Corporate gender equality need to wait

New York: Women around the globe are seeing slow progress in gaining gender and pay equality and are underrepresented at all levels in the workplace and executive boardrooms, a report shows.

Although they make up 40 per cent of the average company’s workforce, women represent only 33 per cent of managers and 26 per cent of senior managers. Even fewer, 20 per cent, have risen to the executive level because companies are slow to build talent pipelines to promote diversity.

The report by consulting firm Mercer, billed as the largest and most comprehensive research of its kind, showed there are still roadblocks preventing women gaining full equality in the workplace, despite advances over the past several decades. “At this pace and rate of change globally, we won’t see any form of gender equality in the workforce till 2050,” said Mercer’s Patricia A. Milligan after the report was released.

She described the underrepresentation of women as “an economic and social travesty” that will continue if companies do not take action.

“We won’t see any form of real pay equity in our lifetime,” Milligan, Mercer’s global leader, multinational client group, added in an interview.

The report, which covers 583 organisations representing 3.2 million employees in 42 countries, showed the number of women in jobs declines as the career level rises. Women are 1.5 times more likely than men to be hired at the executive level, but they are leaving at 1.3 times the rate of men.

“Simply bringing them in at the executive lever without looking at the talent pipeline is not a sustainable strategy,” Milligan explained.

Forty per cent of organisations in the US and Canada offer pay equity remediation processes, compared to 34 per cent globally, a quarter in Asia and 29 per cent in Europe.

But Mercer’s ‘When Women Thrive’ report showed progress has stalled with no improvements in the pay issue since 2014. “Less than 30 per cent of organisations routinely review performance ratings by gender to check for disparities that translate into difference in opportunities for men and women,” the report said.

The US and Canada ranked first with 14 per cent of organisations offering women-focused retirement and savings programmes, compared to only 9 per cent globally.

The report predicts Latin America is the only region expected to nearly reach equal gender representation in the workforce, rising from 36 per cent in 2015 to 49 per cent by 2025, followed by Australia and New Zealand, the US and Canada with 40 per cent of less.

Asia is projected to have the lowest representation of women in the workforce in a decade with 28 per cent.