If you don’t need an LMIA, submit an offer of employment and pay the employer compliance fee using the Employer Portal. Provide the offer of employment number you receive to the worker you want to hire so they can apply for their work permit.
Some employers don’t need to submit an offer of employment in the Employer Portal or pay the employer compliance fee. Find out if you are exempt.
Have the worker apply for a work permit
Once you have an LMIA number or offer of employment number, send those details to the worker with the job offer. They need to use this information to apply for a work permit.
If you are exempt from the employer compliance process, send the worker the employment contract. They can use it to apply.
Tell the worker what to expect from their application
Tell the worker that they will receive a letter of introduction when their work permit has been approved. The actual work permit is issued by a border services officer at the port of entry when the worker arrives in Canada. If the worker is already in Canada and eligible to apply, we will mail the work permit to them.
The old ideal of retiring after 40 years with one company, taking home a pension and a gold watch, is fading into the past. For many reasons, more Americans are changing jobs several times throughout their careers
For one thing, only 54% of workers think their employer is loyal to them, so that may lead to a greater willingness to change jobs.2 For another, employees may find it too expensive to be committed to one employer for years on end. Raises have been hovering around 3% on average, leading some employees to jump to a new job for a more significant pay increase. Staying at the same place over the long haul can cost workers thousands of dollars with no real reward in terms of job security.
It can be difficult to determine the number of times people have changed jobs throughout their working lives, due in part that there is no current consensus on what is considered a career change. For some, an internal transfer or a promotion may be considered a change, while others only consider it a job change if there is a jump to a new company.
Not only is the definition of a job change in and of itself complicated, but even seemingly minute details like the duration of time a person must stay in a role for it to be considered a career are up for debate.
The Average Number of Times People Change Jobs
Fuzzy definitions aside, the average number of jobs in a lifetime is 12, according to a 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey of baby boomers.
Many workers spend five years or less in every job, so they devote more time and energy transitioning from one job to another. In its 2018 Employee Tenure Summary, the BLS reported, the median employee tenure was 4.3 years for men and 4.0 years for women.
Because job changes are frequent, it’s more important than ever before for workers to be experts at job searching and networking. The successful worker is one who is up to date on trends in their industry, as well as practiced at interviewing and connecting with potential employers. Upgrading employment status has become an ongoing process, rather than something done once or twice during a career.
Job Changes by Gender
Remarkably, the BLS survey revealed that women held almost as many jobs as men throughout their careers, despite taking more time out of their careers for child-rearing activities. On average, men held 12.5 jobs, and women held 12.1 jobs.
Job Changes by Age
A worker’s age impacted the number of jobs that they held in any period. Workers held an average of 5.7 jobs during the six-year period when they were 18 to 24 years old. However, the number of jobs held declined with age.
Workers had an average of 4.5 jobs when they were 25 to 34 years old, and 2.9 jobs when they were 35 to 44 years old. During the most established phase of many workers’ careers, ages 45 to 52, they held only an average of 1.9 jobs.
Job Changes by Race
From age 18 to age 24, Whites made more job changes than Blacks or Latinos. Whites held 5.9 jobs between the ages of 18 and 24, while Blacks held 4.8 jobs, and Latinos held 5.1 jobs.
There were only minor differences in later age ranges among the different groups. Whites, Blacks, and Latinos held between 4.3 and 4.6 jobs from age 25 to age 34, and between 2.9 and 3.1 jobs from age 35 to age 44. From age 45 to age 52, all three groups held an average of 1.9 jobs.1
Average Duration of Jobs
The BLS Employee Tenure Summary notes that a high percentage of younger workers had short-duration jobs as of January 2018. Among jobs held by workers ages 25 to 34, the median tenure is 2.8 years.
From ages 35 to 44, the median job duration was 4.9 years, and from 45 to 54, the median tenure at a job was 7.6 years. Median tenure rose to 10.1 years for workers aged 55 to 64.
The job sectors with the highest median tenure include management, engineering, legal, and education. Workers in service occupations had the lowest median tenure.4
Reasons for Changing Jobs
Some examples of the common reasons that workers change jobs include:
Seeking higher pay
Better benefits and perks
Relocation to a different geographic area
Career advancement
Choosing a less stressful job
Escaping an incompetent or negative boss
Changing career focus
Better work-life balance
Reorganization at their company
Layoff due to duplication of their job resulting from a merger or acquisition
More interesting work
Better work schedule
Skills and abilities didn’t fit the job
Lack of recognition for accomplishments
Outsourcing of job function
Company moved to a new location
Better alignment between personal values and organizational priorities
No matter the industry, if 2020 taught us anything, it’s that HR leaders and recruiters need to be ready to adapt and adjust their hiring plans. Using Monster data and expert insights, here are five key hiring trends to watch in 2021, along with tips on how to prepare.
For sales and related occupations, Monster is seeing month-over-month growth in new job postings.
Since June, there’s also been a steady increase month over month in new manufacturing job postings for roles including team assemblers, machinists, production workers, inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers and operating workers, assemblers and fabricators, all other, welders, cutters and welder fitters.
And with anticipation that virtual work and school are sticking around for a bit, there’s going to be continued demand for technology roles – Monster has started to see a renewed surge in new job postings in this sector.
1. Companies will focus more on diversity, equity & inclusion in hiring
According to Monster research, more than four in five (86%) candidates globally say diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace is important to them. Additional research found that 62% of people would go as far as turning down a job offer if came from a culture that didn’t support a diverse workforce.
It’s likely that this has to do with 2020 being a year of sweeping social justice movements. “There will be continued focus on DEI in 2021 – no change there,” predicts Tony Lee, VP of editorial at SHRM, who adds that companies will continue making efforts to look at candidates who are considered untapped talent. “People who may not have been considered before such as people with physical disabilities, criminal histories, those without a college degree,” says Lee. “Broadening the definition of what an effective successful candidate looks like can help make sure you’re more inclusive.”
It’s also good for business. According to the “Diversity Wins” Report by McKinsey, organizations in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. For ethnic and cultural diversity, top-quartile companies were 36% more profitable.
TIP: In order to compete for top diverse talent, plan to amplify DEI efforts as part of your employer branding message and in job descriptions for 2021. That way, you can show candidates you’re committed to diversity and inclusion in hiring.
2. Remote work is here to stay
In case you were wondering if remote work was a passing pandemic fad, consider that the top keyword search from candidates on Monster over the last few months continues to be “work from home.” Plus, according to other Monster research, remote flexibility was the second biggest policy change reported by employers in 2020.
The pandemic essentially forced many companies to do the unthinkable: manage a remote workforce. To a large extent, it was successful, proving that the work can still get done even without a physical office presence. In other words, even when things return to normal, there’s a good chance that many employees will prefer to remain off-site, at least some of the time.
Take working parents of school children, for example. When asked in a Monster survey what they think a company could do to best support parents with school children, 75% said work schedule flexibility would go a long way.
Of course, remote work can only apply to selected skill segments where people can work from home. Of four industries examined by SIA (Staffing Industry Analysts), IT and office/clerical showed a boom in remote work, whereas industrial and healthcare staffing firms did not.
The bigger implications of remote work on hiring is that companies can hire from anywhere, globalizing recruitment, says Jon Osborne, VP Strategic Research at SIA. “In the world as it historically has been, our lives revolved around employment and because of that we were tied to the location of the employer – life may change a great deal as we are liberated from that locational anchor,” he says.
Then again, there are also some leaders who still feel productivity is “less” from remote workers versus those in office, says Herman. Hence why many companies that plan to return to the workplace sometime in 2021 are sticking with sourcing individuals who live close to physical offices.
But for the companies that are “all in” on remote, they can enjoy the ability to hire from any geo-location, adds Herman. “This has allowed them to hire quicker and in some cases, upgrade their talent.”
TIP: It’s important for hiring managers to learn how to interview remotely and look a little deeper into past history and past performance, says Lee. “Talk to people who have worked with them. Look at work samples.”
3. Upskilling will help companies—and staffing firms—fill hard-to-hire positions
Despite so many people out of work, 87% of employers say they are struggling to fill positions as a result of skills gaps, according to Monster data.
“Even though there are tens of millions unemployed, we still have a skills gap for a highly skilled workforce – that’s not going to go away,” says Bob Melk, chief commercial officer, Monster. “If employers are investing in establishing a dialogue with candidate pools, they will be in a much stronger position when they are ready to hire again.”
Staffing agencies have been leading the way in this arena, using training programs to reskill candidates who demonstrate leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills into computer programmers, says Tim Robbins, VP of staffing and recruiting, Monster. “There’s an opportunity to upskill candidates, helping to change candidates’ lives with significant new career and growth opportunities,” he says.
Though upskilling has been commonplace in certain industries, 2021 may see it adopted in other fields. “Industries with talent shortages may recognize the value of upskilling,” says Lee. Big-name companies already have such plans in the works, including Amazon, which said publicly they were going to upskill 100,000 people in the next few years. “They have made the effort and investment to upskill for the job of the future,” says Lee.
Whether the onus is on the employer to train workers or on the workers themselves to maintain skills can vary by industry. However, a recent Monster survey shows that a third of candidates expect employers to step up versus just 19% of employers who said they should be responsible.
TIP: If you’re looking to fill the roles you have, you may have to look to an underskilled workforce to identify transferable talent. “We have seen staffing firms take candidates that were in the restaurant/hospitality industry with excellent customer service skills and repurpose them into other roles created by the pandemic, such as contact tracers and temperature checkers,” says Lenore Convery, director of enterprise staffing, Monster. She points to a need for recruiters and in-house talent acquisition professionals to become adept at identifying transferable skills. “The mortgage industry has exploded with opportunity due to the low interest rates, requiring talent that doesn’t have mortgage industry experience,” says Robbins. That’s one sector that could benefit from broadening qualifications to include candidates with crossover skills.
4. Candidates will continue to need assurance that workplaces are safe
As Monster data shows, 58% of Candidates feel their job search expectations have shifted during the pandemic, and projections for 2021 indicate further change ahead. Among their top priorities: safety.
“Employers are very concerned and conscientious about the importance of this issue,” says Herman. Some have added verbiage in their job descriptions along those lines, while others are spelling out their COVID-19 safety plans on their career sites, she adds. Besides sanitation and social distancing protocols, many employers are giving employees an option to return when they feel safe or have a hybrid schedule.
“Companies understand how they handle this speaks volumes about their brand and employees and prospective candidates are watching how they handle this and expect them to take action,” says Herman.
The bottom line: With the pandemic still expected to rage on for at least the first quarter of 2021, you can expect that candidates will be concerned about how serious an employer takes workplace safety. “This will be critically important,” says Lee. “Candidates won’t want to go into a physical workplace if the company is not taking safety seriously.”
TIP: Recruitment advertising efforts must talk about the ways in which the company values the health and safety of its workforce. This can include specifics regarding workplace safety practices including sanitizing, social distancing protocols, and more.
“Uncertainty is indeed one of the drivers of non-permanent work, so the degree that uncertainty is an issue in 2021, it will contribute to higher usage rates,” says Osborne.
Jobs that fueled the initial gig wave are also morphing, says Danny Ashraf, director of sales, Monster. For example, Uber shared that their rideshare business was down 75% in Q2 2020 and 53% in Q3 2020 YoY. “Since legacy rideshare drivers have had fewer passengers, they are looking to supplement their income by joining food delivery apps like UberEats or personal shopping/delivery programs like Shipt by Target,” says Ashraf.
Another sector to watch is events. “Everyone is hoping that 2021 will be different. Events will be more intimate in size, but temperature checkers and other new job types will be established for event staffing,” says Ashraf.
TIP: Gig workers consider salary, flexibility, and fair treatment when considering which companies they want to work with. For hiring teams looking to bring on freelancers, focus on those key elements.
Four years ago, Google set out on a mission to work out how it could transform productivity in its team.
Project Aristotle, started in 2012, studied hundreds of teams at Google to try and figure out the secret to their success.
Google works hard to keep employees happy and motivated. It already offers free lunches, massage rooms, nap pods, haircuts, and doctors. Google spends money to help new parents and offers them time off to look after their baby. Employees get paid-for courses, free legal advice, free bikes, and even space in the company garden to grow vegetables.
Then, Google being Google, measures every scrap of data from these perks.
Laszlo Bock, who heads Google’s People Operations Department, told CBS: “We try to bring as much analytics and data and science to what we do on the people side as our engineers do on the product side.”
Bock has data that shows that if the manager greets a new recruit on their first day, that recruit is 15 percent more productive in nine months’ time.
But a year into their research, the people behind Project Aristotle were stumped. Besides all the perks, they had identified some important factors that made group work more effective, but their data didn’t offer a clear view of which was the most important, or a consensus on how to organize a group for best results.
They came across a study that found that successful teams had high “average social sensitivity” – which means group members were good at gauging how others felt based on their tone of voice or expression. Another way of referring to this in psychology is psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, defines psychological safety as a “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up”.
In an article for the New York Times, Charles Duhigg told the story of a Google executive who volunteered to try out some of Project Aristotle’s findings.
When he discovered his team wasn’t as happy and productive as he thought they were, he took them offsite and made a huge personal confession: he had stage four cancer. After a stunned silence, other members of the group started to talk about their own personal issues.
Although Project Aristotle hadn’t advocated making personal revelations, the Google exec realized that to create psychological safety in his team, he needed them to bond.
By trying to maximize productivity using data, Google realized that psychological safety, or the security form ties and talk about feelings, was the most important factor.
They had stumbled on the key to building a successful team: just be nice.
We all have unconscious bias tendencies whether we realize it or not. The most important thing to remember is that we can create hiring practices and workplace policies that can ensure that procedures won’t allow for this unfair practice to take place.
Gender bias is prevalent in every aspect of our lives. Our brains are hardwired to categorize things we encounter in order to make sense of the complicated world around us. However, biases can cause us to form prejudices against others, which allows for egregious inequalities to form between different demographics.
While bias comes in many forms, this article focuses on gender bias and its role within the workplace. We’ll cover what it is, where and when it happens, along with 13 ways you can reduce gender bias and ultimately build a more diverse and inclusive workplace. It should be noted that while there is a spectrum of gender identities, due to constraints within existing literature we’ll focus on the gender binaries — male and female. Feel free to click the links below to skip ahead.
GENDER BIAS DEFINITION
Gender bias is the tendency to prefer one gender over another. It is a form of unconscious bias, or implicit bias, which occurs when one individual unconsciously attributes certain attitudes and stereotypes to another person or group of people. These ascribed behaviors affect how the individual understands and engages with others.
Gender bias is the tendency to prefer one gender over another.
It is a form of unconscious bias, or implicit bias, which occurs when one individual unconsciously attributes certain attitudes and stereotypes to another person or group of people. These ascribed behaviors affect how the individual understands and engages with others.
In today’s society, gender bias is often used to refer to the preferential treatment men receive — specifically white, heterosexual males. It’s often labeled as “sexism” and describes the prejudice against women solely on the basis of their sex. Gender bias is most prominently visible within professional settings.
GENDER BIAS DEFINITION
Gender bias is the tendency to prefer one gender over another gender.
In addition to gender bias, there are a number of other types of unconscious bias that disproportionately affect women’s success in the workplace, which include:
PERFORMANCE SUPPORT BIAS
Performance support bias occurs when employers, managers and colleagues provide more resources and opportunities to one gender (typically men) over another.
One study found that among sales employees — who are paid based on performance and commission — women are unfairly assigned inferior accounts compared to men, even though women have proven to produce the same results when given equivalent sales opportunities.
PERFORMANCE REVIEW BIAS
Performance review bias occurs when employers, managers and colleagues review an employee of one gender differently from another gender — even when the evaluations are purely merit-based.
Harvard Business Review found that performance evaluations are inherently bias, even when companies make an effort to remove bias by making them open-ended. In fact, without structure to evaluations, people are more likely to review an individual on the basis of stereotypes related to gender and race than reviewing individuals meritocratically.
PERFORMANCE REWARD BIAS
Performance reward bias occurs when employers, managers and colleagues reward an employee of one gender differently from another gender. Rewards may be in the form of promotions, raises or other merit-based rewards.
While it may seem like rewarding individuals on merit would help eliminate gender bias, it’s not as cut-and-dry as you think. One study found that when women and minorities receive the same exact performance evaluation score as white men for the same job and work unit, they receive lower pay increases than white men.
GLASS CEILING
A major result of these biases have contributed to the creation of the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling is a metaphor for the evident but intangible hierarchical impediment that prevents minorities and women from achieving elevated professional success.
Due to contributing factors, like the aforementioned types of bias, women and minorities experience a barrier that prevents them from reaching upper-level roles in leadership and the C-Suite.
With the basics of gender bias down, let’s review some statistics to see where and how such biases affect women in the workplace.
GENDER BIAS STATISTICS
Image via Shutterstock
To further illustrate the role gender bias plays in the office, we’ve gathered a number of statistics related to diversity and gender bias in the workplace:
42% of women experience gender discrimination at work.
When it comes down to it, gender bias can happen at all stages of recruiting, hiring and retaining employees. In this section, we’re going to break down some key areas where gender bias affects candidates and their careers.
MANY RECRUITING STRATEGIES ARE BIASED
As we mentioned earlier, both male and female hiring managers are twice as likely to hire a man over a woman. Throughout the recruiting process, there can be traces of gender bias, starting with where and how you recruit candidates.
Looking for a job after graduating college, Erin McKelvey didn’t receive a single response from employers. When she changed her name from Erin (a feminine name) to Mack (a more masculine name) on her resume, she received a 70% response rate.
Additionally, employers may unconsciously (or consciously) place open roles on platforms with predominantly male candidates or actively target men through ads. Aside from being unethical, know that this is also illegal, which Facebook discovered the hard way back in 2018.
JOB DESCRIPTIONS CONTAIN GENDER BIAS
Even something as mundane as a job description contains traces of unconscious bias. Language inherently has gendered associations, so including words like confident, decisive, strong and outspoken have been found to attract male candidates and deter female candidates.
Research also shows that men apply to jobs where they meet 60% of the qualifications while women only apply to jobs that they meet 100% of the qualifications. Meaning if your job description has a lot of unnecessary or strict requirements, you are unintentionally weeding out women from applying to your open roles.
Image via Shutterstock
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS CAN BE GENDER BIASED
When interviews are not standardized, the questions interviewers ask can be biased based on the candidate’s personality, experiences and yes, even gender.
One study found that when candidates were assessed separately by individual hiring managers, 51% of managers were influenced by the candidate’s gender and selected the under-performing candidate. However, when candidates were evaluated by a hiring team together, gender didn’t affect their decision, they simply hired the highest performing candidate.
Additionally, during the interview, hiring managers tend to ask more targeted questions about a female candidate’s leadership abilities and unconsciously prefer more masculine leadership styles.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & CAREER ADVANCEMENT ARE AFFECTED BY GENDER BIAS
We briefly discussed the glass ceiling earlier in this article, which is a metaphor for the evident but intangible hierarchical impediment that prevents minorities and women from achieving elevated professional success.
It’s clear that gender biases play a significant role in women’s ability to excel in their careers and reach upper-level roles. You can learn more on this topic in our article about the glass ceiling.
GENDER BIAS CAN INFLUENCE MENTORS & MENTORING OPPORTUNITIES
In order to achieve upper-level positions, it is highly beneficial for individual contributors to have a mentor supporting them throughout their career. Companies that have mentorship programs are found to boost promotion and retention rates for women by 15-38%.
Not only that, but 67% of women view mentorship as a highly important factor contributing to their career advancement, yet only 10% of women actually have a mentor during their career.
The gender pay gap is no joke. Between men and women, the gender pay gap ranges from 3% to 51% and on average sits at 17%. However, we need to consider the two measurements of the gender pay gap — adjusted and unadjusted.
The adjusted gender pay gap takes into account factors like differences in education, occupations chosen, skills, hours worked and job experience. With the adjusted gender pay gap, women make about 95 cents to every $1 that men make.
When considering the gender pay gap, you must account for the fact that more women are segregated to lower-level jobs in low-paying industries and are unable to obtain upper-level roles due to biases and the glass ceiling. These disparities in opportunities, prevent women from excelling in their career and inhibits their ability to make the same amount as men. At every stage of their careers, women face barriers that place them at a disadvantage for career opportunities, mentorships, promotions and pay raises.
For a clearer comparison of ‘unadjusted’ and ‘adjusted’ gender pay gap, we’ve included Glassdoor’s breakdown of the two types of gender pay gap in the the graph below.
Image via Glassdoor
PERKS & BENEFITS AFFECT GENDERS DIFFERENTLY
The perks and benefits companies offer can significantly contribute to gender bias and opportunity discrepancies between genders. This is especially true when it comes to benefits for working parents since women are typically assigned to act as the primary caregiver of children, which has led to a motherhood penalty.
54% of women with a young child don’t work because they need to care for their child. On the other hand, 53% of stay-at-home moms say flexible working hours is an important factor of accepting a job opportunity.
PARENTAL STATUS AFFECTS INCOME AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT
In the previous two sections, we talked about unequal pay, benefits and the different expectations of men and women. For working mothers, these discrepancies are even more drastic and surprising.
MomRising.org created an infographic that provides further information on disparities between dads overall and women by race and ethnic differences.
Image via MomsRising.org
Another study found that when candidates of equal merit apply for the same job, mothers were penalized. Women without children received 2.1 times more callbacks and were recommended to be hired 1.8 times more compared to equally qualified mothers. Not only that, but fathers were recommended to be hired at a slightly higher rate than men without children.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE AFFECTS GENDERS DIFFERENTLY
A staggering 70% of women who experience sexual harassment, experience it in the workplace. And of the women who experience it within the first two years at a new job, 80% quit and move to a different company.
Not only that, but the stigma around sexual harassment in the workplace is still extremely prevalent, affecting 45% of women who are not confident in their senior leadership’s ability to address the issue. Not to mention the 75% of women who face retaliation after reporting harassment to their employers.
Whether women decide to start over somewhere else or risk retaliation from addressing the issue, they are at a constant risk of harming their careers after being sexually harassed.
13 WAYS TO REDUCE GENDER BIAS IN THE WORKPLACE
Image via Shutterstock
Now that we know where to look for gender bias in the workplace, let’s tackle some ways you and your team can actively work to reduce biases and create a more diverse and inclusive workplace for everyone.
COLLECT & ANALYZE EMPLOYEE DEMOGRAPHIC DATA
Start by collecting data about your employee demographics. Look at disparities between men and women by department, seniority and retention. You may also consider publishing this information on your careers page to remain transparent with your entire company and to hold your team accountable for moving the needle toward becoming an entirely gender diverse and equal opportunity employer.
COLLECT & ANALYZE EMPLOYEE COMPENSATION DATA
Conduct regular pay audits to identify how men and women are paid and promoted differently. Consider both the adjusted and unadjusted pay gaps that we talked about earlier in this article.
Also, it may behoove you to publish your findings for the entire company to see or even on your careers page. One study found that when Denmark created a law in 2006 requiring companies to report on their salary information and break it down by gender, the gender wage gap was reduced by 7% in just 12 years. While there were likely a number of factors that influenced this change, informing people about the gender pay gap at large and specifically within your company is the only way these improvements will take effect.
RUN EXPERIMENTS UNIQUE TO YOUR TEAM
Aside from collecting demographic and compensation information, you also need to gather open-ended, real experiences from your team.
Employee engagement surveys are a great way to gather more data about your team and identify trends in how your employees engage in their work. Keep in mind that in order to obtain the best, most unfiltered responses, you’ll want to keep these surveys anonymous. If your teams are small and not highly gender diverse, you may not want to ask for personal information like job title or even gender because if there’s only one woman with a specific role on the team, she will be easily identifiable.
Additionally, you may want to implement perception surveys, which focus on the safety of your employees. Anonymous surveys like this will provide an opportunity for employees to share experiences they’ve encountered like sexual harassment or gender bias that may not have been addressed in standard employee engagement surveys.
Image via Shutterstock
IDENTIFY GENDER BIAS IN YOUR RECRUITING PROCESS
To reduce gender bias in your recruiting process, start by looking at the language you use. Utilize this gender decoder to identify biased language in your job descriptions. You could also plug in recruitment content from emails, interview questions and employer branding materials for social media and your careers page.
One simple way to reduce gender bias in your recruiting process is to invest in recruitment tools that utilize automation or artificial intelligence to make decisions.
Not only will this save time during the initial screening process, but it will help filter through candidates based on merit rather than gender or other characteristics that may place them at a biased and unfair disadvantage.
However, it is also important to note that artificial intelligence is a type of machine learning, so over time, if human biases are introduced, artificial intelligence can learn and perpetuate those biases, so take precautions when using such technology to reduce bias early on.
Image via Shutterstock
IMPLEMENT REGULAR GENDER BIAS TRAINING
Sure, biases are a simple fact of life, but that doesn’t mean they are set in stone. The best way to reduce unconscious gender bias is to learn about it and take action to alter your perception of biases for the better.
Start by informing your team of the different types of unconscious bias and then look for diversity and inclusion professionals or unconscious bias programs near you that will support your efforts. Not convinced you need training? Check out why these five companies offer unconscious bias training.
STANDARDIZE MENTORING OR UTILIZE E-MENTORING
To provide all of your employees with equal opportunities, create a standardized mentoring process. One company created a program and found that the mentees who participated were five times more likely to obtain a higher salary and five times more likely to be promoted. And the mentors that participated were six times more likely to obtain a raise.
Additionally, the same study found that retention rates for mentees was 23% higher than employees who didn’t participate in the program, and for mentors the retention rate was 20% higher.
If a mentor program doesn’t quite work for your team, consider partnering with an e-mentoring program to connect your employees with professionals outside of your company.
Image via Shutterstock
GIVE EVERYONE A SEAT AT THE TABLE FOR IMPORTANT PROJECTS
When you’re implementing a new project, make sure you’re bringing together a diverse team with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences to tackle it. One study found that gender diverse teams are 73% better at decision making than teams that are all men. A gender diverse team will also support women in their professional development and provide them with opportunities they may otherwise miss out on.
OFFER PERKS & BENEFITS FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES
When you review the perks and benefits you offer, bring your entire team in on the conversation. Provide them an opportunity to share honest feedback on the benefits they wish your team had and the benefits that would draw them to another company. If you have a young company, employees may value parental leave benefits, whereas if your employees are later in their careers, they may care more about retirement benefits. Having these conversations will help you invest in benefits that will actually support your employee’s work-life balance.
Also, know that if you don’t offer benefits that support work-life balance and working parents, your competitors will — if they aren’t already — and you will miss out on great candidates. To prove our point, we’ve included a graph from SHRM of how organizations are boosting their parental leave benefits.
Image via SHRM
And when it comes to parental leave, it’s important to include working fathers and encourage them to actually take the leave. One study found for every month a man takes parental leave, women’s salaries increase correspondingly by 7%, helping to further close the gender pay gap.
Image via Shutterstock
CREATE AN OFFICE SPACE FOR EVERYONE
Believe it or not, your physical office space can play a role in how men and women interact in the workplace. Certain office designs have even been found to be more or less inclusive for different demographics. In industries that have been dominated by men, oftentimes, there aren’t even bathrooms for women.
Many companies also do not offer a mother’s room, forcing working moms to breastfeed in the bathroom or other places that are less than welcoming and unhygienic.
DIVERSIFY YOUR BOARDROOM
Regular bias training, adjusting office spaces, and opening up more leadership opportunities are all a great step in the right direction when overcoming gender bias in the workplace. With that said, it can’t stop there. Beyond managerial or even C-level leadership positions, companies also need to take a hard look at their board of directors.
As of 2018, just 16.9% of global boardroom seats were held by women. Though there have been steps taken to change this, such as California’s 2018 law mandating that any publicly traded company based in the state must have one woman on the board of directors, there is still a lot of work to do. A study performed at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business showed that, “Companies with more women on their board of directors are more likely to be companies that have programs, guidelines, and clear policies to avoid corrupt business dealings, have strong partnerships and have high levels of disclosure and transparency.” If you’re looking for ways to build a more diverse and transparent workplace and business, appointing more women to your board of directors is a perfect place to start.
REVIEW YOUR ANTI-DISCRIMINATION AND BIAS POLICIES
Last but not least, review your nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policies, and make sure this information is included in job descriptions, employee handbooks and your career page. In addition to your policies, provide employees with information and resources on who to reach out to in different situations. Include clear steps for what is going to happen so people know what to expect when they file a complaint.
We’ve reached the end and by now, you should be well-informed about the basics of gender bias in the workplace. It’s certainly a complex and dynamic topic that is ever evolving, so make sure to keep learning and discovering new and improved ways to reduce gender bias in the workplace.
