How Can You Evaluate a Company’s Impact on Women Employees?
Researchers connected to the Wharton Social Impact Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania released a new report on November 1, 2018, titled “Four for Women: A Framework for Evaluating Companies’ Impact on the Women They Employ.” Katherine J. Klein, Shoshana Schwartz, and Sandra Maro Hunt conducted an extensive review of the literature on how you can figure out if a company is a good employer for women or not. One thing is not debatable—companies do have an impact on the women they employ—so teasing out the variables that make companies net positive for women is vital.
Background
The researchers reviewed “hundreds of academic studies of employment conditions, trends, and effects” (p. 9). And, building on this review, they proposed the “Four for Women Framework.” Their analysis identified the four most important criteria in determining whether a company or organization is a good employer for women in terms of having a positive and significant impact on them.
Results
I typically paraphrase the results, but because this report concisely outlines the four elements in the framework, it is important for me to give them to you as they are worded in the report, and you can find more detail in the full report (see link above). So, a company is a good employer for women if it does four things (see p. 9):
1. Representation: It employs a large percentage of women at every level and in every unit of the company.
2. Pay: It pays its employees at least enough to avoid poverty; pays equally for equal work, and has no gender pay gap.
3. Health: It supports and protects the health of the women it employs (and the men, too).
4. Satisfaction: It provides satisfying working conditions for women (and for men, too).
I appreciate their whole section on “Using the Four for Women Framework to Evaluate Companies: Measurement and Data Access” (pp. 27–37), which culminates with their list of possible metrics for companies to use. I also appreciate their caution to use the framework carefully as it wasn’t designed as an index, ranking, judgment on practices, or to tell companies they are “bad.” Instead they say it is a framework that they hope will help “investors, employers, employees, customers, and other interested individuals understand, explore, and assess what it is to be a good employer for women” (p. 10).
Concluding Thoughts
I think the authors provide an interesting tool to consider when evaluating companies and their current and potential impact on women and men. It will help leaders, managers, and employees as they dialogue around needs and changes for the future. Lots of research has found that improving one employment element can also influence others, so I would encourage companies’ boards and leaders to figure out which of the four to start with and make some progress in 2019 toward strengthening their impact on women in their companies and beyond.
Prof./Dr. Susan R. Madsen is a global thought leader, author, speaker, and scholar on the topic of women and leadership. She is also the Orin R. Woodbury Professor of Leadership and Ethics in the Woodbury School of Business at Utah Valley University and the Founder of the Utah Women & Leadership Project.
Patient partner in research, quality, governance, health tech assessment, standards development. Interests in AI, digital health, learning health systems. PWLE of brain disorders, rare disease, complex chronic illness.
6yThanks for a great summary of an interesting and valuable piece of work Susan! It would be hard to disagree with the four key indicators they’ve highlighted, though I suspect the challenges accessing the necessary data to fully implement the framework as an evaluation tool will persist for quite some time. Perhaps the best employers will seize the opportunity to implement and use the framework to lure talent away from their competitors, forcing other organizations to take it seriously. In the meantime, perhaps we should be crafting incisive questions for future interviewers aligned to the framework - not in the expectation that they’ll provide full or reliable responses, but keen observation of reactions might offer a revealing clue to the organizational culture, and whether it’s likely to be a good fit for us.
Manager, Manufacturing Engineering at Thermo Fisher Scientific
6yThank you for the link to this interesting research! A more holistic approach rather than the "sound-bite" look is definitely helpful. I am fortunate to work for a great company, but part of the reason they are successful is that they keep working at it.