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Women face unique challenges in the workplace that influence their careers. Employers can do their part to mitigate these issues by understanding the trends and working to prevent barriers.
Women Rising released it’s the Voice of Women at Work 2023 report, highlighting some of the most recognised challenges and opportunities for women in the workplace.
Megan Dalla-Camina, founder and CEO of Women Rising joined The HR Leader to discuss the results from the report, and what leaders can do to create an inclusive environment for women.
HR Leader: “With just eight per cent of women thriving at work, what can employers do to turn these results around?”
Ms Dalla Camina: “One of the concerning things that we see is that on the surface, women may look like that everything's fine. But when you really start to unpack it and ask them, ‘How are you doing?’ That’s when you reveal those kinds of numbers.”
“And I think there's a lot of contributing factors. It's very nuanced and layered. We saw very high levels of stress and burnout coming through the pandemic for women. But we may have thought that that would have settled down by now. And what we're actually seeing is it's still going up.”
She continued: “So, when it comes to employers, managers, and HR leaders, [they need] to be thinking about a couple of key things. Number one, the biggest challenge that women said that they face in their work environment is workload. And I'm sure it's not just women. It's across all genders of completely unmanageable expectations. People doing two jobs, three jobs across a whole range of industries, particularly in industries like tech, that have had such massive layoffs.”
“I would recommend absolutely that managers and HR leaders start to look at what is the workload on our people, particularly on our women, and what can we do about that? Because it is the biggest issue,” said Ms Dalla-Camina
“Women say that the number one thing they need to thrive at work is a good relationship with their manager. But a high percentage of women said that they don't have that. And we know that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. So, when we're looking at attrition rates and retention, where is the support for the manager? How are the managers supporting everybody in their team, the women, for this conversation?”
“One of the other big things that came out in this report are the levels of bias that women are experiencing because of gender, but that they're also experiencing because of age. We often think that age bias happens in the younger age groups and in the older age groups. But what we saw is that it's across every age group that women are experiencing that age bias in the workplace,” she explained.
HR Leader: “Why are women changing jobs at such a high rate?”
Ms Dalla-Camina: “We saw was almost a third of women that we surveyed had changed companies in the last 18 months, and only a small percentage of that were layoffs due to COVID-19 … Women feel like they've got nowhere to go or that they have unlocked potential. And this is a good message for HR leaders and leaders across the board, that there is massive untapped potential for women in your workplace.”
She added: “A lot of women want more opportunities, they want to step up, they aspire to management leadership roles. They need a better relationship with their manager. They want their careers to be invested in. Seventy-four per cent of women told us that they will consider leaving their organisation in the next 18 months if they don't get career development. And only 40 per cent of women said that they've actually had that in the last 18 months.”
The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Megan Dalla-Camina, click below:
Jack Campbell
Jack is the editor at HR Leader.
