Gender equity là gì

Why We Need Gender Equity Now

By: Katica Roy

We need gender equity now. Those are words often uttered in social justice circles, and recently, across a number of headlines. What does that mean? More broadly, how is gender equity different than gender equality?

If gender equality is the end, gender equity is the means.

Genderequality"does not mean that women and men will become the same, but that womens and mens rights, responsibilities and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female.

Genderequitymeans fairness of treatment for women and men, according to their respective needs. This may include equal treatment or treatment that is different, but which is considered equivalent in terms of rights, benefits, obligations, and opportunities.

When we talk about opportunity, were talking about ensuring opportunity is not limited simply on the basis of gender. We are talking about correcting for gender biases so that economic outcomes improve for all.

Why do we need equity?

Lets start at the beginning. In no country are women in equal. In fact, the World Economic Forum projects it will take170 years to reach gender equality globally, and 158 years in North America. That means it will take five more generations for us to see gender equality - or my great, great, great, great, grandchildren. Thats not only bad news for our daughters - its bad news for our sonsbecause gender equality impacts the economic pie for all.

Many of the measures concerninggender equality interplay with the economyand more specifically,the workforce.

Heres the current state:

• If theres only one woman in your candidate pool,theres statistically no chance shell get the job
• Men are promoted at 30% higher rates than women during their early career stages
• 90% of women leave the workforce because of other workplace problems[rather than having a child]
• Women are paid79 cents on the dollarof their male colleagues [that drops drastically to39 cents for the top 2% of wage earnersin the U.S.]
• More men named John runFTSE 100 companiesthan women
• In a study of 21,980 firms from 91 countries, just over50% of firms didnt have any female executives[only 11% of firms had all female executives]
• 50% women in STEM fields will eventually leavebecause of hostile work environments

In addition to women attaining57% of bachelor degrees and above in 2015[thattrajectory is projected to continue], they are also themajority of university students in nearly 100 countries. Women are an educated cohort, particularly in the U.S., but they are not making it up the talent pipeline. Why not?Gender biasis causing a leaky pipeline.

How does equity lead to equality?

If gender equity is about fairness, then what we are talking about here is making up for the gap between gender bias and reality. How can we hack the system to give women an equitable shot?

Overall,gender mainstreamingis a very useful strategy. Why? It overlays the gender lens across any action, policy and more. Lets take an example:

Raising the social security retirement agein the U.S.

Seemingly, this affects women and men equally. Not the case. Not only do women havelower social security benefits, they alsolive longer, andfind it harder to get a job in their later years due to age and gender bias. Raising the social security age disproportionately adversely affects women. If we understood that data, we might make different decisions so that retired women arenttwice as likely to live in poverty.

Gender mainstreaming our workplace policies including hiring, pay, performance, and promotion enables positive leaps toward gender equality.

Why does gender equity affect allof us?

In addition to the40% of U.S. householdswith children under the age 18 where women are the primary or sole breadwinner, in the median U.S. household with a mother working outside of the home, women contributenearly 40% of their familys total earnings. Womens earnings and economic opportunity matter to the majority of families in the U.S.

In fact, in the U.S. we could increase ourGDP by $2T to $4T by closing the gender gap[since 1970, it did increase by$2T because women increased their labor force participation and hours]. That impacts not only families with children where women work but all families and the U.S. as a whole because it increases the economic pie including jobs and earnings.

Couple that with the growing skills gap in the U.S. [5 million workforce shortage by 2020], women as a growing majority of the educated workforce [noted above] and the fact that they are leaving the labor force [womens participation in the labor force dropped from59.2% in 2004 to 57% in 2014, it is projected to drop again to 55.8 by 2024], and we have an issue. The U.S. will struggle to grow its economy without the full participation of women and equity matters [evenTim Cook cited this risk specific to STEM earlier this year].

On the path to gender equality, we need gender equity. In order to have gender equity, we need to change the narrative and focus away from fixing women and put it squarely where it belongs - fixing the system. A system that has generated a leaky pipeline and suppressed economic opportunity at all levels - individual, family, company, and country.

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Katica Royis an ambassador for gender equity in the workplace and beyond. She is the CEO and co-founder of Denver-basedPipeline, a SaaS platform that leverages artificial intelligence to drive economic gains through closing the gender equity gap. Lets fix leaky pipeline -share your thoughts on how we can improve the narrative.

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