The glass-ceiling-shattering law will forcibly move the needle towards greater gender parity by 2021, but what’s stopping the change from happening at companies today?

Thanks to new legislation signed into effect on Sunday by Governor Jerry Brown, California is now the first state in the country to mandate women on company boards. The law, known as SB 826, will require all publicly-held companies in California to have a minimum of one female director by 2019.

By 2021, the minimum number will increase to two or three female directors depending on the size of the board.

This pioneering decision emerges during a charged political climate in the US, particularly on the heels of of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault allegations and the rapid momentum of the #MeToo movement across the country. Brown acknowledged this current state of affairs in a memo accompanying the new law, saying, “Recent events in Washington, DC—and beyond—make it crystal clear that many are not getting the message” about equal treatment of women.

Many in-state organizations are likely taking stock of their gender parity initiatives in the wake of this new legislation, which carries fines between $100,000 and $300,000 per violation. California-based companies have until December 2019 to comply, but equality activists are scratching their heads as to why—in the midst of the social justice movements sweeping the US—companies are just now reacting to the lack of female leadership at major corporations.

Of the 445 publicly-held companies headquartered in California listed on the Russell 3000 Index, more than one quarter (26.1 percent) had zero female board members in 2017. California, on average, has 1.65 female members per corporate board whereas the US as a whole averages 1.75 female members.

These discrepancies have raised concerns in recent years over the lack of female representation in sectors like the tech industry, with a major hub located in California’s Silicon Valley. According to the most recent diversity reports from SV’s biggest tech firms, women account for 24.5 percent of technical employees at Google, 23 percent at Apple, and 22 percent at Facebook.

These numbers are growing slowly, but not nearly fast enough for change advocates like California Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who authored SB 826, arguing that “gender diversity on corporate boards is associated with increased profitability, performance, governance, innovation, and opportunity.”

A number of European countries have already acknowledged the benefits of more female leadership roles. Norway lead the charge in 2008 by requiring companies to have at least 40 percent female directors or face possible dissolution. In the years that followed, France, Italy, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands were among the dozens of countries that enforced similar quotas ranging between 30 and 40 percent female representation at the corporate level.

With the fifth largest economy in the world, and home to 53 companies on the Fortune 500 list, the Golden State is in a chief position to spearhead efforts of corporate board diversity in the US.

But why is the threat of financial penalties the strongest motivator for generating this change when the merits of female workers are well known? Not only are women often more qualified for leadership roles than their male counterparts, they often outperform their male colleagues over time because they continue to learn and develop their skills.

What’s more, a study from MIT found that evenly-split, gender-mixed teams brought “a greater spread of experience, which could add to the collective knowledge of a group of office workers and make the unit perform more effectively,” affecting everything from office morale to the company’s bottom line.

While the passing of SB 826 may present challenges for organizations that currently lack diverse hiring policies, here are some actionable tips that all HR and TA professionals should consider as more companies reevaluate their diversity and inclusion efforts.

• Get comfortable discussing difficult topics. Conversations around D&I are rife with uncomfortable truths, but the first step to implementing real change is approaching these conversations in an open and honest way.
• Identify what doesn’t work. Bärí Williams, legal counsel for companies like Marqeta, StubHub, and Facebook, argues that companies looking to improve their company diversity and inclusion should begin by asking the simple question: “How can we do better?”
• Examine your employer branding. Think about how your company’s employer branding also encompasses your impact on customers, employees, and society at large. It’s equally important to consider your organization’s candidate-facing image, from the company website to the tone of its messaging, the types of photos used on social media channels, and the language used in job descriptions.
• Reach out to underserved or underrepresented minorities. Proactively seeking out these talent pools gives companies a measurable advantage over others that exclude them. According to Greenhouse Senior Recruiter Ariana Moon, “We saw a huge impact on our pipeline once we began listing jobs on diversity recruiting sites such as NAACP and Ebony.” She continues, “When thinking about partnerships, align with different organizations that are key to building pools of diverse talent.”
• Reduce bias in the hiring process. One of the biggest D&I issues tackled by AI is recruiter bias. AI solutions like SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant automate the candidate screening process, evaluating applicants based on skills, allowing you to make better and faster hires backed by measurable data.
• Create a truly inclusive company culture. None of the efforts outlined above will work unless your company embraces and celebrates different cultures and values. Making employees feel valued and giving them a sense of belonging allows them to thrive at your organization, and directly affects your employer branding.

Although California’s recent legislation represents a major step towards greater gender diversity in the boardroom, whether or not this new law will be challenged in court remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, it appears promising for women everywhere, offering them an opportunity to step into more executive roles and the chance to undo the male definition of leadership that has dominated the corporate world for generations.

Sexist algorithms, Saudi women takeover ride-sharing, #metoo hurts women, the New Zealand PM makes history, and much-much more from Women in Work this year.

When it comes to gender equality in the workplace, is 2018 just riding 2017’s coattails? Last year was all like, “#metoo! Highest number of female CEOs in fortune 500 companies ever! Women’s March!” This year is all like –  Men afraid to work with women… Number of female CEOs dips by 25 percent… Oh, and by the way, Facebook is sexist.”

2018 is not without its charms. The recent lift on the female driving ban in Saudi Arabia and New Zealand’s PM making history by taking maternity leave are all hopeful signs that good things are happening, but did last year’s sprint tire us out for the marathon? Read on and decide for yourself.

Sexist Algorithms

When three economists used Facebook to advertise STEM jobs, they found the posts were more likely to be shown t o men, but why? It’s actually because women are more valuable. Think about it, women tend to control more of the household budget so companies will pay more to target them. The algorithm working on the normally sound principle of maximizing return on investment will then opt for surfacing these job posts to men.

The trio of researchers: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, explain to companies like Facebook that this behavior is an unfortunate consequence of the “black box,” but hard to correct lest the algorithm become as discriminatory as implicit human bias, a concept from which companies are now trying to distance themselves.

New Zealand’s PM Makes History

Thirty-seven-year-old PM Jacinda Ardern makes history as the second world leader to give birth while in power, after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto in 1990, and the first head of state to take maternity leave. Though Arden will only be taking six weeks to be with her newborn daughter, Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford, (about the same time President Barack Obama took off yearly while in office, and less time than George W Bush), she was not immune to criticism online.

Mixing and Matching Gender on Surgical Teams

World’s leading behavioral expert for animals turns attention to humans and finds mixed gender teams perform better.

Frans de Waal had a crazy thought: could the same methods used to documents and analyze chimpanzee behavior be applied to humans to evaluate and improve surgical teams?

Waal’s researchers – including colleague Laura K Jones from Emory University, Atlanta Georgia, who carried out the field work – studied the interactions of 400 doctors, nurses, and technicians over the span of 200 surgeries. They recorded the communications as either “cooperative” or “conflictive,” the former leading to better surgical outcomes and the latter likely to jeopardize the patient.

What they found was that predominantly male teams, with a male lead, were twice as likely to experience conflictive behavior than those lead by a woman – 21.3 percent likelihood on women-lead teams to 50.6 percent on male-lead teams.

For majority female teams, the gender of the leader didn’t affect the percentage of conflictive behavior, but most intriguing, collaborative interactions on teams were always higher where the gender of the leader differed from the bulk of the underlings.

That’s important when you consider 70-80 percent of surgical mishaps are directly caused by the interactions of the team going awry. The solution? In the the long term it’s recruiting more women into the now male-dominated profession; for now, hospitals will have to make due with shuffling personnel.

Read full study: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

India’s Women Are Out of Work, Is this Progress?

Some reasons for this drop in female workers are actually harbingers of progress, like girls staying in school longer, while other explanations belie the faulty structure of India’s precarious economy.  For instance, India never went through a manufacturing stage like its neighbor Bangladesh, which has increased their female employment rate to 50 percent since 2005. Without clothing factories, “unskilled” women’s main place in the economy is agricultural, but with the rise of mechanization, that is disappearing as well.

As for educated women, well, they face a different challenge in the form of persistent social mores that prize marriage and childbearing. More schooling below university level, ironically, decreases the likelihood a woman will work. As education makes for a more desirable bride, and a stay at home partner brings prestige to the family unit, higher education often ends up just being a heftier scorecard for being a rich housewife. Wealthier women, as such, are pressured by their husbands to drop out of the workforce, to show how much money the man is really making. Not working is a prestige thing.

The last piece of the puzzle is job scarcity. India has very few jobs in ratio to its population. Government posts routinely receive upwards of one-thousand applicants, and there is a general agreement that men should have the first pick over women, especially in traditionally male-dominated fields like engineering.

In industries like media and publishing, there has been a female incursion, with top newsroom and editorial positions held by women. Keep an eye to the communication sector to see where India’s female workforce will continue to grow.

Men Penalized More Than Women for Staying Home

In a recent study from from Harvard Business Review, assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina University, Kate Weisshaar, found that stay-at-home-dads are the least likely to be called in for a job interview, below unemployed workers, laid-off works, and even stay-at-home-moms (who are already half as likely as laid-off women to be contacted).

Another study form the University of Michigan, which examined the effect of part time work on lawyer salaries, yielded further evidence that men are penalized more than woman when they reduce hours to share the burden of childcare. While the average decrease of a woman’s salary was 4.8 percent annually, men saw their wages decrease 2.9 percent monthly.  

Saudi Women in the Driver’s Seat

The ban on female drivers in Saudi Arabia was lifted this year on June 24th, in a sweeping decision by the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Though the world remains skeptical of Salman’s motives given that 17 feminist activists are still in detention for protesting the ban, many women are already looking forward to the possibilities this new “privilege” may afford, including the ability to work.

Sara al-Theeb, a 30-year-old employee of HSBC, recounts to the Financial Times in 2017 her difficulty in finding a job, saying, “it [was] challenging. Men have the advantage of driving. Whenever there is a sudden visit to a client, I can’t accommodate that.”

Ten women have been issued licenses to date, and over 120,000 have applied.

Already ride-sharing apps like Careem (the Uber of the Middle East) are looking to recruit from this new talent pool. Over 2,000 women have applied, and a small number have already been hired (mainly women with international licenses in the process of being transferred).

Given that educated women outnumber men by 105,494 to 98,210, in Saudi Arabia, it would be no surprise if other industries soon follow suit.

Is #metoo Hurting Women?

A Lean In Institute survey reveals that three times as many male managers are now uncomfortable at the idea of mentoring a woman in the wake of #metoo. The number that has risen from 5 percent, to 16 percent, still a small fraction of male leadership, is important because it reveals an attitude that sexual harassment is something that one just happens into, merely by being alone with a female colleague.

However, the 2010 World Economic Forum Report suggests that women are “over mentored” and ‘under–sponsored,’ meaning mentors don’t, as often, use their clout within the company to get get their female mentees promoted.

“Among survey participants who had active mentoring relationships in 2008, fully 72 percent of the men had received one or more promotions by 2010, compared with 65 percent of the women.” – Harvard Business Review.

So maybe fewer one-on-one chats and a little more recommendation writing wouldn’t be so bad afterall.

Revlon Appoints First Female CEO, but It’s Just A Cosmetic Fix.

For the first time in Revlon’s 86 year history, a woman, Debra Perelman, is appointed CEO. And while the choice garnered much favorable press for the beauty giant, it comes amidst a sharp dip in the number of female CEOs and board members decrease in S&P fortune 500 companies overall.

Female CEOs in this exclusive echelon of the business world have decreased by 25 percent in the past year, from 32 to 25. Staples, Avon, eBay and Campbells Soup, to name a few, all said goodbye to their female CEOs in 2018, and almost all have been replaced by men. With 2017 as an all-time high, the old two steps forward, one step back, feels very real.

Wage Disparity Greatest in Tech Hubs

Progress towards wage parity between men and women has been grossly stagnant in the last 15 years, and a new report reveals that our glittery tech metropolises aren’t helping.

Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area are found to have the widest gender pay disparity, at 30 percent and 20 percent respectively. In an analysis of 25 major US cities from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) found that the pay gap between men’s and women’s salaries hovers at 19 percent, in line with the findings of the US census. Of course, this isn’t the whole story.

The wage gap is more complicated than a blanket average. Even the widely touted statistic of women making 79 cents for every man-made dollar is misleading, as it ignores factors of race, profession, and location. In every city surveyed, black women fare worse than their white counterparts, and Latina women are paid the least of all measured demographics. For instance, in Tampa, Florida, where the wage gap is the lowest in the US, white women make 89 percent of what white men earn, while black women earned 65 percent, and Latina women only 61 percent.

Do women choose lower-paying professions? Yes, women tend to cluster in certain professions (men do too) and the female cluster is lower on the pay scale. (Elementary school teachers, RNs, and Secretaries being the most popular female professions). However, even when working in the same sector, men still tend to make more. For example, in the Seattle tech world, the average salary for a female employee is $110,000, while for males it’s $143,000, found a 2016 survey from Comparably.

Speaking of tech, the same study discovered that the tech wage gap is surprisingly 17 percent above the national norm, at a whopping average of 36 percent across the 16 cities surveyed. When we break down that number further we find that finance, marketing, and business development are the biggest offenders, while women in administrative roles actually earn seven percent more than their male counterparts.

Come on 2019, we’re already expecting big things from you. Sincerely, Women.