When Women Thrive 2020 Global Report |Mercer

According to Mercer’s When Women Thrive 2020 Global Report, the majority (81%) of organizations worldwide say that improving diversity and inclusion (D&I) is important, yet less than half (42%) have a documented, multi-year strategy for achieving gender equality. With this in mind, the report found that women’s representation of the global workforce only slightly improved to 40%-up 2 percent since 2016. Also, female representation in executive and senior management levels saw a modest 3% increase. While there are positive indicators such as rates for hiring, promoting, and retaining women now being comparable to rates for men (an improvement from 4 years ago) there is more work to do. Before determining tactics to address this issue, organizations can first gain insights that enable the right actions. One useful tool I find for doing so is an internal labor market flow, which depicts the flow of people into, through, and out of an organization. Aside from showing balances or imbalances in workforce representation of men and women by career level, it answers many other questions such as: who gets hired, who advances, and who stays? P.12 shows an example. A useful tool that can turn insights into an impactful set of actions.