How To Set Goals for Greater Gender Balance and Inclusion

In light of Women’s History Month, Caitlin Kirwan shares a systematic approach for identifying gaps and setting gender equality goals – something that’s absolutely critical to the employee experience. 

The roots of Women’s History Month trace back to March 8, 1857, when women from New York City factories protested over poor working conditions. New York then celebrated the first Women’s Day in 1909, and over seven decades later, Congress established a National Women’s History Week to be marked annually in the 2nd week of March. In 1987 the week was expanded to Women’s History Month, which we now celebrate right across the world.

But, as I explored in my recent blog post about how to celebrate International Women’s Day in a meaningful way, marking these important campaigns needs to be about more than a themed bake sale or a hurried all-staff email from the CEO. One of the most important things an organization can do to demonstrate its commitment to gender balance and inclusion is to set actionable goals.

This blog post explores why goal-setting should be on your agenda this Women’s History Month, and shares three practical steps to get you on your way. 

The importance of setting goals for gender balance and inclusion

Let’s start by clarifying what we mean by gender balance and inclusion.

Achieving gender balance is about ensuring equitable opportunities for all employees, regardless of their gender. This includes equitable access to opportunities for development, compensation, benefits, and employment across the organization. Similarly, gender inclusion refers to the active efforts an organization makes to respect and acknowledge all gender identities.

And it’s certainly not new news that gender diversity has been linked to improved organizational performance. Researchers have highlighted three main reasons for the positive link: 

• A diverse workforce signals an attractive work environment for talent – Glassdoor found that 67% of job seekers look at workforce diversity when they consider a job offer. 
• Diversity leads to greater innovation and idea exchange – Research shows that diverse teams are more likely to come up with more innovative ideas. 
• Gender diversity is seen as a sign of competent management – Gender equality is increasingly seen as a baseline feature of well-managed organizations, and is something that investors and shareholders often look for.

As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. Setting goals relating to gender balance and inclusion allows organizations to take a systematic approach that leads to sustained impact. The Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency sums it up pretty well…

Similar to setting financial or other operational targets within an organization, establishing realistic gender targets based on rigorous analysis and baseline data will significantly increase your chances of achieving the target.

Formalizing your commitment to gender balance and inclusivity in the form of hard and fast goals sends a clear message to employees that diversity and inclusion are priorities. And setting these goals also enables leadership teams to commit the time and resources needed to achieve greater gender equality.  

How to set your goals

There are a few actions that every organization needs to take before diving into goal setting.

Firstly, get your employee resource groups (ERGs) involved to begin forming a goal-setting project team. ERGs are made up of employees who come together to exchange ideas on how the company can better foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. The chances are that they’ll already have some great ideas about the sorts of things you should be targeting in your gender balance goals.

The next action is to define your target group. Will every goal you’re going to set apply to all employees? Or will there be specific goals that apply to different groups at different levels, from leadership through to junior employees? It’s important to think about the differences between business units and consider if certain parts of the organization would benefit from dedicated gender balance goals.

The next pre-goal-setting action is to clarify accountabilities. Think about who will be responsible for achieving the goals you’re going to set, and ensure they are included in the project team. Nobody likes surprises – so make sure these key stakeholders are informed and consulted from the very start of the process.

Finally – and most importantly – remember that the goals you’re setting need to be in support of the organization’s overall gender equality strategy or vision. It’s estimated that around 75% of enterprises worldwide have equal opportunity or diversity and inclusion policies in place. Ensure the goals you define are aligned and consistent with the organization’s existing commitments.  

With these actions completed, it’s time to set your goals!

Step 1: Analyze data to highlight gaps and opportunities

The first and arguably most important step is to take some time to analyze the data that’s available. In addition to benchmarking your current gender gap, this step includes:

• Analyzing gender parity and gender equity 
• Reviewing your existing gender policy
• Creating an inventory of already-implemented practices

While this ‘hard data’ will help you to understand the facts and figures when it comes to gender balance and equality, it won’t necessarily provide any insight into how inclusive the organization feels to your employees.

To build a picture of the current state of inclusivity, it can be helpful to review things like employee engagement survey results, recruitment data, employee turnover data, and information from exit interviews.

Analyzing all of this information will reveal the gaps and opportunities for your new gender balance goals.  

Step 2: Establish the priorities

As much as we’d all like to, we can’t tackle everything at once.

So once you’ve highlighted your gaps and opportunity areas, the next step is to establish which ones should be prioritized. Reminding yourself of the organization’s overall gender equality strategy or vision that you considered before beginning the goal process will help steer your goals in the right direction.

Deprioritizing something doesn’t mean it’s going to be ignored or neglected, it just means other things land higher on the priority list. This kind of phased approach is often the best way to get some forward motion!

Step 3: Define short, medium and long-term goals

…which leads us nicely to step three: defining short, medium and long-term goals.

By this stage, the data analysis has given you a good idea of the challenges needing addressing and the prioritization exercise has highlighted the most critical areas for the goals.

The next step is to break these objectives down into short, medium, and long-term. They can include strategic longer-term goals, but also the more ad-hoc tactical interventions that can be rolled out more quickly. Both are important.    

Use Workvivo to successfully launch your new gender balance goals

Once you’ve defined your new gender balance goals, it’s essential to communicate them in a way that engages employees and contributes toward positive cultural change.

Workvivo is the perfect platform to support the launch. There’s a reason we’re the world’s no.1 employee experience platform, with millions of users! Come and say hi if you’d like to schedule a demo and find out how we can support your organization.