Despite being considered a thing of the past, gender inequality, whether conscious or unconscious, is alive and present in today’s workplace.
As toxic work cultures continue to plague work environments, it becomes challenging for employees to be their authentic selves while accomplishing their desired career growth. By improving your company’s gender diversity, you will attract and retain more talented women, allowing your organization to benefit from different perspectives, information, and ideas.
To be successful in your quest for gender diversity, you will need to ensure that gender equality is a top priority, communicating this effort to employees at every given chance.
Here are three ways to eliminate gender bias at your workplace:
- Implement Gender Neutral Recruitment Processes
- Conduct Regular Pay Audits
- Establish Employee Mentoring Programs
Implement Gender Neutral Recruitment Processes
A common area where gender bias exists is in the recruitment process. Therefore, it is essential to review and examine your company’s processes. Consider reviewing how your advertisement is worded, how interviews are conducted, and how hires are made. By tracking the gender breakdown of new hires, you will search for fairness and parity in numbers, roles, and seniority levels. The wording of your organization’s job advertisements and descriptions is crucial as it can affect who applies and gets hired.
Refrain from using gender-charged words in your hiring and recruitment practices. For instance, research shows that adjectives such as “cooperative” and “collaborative” attract women rather than men while “competitive and “determined” put off women when seen in job descriptions. Although words are selected to convey a role, certain words have connotations that go beyond your company’s intentions.
Conduct Regular Pay Audits
The gender pay gap is significant in many countries, and thus, your company must conduct regular pay audits for parity between genders and races. This can be done by listing the persons employed by your organization and their pay rates and comparing liked roles and performance levels to review and evaluate whether a gap or discrepancy exists between the pay of men and women. This is considered one of the most tangible manifestations of gender bias, whereby women work hard and perform their duties well but receive lower salaries than their male counterparts.
When your company evaluates its compensation curve, you will obtain insight into any patterns, inconsistencies, and present bias. Thus, your leaders can take the necessary steps to improve your compensation system.
Establish Employee Mentoring Programs
Mentoring can be a great tool for your organization that can aid in tackling gender bias. Establishing a mentoring program fosters connections among employees, enabling everyone to share their experiences and skills while creating career progression. It is also a great way to equalize promotion opportunities and create better career opportunities for women within the company. The guidance and knowledge provided by mentors will motivate women team members to accomplish their career ambitions.
Additionally, mentoring programs are critical in fostering a more diverse work hierarchy, leading to successful diversity efforts.
Final thoughts
Eliminating gender bias with these three steps will help embrace gender-based equality, ultimately providing a safe and encouraging work environment for all. Although there is no one size fits all remedy to reduce gender bias, your organization must remain committed to the cause with continuous communication of your message to ensure that everyone takes this seriously if you are to be successful.
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