversity objectives starts from the top. A lack of women leaders means a lack of role models and mentors to grow future women leaders. Understanding the root cause of leadership diversity gaps requires examining the entire employee lifecycle, including recruiting, development, and promotion. What roles are on the leadership track? How are promotion decisions made? What are attributes valued in leadership?

Variation in employee satisfaction by group

Employee satisfaction surveys are a great tool to identify what you're doing well and areas you can improve the employee experience. The data will uncover clues about how different groups are experiencing your culture. Diving deeper into the root cause of these results is a critical step and requires engaging your team in open conversation about opportunities and solutions.

High potential women leaving the company

Great companies lose great people because they don't understand the deeper causes for disconnection and dissatisfaction. Attrition is a painful outcome not only because it's sad to see great people leave, but it's also costly. According to SHRM research, employee attrition costs the company 50% to 250% of the employee's annual salary. Investing in creating an environment where diverse teams thrive is good for people and good for business.

If you aspire to build diverse teams and any of these warning signs sound familiar, it's time to take a closer look at the root causes and develop an action plan.