3 Ways to Increase the Percentage of Woman in Leadership 

At TED Long Beach 2012, Regina Dugan, former director of DARPA,  the technology-oriented DoD agency, asked the audience, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid to fail?”  The first thing that came to my mind when Duncan asked that question was “I’d quit to be at home with my family.” It turns out I’m not alone.

ForbesWoman and theBump.com (a site devoted to pregnancy and motherhood) conducted a study called “Parenthood and the Economy 2012.” The results: of the working women interviewed, 84% agreed that staying home to raise children was a desirable goal – but, frankly, a financial luxury. That said, over half of working women surveyed felt their happiness would increase “if they didn’t work.”

That 84% is an interesting statistic — because that means that 16% of women don’t aspire to stay at home to raise a family,  and from a CNNMoney study of  female executive presence in the S&P 500, of the top four leadership positions below the CEO,  16.5% are held by women. Coincidentally, approximately 17% of law firm partners are women.   Another stat: at Intel, a tech company that has publicized its push towards reaching a more diverse workforce, leadership is approximately 17% women.  These figures all align with the portion of the female population that is comfortable with not being stay-at-home moms.

So, what conclusions to draw? As the push for diversity strengthens in corporate America, particularly in the executive suite, companies may well struggle to raise their numbers above that 16-17% threshold — unless they can understand how to better position corporate advancement to the 84% of working women who view mixing work and family as a financial necessity.

Pursuing a career at full throttle in a dual-income family (or single parent household) while raising a family is hard. In fact, I can openly say that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  Unfortunately, the stressors of corporate life don’t make it any easier – the number one cause of stress in the US in 2014 was job-related, with co-worker tension, bosses, and workloads being the main contributing factors. And with flattening work structures, economic stress, and technology enabling an “always-on” environment, no wonder the path towards executive leadership is a particularly hard pill for any single parent or dual- income family to swallow.

The remedy: to identify and hire women — and other diverse candidates — into influential positions, and give them the opportunity to perform.   Many companies out there already recognize this, and are making efforts to influence diversity at the hiring stage. And once they have focused their hiring this way, there are a few things that companies can do to help retain these employees and increase the diversity in their leadership pipelines.

Three Very Welcome Policies for Working Women

Encouraging a Culture of Mentorship/Sponsorship

The “Sponsoring Women to Success” report by the professional organization Catalyst indicates that sponsorship is critical for the advancement of high performers. Sponsorship is even more essential for women where the benefit of accepting a new opportunity vs. the trade-off of how to make it work with their home life is a serious concern that needs to be addressed.

Why a sponsor fits seamlessly into this scenario: a good corporate sponsor can not only identify a high performer and recommends her for a particular opportunity, that sponsor can also work with the employee to share their expertise on the benefits and risks of the opportunity.  Furthermore, sponsorship helps lift women out of their double bind of self-promotion – where women are penalized socially and professionally for the same so-called “self-promoting behavior” that is common among men.

Provide Professional Coaching from Day One

Careers are becoming more self-directed, and in a world where there isn’t a single trajectory to the top, each professional has to figure out a path to getting where they want to go. A professional coach can help immensely with this process.

Particularly for employees with children and family, the navigation can get incredibly rough between managing life’s needs along with their career vision.  A coach can help you piece together a plan, keep you on track, and help you reevaluate as roadblocks come along.  While the cost of coaching for non-management employees may seem high, the investment may be worth it if it can help retain high potential employees and better equip them for leadership.

And professional coaches are not just for the C-suite; anyone at any level can benefit from a good relationship with a coach.  Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Inc., would agree, as seen in this YouTube clip.

Create an Open, Flexible and Empathetic Culture

Building a culture that is open to more than one way of doing things is vitally important if you want to retain working mothers in your workforce.  It’s important to understand that, as a recent  New York Times article (aptly titled “The 24/7 Work Culture’s Toll on Familes and Gender Equality”) pointed out, family-centric perks and policies aren’t the sole answer to this.  Rather, an organization that is truly open to new ideas or methods and respectful of employee’s personal time is a fundamental part of creating an environment that welcomes diversity.

Harvard Business School professor Robin Ely reiterates this point in the same New York Times article: “The very well-intentioned answer is to give women benefits, but it actually derails women’s careers. The culture of overwork affects everybody.”

If increasing the ranks of women in leadership is important to any organization, taking steps above and beyond hiring will be instrumental in driving change.  With 80% of births in the U.S. currently being to millennial moms, a new workforce of women is emerging – one that will be focused on melding their work and family lives in a way that allows them to enjoy a little bit of both.