Who needs quotas when you’ve got common sense.
In its massive 2015 recruitment drive, the Australian Bureau of Statistics made some impressive progress on gender diversity: 43% of its senior executives are now women, and 350 or the 613 successful applicants are female.
That’s seen it double its proportion of women in its senior ranks in less than a year, according to The Canberra Times today.
So how did they manage that when it’s, apparently for some, so impossible to find women?
Fairfax reports that the introduction of new recruitment measures, including removing names and gender from CVs and job applications, were a significant help in the process.
But the Bureau’s COO Jonathan Palmer also notes one other thing that led to some remarkable change. They asked women what they wanted.
Imagine that!
He said from there they started designing jobs that met the needs of employees: with flexibility, work from home options, and the ability to work from another office. He told hiring staff to not make assumptions about what women want and to encourage women to apply.
The ABS was seriously behind the rest of the Australian Public Sector before the latest drive, with just 21% of its senior executives being female, compared with 42% across the sector (still a low figure given women make up 60% of the entire Public Service, according to the Fairfax report).
I like this ABS case study as it shows what can happen if you take clear innovative measures to address a gender imbalance — such as the blind recruitment initiative — but also what happens when you do more simple things, like asking questions.
Don’t just say ‘there are no women’ or ‘women aren’t applying’. That’s not good enough. Look around, there are plenty of women. The fact they’re not responding to your job application, or progressing up the ranks in your organisation, says much more about your recruitment and employment practices than it does about the women in general.
Looking to hire women? A few tips:
- Cut the assumptions. Don’t make predictions on whether a woman would want a particular role, no matter how intense the tasks, how male dominated the field, or how inflexible the work
- Ask female AND male candidates about their ideal working scenario. It could be as simple as working from home one day a week, being able to drop the kids at school each morning or taking additional annual leave to go surfing in Indonesia every year.
- Make the shortlist ‘blind’. Ask somebody with no responsibility for the selection process to remove names and other gender and cultural identifiers from CVs and applications.
- Address language on the job description. Are you immediately turning some women off with words that make it appear ‘blokey’? Are you preventing talented candidates from applying because they feel they’re not, absolutely, 100% qualified? Are you really only prepared to hire a ‘guru’ — because that word alone will see a large base of talent immediately eliminating themselves.
- Take a good, hard look at your company website. Maybe you don’t have a huge amount of women currently employed within your organisation or senior leadership team. No matter what, you can at least outline your aspirations for an inclusive environment. Avoid the all-bloke images. Avoid statements like that you ‘wind down after a big week by drinking beer and partying hard!!’. Outline your diversity policy and note you’re a flexible employer that’s either got, or is building, a diverse and inclusive culture. Be honest if you’ve got work to do, but share the solutions you’re working on to make change happen.
- Create a gender-balanced interviewing panel. Just like no one wants to see an all-male panel at an event, nobody wants to find themselves in front of one (or an all-female one for that matter) during the interviewing process.
- Introduce a formal mentoring scheme. Give every new recruit an internal buddy. It doesn’t cost much, but it will pay off significantly in terms of attracting and retaining great talent. Declare this is on offer in job advertisements, and talk about how the program works on your website.
- Show you’re committed to hiring women by offering great entitlements. Make those entitlements — particularly around caring responsibilities — accessible to both men and women. This is not just about offering more weeks of paid parental leave than your nearest competitor, it’s about actively demonstrating how men and women are using such schemes to balance their careers with life.
The above is just a general start on what employers can do to hire more women.
We want to put together a more comprehensive list, including case studies. If you’ve got an idea or a success story, get in contact.