Author Note: This is the fifth and final blog summarizing the findings of the She Leads STEM 100 Leaders Report. What you'll read here is a small snapshot of the data available. Access the entire report for free HERE, and read the summary blogs in this series through the links below:
· Blog 1 -"Top 10 Challenges Faced by Women Leaders in STEM"
· Blog 2 – "6 Leadership Skill Sets for an Accelerated Career Path”
· Blog 3 – “5 Focus Areas for Companies to Retain Women in STEM”
· Blog 4 – “6 Moments Women STEM Leaders Say are Essential to Career Success”
This blog discusses practical ways to retain more women leaders in organizations. Blog 3 (link above) focused on big-picture strategies for retention (section 3 of the report), and this one focuses on practical applications to improve retention in your organization. Section 4 of the She Leads STEM report includes a table of specific implementation actions for organizations, allies, and individuals; we encourage you to access the report as a companion to this blog.
You want more diversity – especially gender diversity - in your STEM organization, but you’re struggling to find and retain women applicants. You’ve had more women on your teams in the past, but they’ve moved on to other opportunities.
As a result, your teams still commonly only have 1 or maybe 2 women. And when you interview women applicants, you can tell by the look on their faces that they think that the lack of high-ranking women leaders in your organization means your firm is not committed to gender equity.
It’s frustrating because this was never your intent. You are committed to gender equity in STEM, but you may not be sure how to change this cycle, especially when budgets are tight.
What can you do? Where should you focus your limited resources so that you can make the most significant impact on the retention of women in STEM?
In my case study interviews of more than 100 current STEM women leaders and allies, I asked them directly what made them stay in their particular firms and what those firms are doing to support women. Some of their responses may surprise you, and many of the examples shared don’t require a big budget, policy, or even an HR department to implement.
As a bonus, many of these actions can benefit all employees by contributing to a positive work culture where people can bring all of themselves to work. These tactics are for organizations committed to both gender equity and organizational excellence.
Belonging is the Foundation of Your Retention Strategy
In my interviews with leaders, nine practical actions emerged from those I interviewed when I asked them about specific examples of how organizations support women leaders. These actions can make your organization THE place everyone wants to work because of your empowering work culture. They also have bottom-line impacts by lowering the costs of recruiting, hiring, and training new employees because more current employees stay.
An analogy for the model that emerged is the wheel of the car—eight spokes surrounded by a tire. While all are important, you won’t get anywhere without the tire.
Belonging is the “tire” of your retention strategy, and it’s foundational to a place people WANT to work. Without it, any other strategy will be ineffective.
The good news? Belonging (or lack thereof) is demonstrated in how people treat one another in their daily interactions. It doesn’t require a huge budget so much as it requires attention and modeling of desired behaviors of current and aspiring leaders until they become normalized throughout the organization.
If you’re struggling with retention, belonging is the root cause and must be addressed first. Adding family-friendly policies or having mandatory bias training without addressing the underlying behaviors that sabotage belonging for women is like handing a bandaid to someone who is gushing blood: it simply doesn’t work.
If you’re working with or managing STEM women and are trying to do your best with good intentions, a never-ending to-do list, and limited resources, the rest of this blog is for you.
The #1 action for retention is creating a sense of team and organizational belonging
Belonging is a sense that you are welcome and that others want you there. You feel valued and appreciated for the unique skills you bring to work.
Activate feelings of belonging through specific, everyday behaviors that let others know they matter. Belonging is correlated with increased productivity and is measured using simple employee engagement surveys.
Specific examples of ways the women leaders said their organizations made them feel like they belonged include:
People listen to each other; this can be as simple as setting an expectation of no interruptions when others are speaking in meetings
Have a women’s employee resource group (ERG) with access to leadership. The ERG is asked for opinions on policies that affect them, and organization leaders support ERG activities. Organization leaders work with the ERG to align ERG activities with company business goals.
Recognize and reward individual skills: Studies by Gallop shows that once-a-week recognition or praise by your manager is the bare minimum.
No tolerance for toxic high-performers. One interviewee shared: “I worked one place where it was well-known that a particular manager was a bully and had issues working with women, but leadership ignored complaints because he brought in work and certain clients loved him. That doesn’t happen where I work now; it’s people first.”
Recognition for training and helping others in the organization (i.e., emphasis on the collective good, not just meeting YOUR individual goals and metrics)
Mentorship within the organization (either formal or informal)
People ask how they are doing (and want the truth)
Employee ideas at all levels are solicited and listened to, even if not implemented; there is a feeling of “my voice and ideas matter.”
Conflict isn’t allowed to fester. “We have a culture of facing problems professionally, yet head-on. We can bring up issues to our leadership without fear of blame or backlash.”
After Belonging, Improve Retention with These 8 Strategic Actions
Belonging is the first place to focus to improve retention in your organization. From there, you can start implementing the 8 spokes – or actions - within the wheel model.
These 8 actions are listed in no particular order. Organizations will generally see the most success by picking one and implementing it before moving to a second one; many organizations find that they can do some of these immediately (and with low or no cost) by tweaking existing policies and procedures.
Again and to emphasize: The strategies below will have little effect if they are put in place as a “policy” or “procedure” without a foundation of belonging first.
Three red flags that belonging is a problem include:
Women and minorities are leaving your organization at higher rates than everyone else
Employees are not participating in current family-friendly policies (i.e., paternity leave); typically, the only reason that happens is due to fear of backlash for using that policy
Policies are compliance-based, which rarely (if ever) results in a change in behavior (i.e., once-a-year bias training or feedback required only in a once-a-year performance review)
Belonging usually doesn’t happen without intentionally setting expectations around how people show up daily. However, once you have the basics in place, the following 8 actions – the “spokes” of the wheel in the retention model – can create a robust, positive work culture inclusive of all genders, especially women.
Action: Normalize Giving and Receiving Feedback
For people to do their best work, they need to know what’s expected of them, have a way to measure their progress toward their goals, and get feedback on how they are doing so they can grow.
My case study interviews affirmed what was found in a 2012 National Science Foundation Report, “Stemming the tide: Why Women Leave Engineering”: unclear expectations combined with lack of routine feedback correlate with women leaving their firms and, in some cases, the industry.
This is also true in mixed-gender studies (all fields), which show that lack of recognition and feedback is one of the top reasons people leave their employers.
Examples of feedback strategies mentioned by our interviewees include:
Regularly and routinely acknowledge and celebrate successes: This is low-hanging fruit and one of the easiest ways to boost retention amongst those high performers on your teams.
Create a feedback culture. Set and model the expectation that you are constantly telling people both what they did well and what they can improve. Everyone in your firm can and should be trained to give professional feedback.
Support 360 feedback: This is about creating a culture of feedback where everyone in the organization is trying to learn and grow. Someone at the lowest level should be just as comfortable giving feedback up the chain as their boss or manager is giving feedback to someone they manage. One interviewee describes how working in this type of organization feels: “I know it’s OK to give positive and negative feedback to my boss.”
Train managers to provide objective performance reviews and feedback: Good feedback is actionable. However, studies show that men are more likely to receive direction and actionable feedback than women. Train managers to reward specific positive behaviors they want more of and provide specific examples of places to improve.
Need some help on how to give feedback? Check out THIS blog for managers and THIS blog for individuals seeking feedback.
Action: Provide Workplace Flexibility
Flexibility is empowering and shows care for employees by granting more autonomy. Flexibility benefits go far beyond “work from home” and maternity/paternity leave. Examples include:
Leaves of Absence (maternity, paternity, medical, etc.)
Sabbatical options
Weekly and daily flexibility policies
Remote work policies or options about when and where to work
One of the biggest challenges case study interviews experienced with workplace flexibility benefits is that use of a policy is often at the discretion of individual managers to “allow” their staff to use them.
Studies show most STEM workers want flexibility, and normalizing the use of these policies by all genders is needed to avoid the stigma some individuals associate with using them. That means workplace flexibility policies should be written with the following two criteria in mind:
Policies are co-created by leadership and those the policies affect. Having diverse voices and viewpoints on the policy committee is vital to ensure they are equitable and impactful. Consider who the policies will affect and how to include diverse voices in policy creation.
Leadership themselves use flexibility benefits. Behaviors of leaders are closely watched and matched (even if subconsciously) by those seeking to advance. Leaders using flexibility benefits signal to everyone in the organization that performance matters for advancement more than presenteeism and that work-life integration is supported.
Action: Grow Your People with Individualized Professional Development
Top talent wants individualized professional development to support their unique journey and skill set. Here are a few ways to support individual professional development needs, as shared by case study interviewees:
Support managers and staff in having career conversations and advancing career goals;
set aside time for explicit career development discussions, so employees know their growth is valued.
Help employees identify their strengths. Magic happens when individual strengths align with organization business outcomes. Support the professional growth of your team by giving feedback on how an individual’s strengths are best used in your organization.
Provide a fixed budget or number of hours for individual professional development, and give employees the autonomy to choose how best to allocate those resources.
Action: Do Unconscious Bias Training Well
Case study interviewees had mixed experiences with bias training, and “unconscious bias” was identified as the top challenge by women leaders, as outlined in blog 1 of this series.
The big-picture takeaways from the interviews include the following:
Compliance-based bias training doesn’t work (esp. in reaction to discriminatory behavior that’s already happened)
Effective bias training builds on belonging and creates a safe space for hard conversations
Let’s take a moment and discuss why unconscious bias training specifically is correlated with improved retention of women in STEM when done well, starting with dispelling two myths about unconscious bias:
Unconscious Bias Myth 1 – Good people don’t act in biased ways.
Unconscious Bias Myth 2 - If you are aware of your own unconscious bias, you can ensure you don’t act unfairly toward others.
Unconscious bias is a condition of being human, and every human has unconscious biases that impact their behaviors. Even the most well-meaning are going to make mistakes and act in biased ways sometimes.
Why? Because the human brain is wired to make assumptions about our surroundings, including other people. Those assumptions kept us alive for thousands of years before we worked in a global, information-based economy.
For example, if you were a caveperson and saw a lion running towards you, you’d assume it was dangerous and immediately run away. In that situation, your survival instinct saved your life.
That same survival instinct means that we view people “like us” more favorably. We make positive assumptions about people like us and not-so-positive assumptions about everyone else. Those assumptions directly impact our behaviors towards others in life and work.
Without actively mitigating those assumptions, we will automatically treat others unfairly based on our brain’s unconscious internal decision of “like us” or “not like us.” Examples of identity characteristics on which our brains might make this judgment/assumption include:
Gender
Race or culture
Education and credentials
Past careers/industries
Veteran status
Family or caregiving status
Age
How someone looks or dresses
Political or religious affiliations
Because we all have this “like us” bias, it’s simply not possible to make sure you never act in a completely unbiased way, even with awareness and the best of intentions.
Bias training, “done well,” therefore, requires navigating complex and sensitive conversations professionally. This includes receiving feedback when you’re unintentionally acting in a biased way so you can correct that behavior without getting defensive or taking it personally.
The foundational skills required to navigate challenging conversations encompass a range of leadership skills, including self-awareness, listening, emotional intelligence, mental fitness/emotional control, empathy, and communication.
Case study interviewees who reported a positive experience with unconscious bias training also reported an overall positive experience with leaders in their firm and firm culture overall, saying things like “leadership is open to different points of view.”
While further study is required, based on the case study interviews to date, we suspect that the reason effective unconscious bias training is correlated with higher retention for women isn’t because of the bias training itself. Instead, it’s because the work cultures of firms that voluntarily complete bias training have a foundation of belonging that brings people closer together when they collectively enhance the leadership skills necessary to have effective conversations around sensitive topics like bias.
That’s good news for organizations, especially in firms where the word “bias” produces a strongly negative or politically-motivated connotation. Effective bias training is about creating a culture where it’s safe to have conversations about tough but important topics. Organizations can do that (regardless of what the training is called) by:
Creating a culture of belonging where people feel safe to start the conversation and share feedback.
Provide foundation leadership skills training to empower individuals to have challenging conversations.
Want more information on bias training specifically? Best practices shared by interviewees are summarized in Section 4 of the full report.
Action: Define Promotion Paths and Criteria
“The rules kept on changing, and they always changed to someone else’s advantage,” one of the interviewees of my case study interviews told me when we discussed the reasons she left her high-profile leadership role in a corporate environment to start her own firm.
Lack of promotion paths and clear promotion criteria was one of the primary reasons current women leaders gave for leaving a previous organization. Based on my research, if I had to pick one thing alone that would instantly improve the retention of rising women leaders in STEM organizations, it’s this: Make criteria for promotion paths clear and transparent.
The bonus: Clear and transparent promotion paths benefit everyone by minimizing back-channel gossip and speculation about “why” someone got a promotion over another. That means more time for people actually to focus on their work.
To increase retention of women in STEM leadership, promotion paths should be:
Transparent: Written and documented metrics determined by a leadership group dictate who is promoted. Metrics are accessible to anyone interested in getting promoted. Performance review conversations align with the metrics, including discussions of skills and milestones attached to them, so individuals know where they stand and where improvements are needed.
Objective: More than one person, ideally a diverse group, develop the promotion metrics. This promotes a fair promotion process and keeps an individual senior leader’s bias towards people like themselves from resulting in qualified candidates who have effective but different leadership styles from being overlooked.
To reiterate: EVERYONE has unconscious bias, and it’s no one’s “fault.” However, when promotion paths are unclear, or only one person/homogenous group makes all hiring/promotion decisions without taking steps to mitigate bias actively, the process inherently favors hiring and promoting others similar to those making those decisions.
Action: Review Pay Data and Fix Discrepancies
Organizational data tells the truth about gender equity at work. What story is your data telling?
Organizations must know their numbers and reflect on what they say about their commitment to gender equity. Throughout my interviews, I heard from women STEM leaders that it wasn’t until they were promoted to a position where they hired staff that they realized they had been underpaid. In most cases, the situation was resolved when brought up, but it can destroy trust.
Data to pay attention to includes:
Retention rates of women versus other genders
Apples-to-apples pay rates of people with similar titles
Apples-to-apples pay rates of people producing similar outcomes (i.e., if someone with a lower title is doing work similar to someone with a higher title/pay; one typical example is management-type tasks when your pay is for an individual contributor role)
Manager and office trends for multi-firm organizations: How do the offices compare on retention data? If one office is an outlier, do the reasons for this withstand scrutiny?
Action: Create Equal Access to Leadership and Mentorship Opportunities
The #1 catalyzing moment that led to a leadership position for current women leaders is a 1:1 conversation with a mentor or sponsor.
Findings about equal access that organizations need to understand to create equal opportunities for women:
Our case study interviews found that less than 20% of current women leaders had a woman mentor or sponsor.
Male leaders committed to gender equity are essential mentors and sponsors, especially in organizations with few or no women in ownership or C-Suite/VP/Director positions.
Younger interviewees in leadership roles (those with 15 years of experience or less) were more likely to report that the presence of senior women leaders was a factor in their decision to accept a job at their current firm. As one interviewee said: “You can tell a lot about an organization’s commitment to women by how many women are in leadership roles.”
See THIS previous blog for more details and data about who and how these conversations occurred so that you can facilitate more mentor/mentee relationships in your organization.
Four questions organizations can ask themselves to reflect on if there is equal access to opportunity include:
What is the process for identifying and growing “high potential” leaders?
Does everyone who wants a mentor have access to one (and what data do you have to back up this assertion)? What is the diversity of those paired with leaders at the highest levels?
Who decides who works on high-profile projects or is identified as having leadership potential? (Hint: When only one person is making/influencing this decision, bias is inherent in that decision regardless of good intentions.)
How are you actively removing bias from decisions on the above activities? (Remember: A choice to not actively remove bias is a choice to disadvantage women and minorities in STEM.)
Action: Include Retention Metrics for Managers in Performance Reviews
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates that it costs up to 3-4 times a new employee’s salary to replace a competent person who leaves. What does your data say about retention in your organization? How is your organization keeping leaders and managers accountable for keeping retention costs in check?
As one example shared in my case study interviews: If you’re a multi-office firm and there is one region or office that struggles to retain women, leaders have to be willing to ask why and take action to create accountability.
Want the FREE companion report to this blog that includes a table of detailed specific actions to improve gender equity in your organization? Enter your information HERE and get immediate access.
Want to read more about this topic? Scroll to the top of this page to read the other four blogs summarizing the data in the She Leads STEM 100 Leaders report.
