How remote work trend is bridging the gender gap
Flexible, hybrid work is here to stay. That was the prevailing sentiment from Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index (WTI). This is good news for innovation. Why? Because innovation surges when diversity increases, and one thing that remote and hybrid workplaces have enabled is more diverse hiring.
WTI notes that remote-work opportunities were found to be more attractive to diverse applicants—women, Gen Z job seekers (those currently aged 18 to 25) and those without a graduate degree were more likely to apply for remote positions on LinkedIn.
For gendered diversity in the workplace, remote work is driving much-needed improvement. Global statistics on gender equality in employment reveal a deeply entrenched disparity, with men participating more in the labour force and advancing more within it than female counterparts. Alarmingly, if we remain on the current hiring and promoting trajectory, it will take just over 135 years to close the gender gap worldwide. This was the finding of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its 2021 Global Gender Gap Report.
Covid pandemic has served to widen this gap, with WEF sharing early projections that show five per cent of all employed women lost jobs in the resulting economic disruption, compared with 3.9 per cent of employed men. Women are also poorly represented in the ‘jobs of the future’ sector.
Such roles arose alongside digital transformation, which accelerated rapidly in response to the pandemic with businesses being forced to operate online during lockdown closures of physical spaces. WEF found that only two of eight jobs of the future that they tracked had reached gender equality.
Looking at the category of Economic Participation and Opportunity, WEF reported favourable results for sub-Saharan Africa, with the region having closed just over 66 per cent of the gender gap, outperforming the global average of 58.3 per cent. However, homing in on a per-country view shows varied progress.
Out of the 156 countries surveyed globally, Kenya was 95th on the list for overall gender parity. It fares slightly better looking at gendered hiring and promoting, ranking 84th globally in the Economic Participation and Opportunity category, placing it 16th of the 35 countries surveyed across sub-Saharan Africa.
While participation between men and women in Kenya’s labour force is roughly equal (9.1 million women vs 9.5 million men), senior roles are predominantly reserved for men. Only 18 per cent of firms have women in top management posts. Clearly, more work must be done to bridge the employment gender divide.
Being able to work remotely has opened many new career opportunities for workers across the globe. Not being confined to one geographical area means the ability to accept jobs based anywhere. As the WTI notes, “this fundamental shift expands economic opportunity for individuals and enables organisations to build high-performing, diverse teams from a near-limitless talent pool.”
The index found that the number of women applying for remote work over locally based jobs on LinkedIn increased by six per cent. This trend presents an opportunity for business leaders to hire a more diverse team where women are equally represented.
On how employers can help nurture the trend for a more representative workforce, WTI asked LinkedIn Chief Economist Karen Kimbrough for her expert advice: “Employers can help by actively seeking female talent, removing bias from job descriptions, and offering more flexibility to allow for a better work-life balance.”
In attracting the right talent from a diverse pool of applicants, businesses will be setting themselves up for the kind of innovative thinking required for the future of work. Diverse businesses are more profitable, too, according to a McKinsey and Company study published in 2020.
The study found that companies whose executive teams were gender diverse were 25 per cent more likely to have above-average profitability than less-diverse businesses. This underscores the importance of not only hiring women, but of promoting them into senior roles as well.
