Diversity is imperative to all workplaces. People with completely different backgrounds and experiences, who come close together as a team, will develop innovative ideas that may keep your company alive and thriving. Despite this, companies in many industries and roles are not benefiting from this because they are dominated by a single-sex. For example, tech industry roles are typically filled by men, while nursing roles are typically filled by women. In each case, the customers are more diverse than the people serving them, which don’t bode well for understanding their needs. To better serve your customers, it’s important to cultivate gender diversity within the work.

Gender diversity doesn’t imply that an organization should have a 50/50 mix of males and females for every position in the company. However, it does mean that all the roles should have a fair representation of both sexes at every level in the company.

As leaders, we can employ a range of strategies to improve gender diversity in the workplace.

1. Encourage an inclusive and respectful culture

A survey report points out that though women connected with a lot of everyday slights and disrespectful behavior than men, 58 percent of all employees expertise some kind of micro aggression, suggesting incivility is common at work.

If things need to change, then it can’t just be about driving the culture and values of the company but also highlighting and communicating that there is no room for sexual harassment, disrespect, or bias, and when needed, stringent action will be taken. Communicate, communicate, communicate this a thousand times over, and start at the top.

2. Build a comprehensive workplace

Before making an attempt to hire for gender diversity, look at intervals and appraise your company culture. Is your company a decent place to figure despite gender? Do you treat people across the gender spectrum equally? Consult your employees to learn how you can build a more inclusive workplace, and put in the work to continually improve your company culture. An inclusive culture can facilitate build your employer brand, so you can attract and retain a diverse workforce

3. Restructure your pay and benefits program

To make your company as engaging as potential to a broader range of individual people, you want to erase pay difference between men and women within the same positions.

One way to try and do this is often to prevent asking a few candidate’s previous wage and offer the same pay range to every potential employee, no matter of what they made in an earlier position. Considering that asking candidates regarding their wage history is already prohibited in some states, this is good practice anyway.

When it involves to advantages, studies conjointly show that women in specifically value robust, family-oriented perks once seeking a new job. This means you should be as generous as possible with family leave, health insurance, remote work and flexible hours.

4. Analyze exit interviews

Exit interviews are useful to understand why people are leaving, so you can improve how you hire and retain talent. If you’re working toward gender diversity within the workplace, you‘ll conjointly poke into your differences in why men and women are leaving your organization. This can provide insights that are unique to your company, and allow you to monitor your progress over time. If, for example, you learn that women are less satisfied with compensation than men, you’ll take steps to enhance your compensation strategy and see however perceptions change over a year.

5. Reserve equal seats for women in a boardroom meeting

The higher they’re going; a lot of women realize themselves alone within the room, which typically makes them feel isolated. Companies need to stop having just two women in the boardroom because it checks a box. According to the report, companies need to examine and explore how they can move women through their organization.

The report explains, “One approach is to hire and promote women in cohorts; another is to cluster women on teams. As opposed to staffing one woman on several of teams, companies should consider putting groups of two to three women on teams together.”

And in to move far from reinforcing gender stereotypes, it recommends thinking twice before clustering women in functions traditionally dominated by women, like human resources and communications.

It additionally recommends making opportunities for the “only” women in a room to connect with other alternative women and to foster additional women’s networking teams inside organization.

Above discussed strategies are the few things companies can do for gender diversity and make more money while doing so. Promoting inclusiveness and variety at your workplace is one of the most effective ways that foster an open-minded, global company culture. Not only does this make good business sense serving your company to better understanding colleagues, clients, and customers around the world it additionally makes the workplace a lot interesting and personally enriching environment for everyone.