After reading McKinsey & Company Women in the Workplace 2020, I simply could not stand by silently allowing folks to believe the narrowly defined "Women in Supply Chain" research being championed over-and-over again by Gartner. Per McKinsey, "the ‘broken rung’ is still holding women back. Despite gains for women in leadership, the “broken rung” was still a major barrier in 2019. For the sixth year in a row, women continued to lose ground at the first step up to manager. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were promoted—and this gap was even larger for some women: only 58 Black women and 71 Latinas were promoted. As a result, women remained significantly outnumbered in entry-level management at the beginning of 2020—they held just 38 percent of manager-level positions, while men held 62 percent."
Recorded w/ Rob O'Byrne in July, I urged folks to poke the "17%" CSCO representation evangelized, particularly given the sheer volume of feedback from real-time touchpoints. As McKinsey confirms, based on a data set with 317 companies and 40,000 people surveyed on their workplace experiences, women have been hit hard by COVID, especially non-white women who were already marginalized in the workplace and frankly, brushed over in the Gartner conversation. Companies are stepping up, but many aren’t addressing the likely underlying causes of stress and burnout tied to gender inequities. Per Mckinsey, "fewer companies have taken steps to adjust the norms and expectations that are most likely responsible for employee stress and burnout. Less than a third of companies have adjusted their performance review criteria to account for the challenges created by the pandemic, and only about half have updated employees on their plans for performance reviews or their productivity expectations during COVID-19."
The pandemic has intensified challenges that women already faced. Many working mothers have worked a “double shift”. Now add remote learning which has forced more than 1 in 4 women to contemplate downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely. Per the McKinsey report, "Mothers are more than three times as likely as fathers to be responsible for most of the housework and caregiving during the pandemic. In fact, they’re 1.5 times more likely than fathers to be spending an additional three or more hours per day on housework and childcare".
We are defining supply chain roles too narrowly folks. Also, let's be responsible and not evangelize a false, non-inclusive narrative. Progress toward gender parity remains slow.
Let's talk about it!
Link to the discussion thread on LinkedIn ~> https://lnkd.in/dQJTw_3
Source: McKinsey & Company (2020) https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace?cid=soc-web
#supplychain #humanresources #diversity #sustainability
