The Future of Job Markets: Gender Parity in Recruitment and Selection
Disruptive changes to business models
will have a profound impact on the employment landscape over the coming years.
Many of the major drivers of transformation currently affecting global
industries are expected to have a significant impact on jobs, ranging from
significant job creation to job displacement, and from heightened labour
productivity to widening skills gaps. In many industries and countries, the
most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years
ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate (World Economic Forum, 2016).
Video 1 - What will the future of jobs be like?
The World Economic Forum’s online Repository of
Successful Practices for Gender Parity pools information on the practices that
have been successfully used in leading companies worldwide to close gender gaps
at the company level, as well as along the companies’ supply chain and
surrounding communities.
The repository suggests six dimensions around which to focus an organization’s gender parity efforts.
1. Measurement and target setting: Achievable, relevant recruitment, and retention targets at all levels, with an embedded accountability mechanism, are critical. Developing a disaggregated database can help to evaluate the causes of gender imbalances and track progress. Transparent salary bands to track and address male and female salary gaps are additional useful tools to understand the status quo in organizations.
3. Awareness and accountability: The focus of many companies on building awareness indicates that the case for change still needs to be built to make progress. Accountability of the senior management and transparency of career paths and opportunities have proven to be effective practices. Ensuring those management policies, processes, systems and tools do not harbour gender-based discrimination, as well as enhancing the understanding of unconscious biases can also make inclusive leadership more tangible.
4. Work environment and work-life balance: Women are often the primary caregiver for both children and the elderly in most countries. Ensuring smooth on- and off-ramping and appropriate childcare options, and developing guidelines on the implementation of work-life balance policies and mentoring for women going through a transition are important levers to ensure a sustained career progression towards management. For those companies that already offer parental leave, flexible working hours, and other work-life balance programmes, the next steps lie in accelerating their use and acceptance by female and male employees.
5. Leadership and company commitment: Visible leadership by the chief executive and top management on supporting women in management has proven to be one of the most important levers for progress in achieving gender diversity in a corporate context. This includes concrete and symbolic actions by top management and, in many cases, the establishment of a position or department to lead diversity efforts. Regular communications by senior management on gender equality have been found to be critical.
6. Responsibility beyond the office: Many companies have leveraged the opportunity to exercise external influence along the value chain, including diversity training for suppliers, distributors and partners and training to support women-owned businesses in the organization’s value chain. External influence can also be exercised by ensuring gender neutrality in advertising, engaging girls and young women to display possible career paths and developing partnerships with gender parity-focused civil society and public sector initiatives.
Reference
Noe, R.A., HollenBeck, C.,
Gerhart, B., & Wright, G. (2006). Human Resources Management- Gaining a
Competitive Advantage (5th Ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
World Economic Forum. (2016). The
Future of the Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth
Industrial Revolution. World Economic Forum. Available at: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs.pdf.
(Accessed: 04 December
2020).
Adding more to you blog, in one US-based experiment, researchers asked 93 participants to consider both male and female applicants for a construction manager position (Norton et al., 2004). When the applicants’ genders were concealed, participants rated education as a more important criterion for success on the job than prior work experience and were more likely to prefer the more educated candidate. However, when the applicants’ genders were revealed, and the highly educated applicant with low work experience was a woman, participants rated prior work experience as more important than education, to the advantage of the male applicant (Norton et al., 2004).
ReplyDeleteThanks for your input Malithra. The gender of assessees should not affect the ratings of assessors. In other words, assessor ratings should reflect that men and women perform equally well in assessment centers and that assessment centers are equally valid predictors of future performance for men and women. Research by Weijerman and Born (1995) confirmed this assumption, as ratings of managerial potential of 77 Dutch civil servants were not biased by the gender of the candidates. Bobrow and Leonards (1997) and Rotenberry et al. (1999) reported similar results. Nevertheless, in other studies ratings were prone to subtle gender bias, favoring women candidates. For instance, in Schmitt (1993) ratings indicated small performance differences in favor of female candidates. Neubauer (1990) found women received slightly higher ratings in a German high school career assessment center. In another study (Shore, 1992) 375 men and 61 women were assessed on their intellectual ability, performance-related and interpersonally related skills, and overall management potential. Although there were no significant differences between men and women in overall management potential ratings or in long-term job advancement, women obtained consistently higher ratings on performance-related skills (Lievens et al, 2001).
DeleteAccording to (Bertrand and Hallock 1999), the reasons for imposing gender parity in top positions lie in the extremely low percentage of decisionmakers who are women, within both the public and private spheres. In politics, only in 19 out of 189 countries did women account for 30% or more parliamentary seats in 2007. In Italy and France, respectively, only 3% and 4% of the 50 largest companies’ board directors are women. In the US, women made up only 3.4% of the top-level management in 1997.
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