Empowering women: breaking barriers for equal workplace pay

A quarter of the way into the 21st century, women continue to fall behind men in income earnings. The United Nations says women earn 77% of what men earn globally.¹According to the Pew Research Center 2023, the gender pay gap in the United States barely changed in 20 years, with women earning only 82% of what their male counterparts earn². The European Commission finds that women in the European Union in 2021 averaged earnings 87.3% of men.³ For Europe, the largest gender pay gap is in Estonia, while the smallest is in Luxembourg. This injustice presents a challenge to trans-global corporations to achieve UN Development Goal #5 of Gender Equality⁴ within the framework for conducting ethical business with a purpose.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023, the pace of progress toward gender pay equality is incredibly slow⁵. At current rates, it will take 131 years for women to achieve gender pay parity⁶. This is unacceptable in the modern age. The WEF views this as an obstacle to overall economic growth throughout the world.

Many firms believe they are helping women with extra training and empowerment groups, but it is they, not the women, who need to change. It is time for firms to do better by embracing diversity, dismantling default-male business culture, and becoming more transparent with publicly disclosed labor gender data metrics to drive improvement.

Value from diversity in globalized labor includes women

Supporting equality and human rights is good business on top of being socially responsible corporate behavior. Transnational corporations now recognize the value of different perspectives in the workplace. Different cultures have different ways of communicating, thinking about time, and organization, which add value to problem-solving. Diversity is an asset to maximizing possibilities in creativity. People of color, different religions, and sexual orientations are making great strides in transnational firms. The recent corporate openness to diversity must more effectively include the culture and communication styles of women.

Neuroscience informs us that women’s brain wiring and biology offer approaches to thinking different from men’s⁷. Males think competitively, while women lean towards collaboration.

Communication styles⁸ differ between genders⁹. Men are blunt and direct and speak with each other about so-called male topics such as sports and hunting. Women communicate indirectly and with more emotion. The differences in communication style become a clash of cultures when women enter a workplace dominated by men¹⁰. A corporate culture such as this infuses employees with default norms for what males unconsciously consider professional and effective work behavior. However, it is not that women are underperformers; it is that the default male culture perceives women as not being up to standards. This is incorrect. It is not the women who need to change; they are valid as themselves. It is the default male cultural perceptions that need to change¹¹. Instead, the communication and collaboration styles of women must come into corporate cultural acceptance. This can be difficult for management within the dominant default culture to recognize. Centuries of entrenchment must be purged from deep-rooted unconscious cultural behaviors¹² in modern business models.

Why typical thinking cannot drive workplace gender equality

The Harvard Business Review article, What’s Really Holding Women Back? asserts that firms need to confront cultural myths about work-life balance and families¹³. Assumptions about men and women are often incorrect. Men suffer just as much as women because of overwork and multiple demands. The difference is that we encourage women to make concessions that derail their careers. It’s the general culture of overwork for everyone that locks in established norms. Firms often have misperceptions about gender turnover rates and other issues that blind them to understanding their internal data collection. This often causes firms to deny their gender data and not act upon it. Employers consider children a career distraction cause, but women without children rarely appear in data comparisons to men. These misunderstandings create a feedback loop of self-reinforcing defense systems that firms unconsciously use to explain why women underachieve, absolving the firm of the need to address its overall workplace culture.

This insight now allows us to expose the accepted norms that claim unequal gender career outcomes are to be expected as normal. Instead, we must now recognize that the dominant masculine defaults in our society exist as an unseen sub-current. We must shift from thinking about changing individual personal biases to altering large-scale collective systemic and structural discrimination¹⁴.

Firms need to move beyond the excuse that women don’t want to work in certain fields. In a culture of masculine defaults, why would women pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) when Pew Research data shows firms actively, willingly, and knowingly pay women less to do the same work as men in these fields¹⁵? In a modern world of liberal economics and rational choice, it makes no sense to complain about why women don’t want to be treated as second-class workers. STEM employers must make themselves more attractive to women to be considered employers of choice.

A typical corporate approach: resource and empowerment groups

Many companies have sought to support women in their workplaces by creating well-intended women’s empowerment and resource groups within their organizations¹⁶. These efforts seek to build skills, offer training, share experiences, and increase networking. There is nothing inherently wrong with such efforts, but here there is a deflected shift in responsibility from the employer to the women workers themselves for achieving social justice. It becomes the responsibility of the individual workers to lift themselves to reach their full potential, as if they are not yet qualified for their positions after attending the same universities and training as their male counterparts.

This follows a deeply culturally rooted mentality that, as women entered the workforce in the 20th century, they had to do more. Women not only had to do the work of men for less money and respect, but they also continued with the lion’s share of household chores, cooking, and childcare. In the 21st century, more men are picking up a share of domestic responsibilities, but the deep-rooted mentality that women still need to reach a potential they have not yet achieved remains in our collective unconsciousness.

Ultimately, a woman who has gone through a university engineering program is just as qualified as a male coworker who went through the same program. The employer simply must pay them equitably. It is not the female worker’s responsibility to get more training to reach “her full potential” beyond that of the male worker to be considered of equal labor value. Employer-sponsored women's empowerment groups must evolve from being a women’s Rotary club¹⁷ raising funds for breast cancer and hearing inspiring speakers. The employer-sponsored women’s resource and empowerment groups make people feel good, but they do not force employers to pay or promote women equally.

Women can claim their stakeholder interests

Women in such empowerment groups can hold their employers accountable for pay equality by claiming their stakeholder interests within the frameworks of stakeholder capitalism and corporate social responsibility. The women’s resource group can be a format for worker organizations. This could include direct social protest action with open letters and petitions to demand their employer survey collect internal gender employment data, survey competitors and industry data, publicly disclose that data, and act on the data to make measurable progress on gender inequality within their workplace. It is not enough for employers to attract female workers with self-help groups. For female workers of identical training, education, and experience, employers must pay them the same as their male counterparts for the same work in the organization. Transparency in gender employment data will inform workers and shareholders if the employer is consciously deciding to support gender equality or inequality. A firm must evolve beyond its symbolic efforts and sideshows. Instead, the firm itself must act.

Women using workplace women’s empowerment groups as a venue for labor organizing is a tricky idea, but it is an idea with collective power. Individual women traditionally come from disadvantaged places and have muted voices. The fear of an unequal employer-employee power dynamic is a real obstacle to workers demanding their fair share. Venerable single mothers may not feel like they are in a viable negotiating position to make requests of employers in a self-reinforcing social cycle of accepting less than what they deserve. In contrast to individual struggles, which lack power and influence, the sisterhood of the group can offer peer support and collective power.

One path for an organizing effort in an employer’s own women’s empowerment group is for women to point to their employer’s annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)¹⁸ reports and Environment Social Governance (ESG) data¹⁹. Today, the major corporations of the world are operating in a stakeholder model of capitalism²⁰. In this model, investors, suppliers, customers, and others are all part of a firm’s interdependent network. Each has an interest and a stake in the operations of the firm. As the firm conducts its business, workers, such as women, are also stakeholders in the social-economic network. The firm must also answer to women workers if the company claims to support CSR and ESG efforts.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) suggests transparency is key to addressing gender pay inequality²¹. Women workers must ask where the employment data on gender pay and promotions within the organization is public. Ask where the results of the internal survey about gender pay are disclosed for shareholder review. Focus on the facts. Create the awkward moment when the corporation might have to say it does not have the data or won’t share it. Embarrass them to conduct the reviews, collect the data, and become transparent. Poor performance will force companies failing to address the pay gap to take corrective action. There are companies making headway in data collection and transparency. Share and uphold them as examples to be followed. Collective social pressure has strength. Competitive corporate disclosures²² aiming to attract investors and operate with purpose can drive change.

Employers must lead with corporate social responsibility (CSR)

Unilever, the makers of Dove soap and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is a leader in annual Environment Social Governance (ESG) public data reporting²³. By focusing internally on the moral and business case for gender equality in the workplace, the organization uses data to drive understanding, progress, and results. If women are not being promoted or are making less in certain areas of the company, the company knows about it and takes corrective action. Because of Unilever’s data collection and transparency efforts, evaluators see the firm as a socially responsible investment option and as a model for other firms to operate sustainably and with purpose.

Firms can audit, identify, and equalize gender pay inequality at any moment if they simply decide to do it. They can learn to embrace female communication and collaboration styles. Transnational corporations must act themselves instead of hiding behind the women’s empowerment groups they promote on social media. After going through the same education and training as men, women do not need to prove more than men with extra training and so-called empowerment. They are worthy just as they are. Women can collectively lean forward to claim their stakeholder interests and hold employers accountable for enabling a male-default business culture. Gender equality in the workplace is a win-win for everyone in terms of dignity, justice, creative problem-solving through diversity, investor attraction, profit-making, and greater social purpose.