Women hold up half the sky – a phrase first uttered by Mao Zedong in 1949, popularized in a 2009 book, and well known to any parents who, like me, adopted girls born in China – is accurate, if not true.
49.6% of the people in the world are women, but that’s where the equality ends. Women still make less than men – 82 cents on the dollar, and that ratio gets worse as they climb to executive ranks. Women of color, mothers, older women, and those who have been unemployed are penalized further. Last year, the World Economic Forum estimated it would take more than 135 years to close the gender pay gap, a generation more than was expected before COVID.
Makes women's half of the sky seem a lot heavier, doesn’t it?
Even so, there’s some good news coming out of the pandemic, based on the latest research from the IBM Institute for Business Value. The pipeline of women poised to take on leadership roles in the U.S. is expanding – up roughly 10 points over 2021 at the professional and manager levels. As you might expect, there’s news that’s not so good as well. When we look at the most senior levels in an organization, the pipeline is still shrinking – down 1 point over last year in the C-suite and among boards of directors.
However, when a woman sits in the corner office, that organization’s leadership pipeline is filled with 23% more women than other organizations, perhaps because 72% of women CEOs say they make advancement of women a top business priority (versus just 16% of men CEOs). So here’s an idea: let women lead.
If you follow Chief, the women’s power networking group, they will tell you March is more than Women’s History Month, it’s Women’s Future Month. Founder Lindsay Kaplan puts it bluntly: “There are 5 million executive women in the United States right now—women who are ready to take the helm of companies, to serve on boards, to run for office. If we want to do it, we can change the world today. Promote them. Open the doors. Give them a seat at the table.”
And that’s smart business. Our study found that organizations can achieve a 61% higher rate of revenue growth when they make active changes to reach gender equity, including making the advancement of women a top strategic priority.
If we have any hope that our granddaughters’ granddaughters will be holding up a sky under which they have equal pay and equal opportunity, we need to start letting women lead today. Read our research to learn about 5 steps organizations can take to build gender equity in leadership.
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