International Women's Day: Working for her tomorrow

International Women's Day (IWD) is a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It also serves as a call to action for accelerating gender parity. This year's theme, For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment, calls for action that unlocks equal rights, power and opportunities, and a future where no one is left behind.

Inclusive Hiring Strategies

At Hays, we know that organisations who build inclusive and equitable working environments are more likely to attract and retain top, diverse talent, enabling greater financial performance.

To attract female talent, businesses can look to their recruitment and attraction strategies and ensure these are inclusive for women. Some of our top tips are:

Use Gender-Neutral Language: Are your job ads truly inclusive? A Gender Decoder can help you find out. These tools analyse job descriptions to spot gender-biased language, ensuring your advertisements appeal to a diverse range of candidates.
Aim for Diverse Interview Panels and Balanced Short Lists: Research show that diverse hiring panels and gender balanced short lists can help overcome unconscious biases leading to fairer decisions.
Take a Systems Approach: Bias – conscious and unconscious – is a key reason why talent can miss out on securing a role, despite having relevant skills, experience and qualifications. Use standardised interview questions and consider requesting work samples or other relevant skills-based assessments. Equip managers with a hiring rubric/scoring criteria so that all candidates are assessed fairly.
Flexible Job Requirements: Focus only on essential skills and experiences required for the role rather than rigid qualifications as this can disproportionately exclude women and other underrepresented groups.
Job Design: Consider if there is any flexibility with job design – can the role be accommodated on a part-time basis or job share arrangement? This can widen your talent pool – especially with respect to women as 68.5 per cent of women work part time compared to 31.5 per cent of men.
Inclusive Statements: Include statements in job postings that explicitly encourage applications from women and other underrepresented groups.
Highlight Inclusive Benefits: Don’t forget to emphasise your employee value proposition and share the benefits you offer that will especially appeal to women, such as parental leave, flexible working hours, menopause or menstrual support, mentoring programs or employee resource groups.

Building an Inclusive and Equitable Work Environment

While recruitment strategies are a great place to start, it’s important to ensure an inclusive work environment where all employees have equitable opportunity to progress their careers. Here are some suggestions to consider when developing an employee value proposition that appeals to women.

Employee Resource Groups

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), also known as Employee Network Groups, can be helpful to drive greater inclusion, awareness and allyship. Women’s ERGs can be key to ensuring a supportive community and assist career progression through networking and cross business collaboration, mentoring and education.

Milly Vorrasi, Senior Strategic Account Director, and Co-Lead of our WE Lead (Women’s Empowerment and Leadership) ERG, shared her views on the importance of these networks. “Our women’s ERG has delivered several informative and educational webinars that have not only upskilled our colleagues but also raised awareness of the challenges women can face in the workplace. Through these efforts, we aim to foster a culture of support, consideration, and motivation, ensuring that everyone feels included and valued.”

Fertility Support

Infertility affects approximately 15 per cent of women and 3 per cent of men of reproductive age at any given time. And it’s estimated that on average people spend 125 hours (approximately sixteen working days) over an eighteen-month period on appointments and care.

Employers can provide invaluable support to their employees during an emotionally and financially challenging time through access to resources and education, flexible work practices and even paid leave provisions. Fertility support can also be useful for LGBTQIA+ employees, acknowledging and supporting differing paths to parenthood.

Parental Leave

Parental leave is a crucial benefit that supports employees during a significant life transition. Employers can provide invaluable support to their employees during this emotionally and physically demanding time through access to resources and education, flexible work practices, and paid leave provisions.

While the gendered labels of ‘maternity’ and ‘paternity’ leave are increasingly being removed and replaced with gender-neutral terms, men typically don’t access primary carers leave. This has an impact on women’s disproportionate caring responsibilities and can impact career progression and earning potential. To address this, is important to build a supportive environment that actively encourages all employees to access parental leave and share the care.

Returnships

Returnships are programs designed to help professionals re-enter the workforce after taking a career break for reasons such as caregiving, personal health, or further education.

Kelly Hopkins, Business Director, Defence and Co-Lead WE Lead ERG explains, “we are seeing several of our clients utilise returnships to increase workforce participation with great success. This can be an effective way to attract and retain highly skilled talent”.

At Hays, we offer a returnship program called Reignite. If offers one-to-one coaching to support parents to achieve their career ambitions. This enables us to support our colleagues more effectively and maintain strong, gender-balanced pipelines of talent.

Menopause Support

New research into the financial and workplace impacts of menopause found that 32 per cent of women experiencing symptoms of menopause or perimenopause make career sacrifices, such as stepping down from leadership positions, delaying career progression, changing career paths, reducing working hours or switching to part time work. The severity of their symptoms led to 14 per cent exiting the workforce all together. Employers can target support to women experiencing menopause and perimenopause symptoms and retain experienced talent.

At Hays, our WE Lead ERG hosted Menopause Awareness Sessions which aimed to increase our leaders’ and colleagues’ awareness and understanding of menopause and deepen our understanding of how we can foster a more inclusive workplace.

Some of our key takeaways from this webinar were:

✔ Open Communication: Establish a culture of open communication where employees feel comfortable discussing their needs.

✔ Understand Menopause: It’s important to develop an understanding of the experience of menopause and where employees can access support.

✔ Enable Flex: Flexible work options (changes to start times, short breaks during the day) will enable employees to manage severe symptoms more effectively.

Employers can also provide specific menopause leave or benefits.

Fostering an inclusive and equitable work environment is not only the right thing to do, but also enables access to a greater talent pool. By implementing inclusive hiring strategies, developing equitable policies, and building inclusive work environments, organisations can attract and retain diverse talent. This approach not only enhances business performance, but also ensures that all employees have the opportunities to thrive and progress in their careers.

As we celebrate International Women's Day, let us commit to creating workplaces where everyone, regardless of gender, can achieve their full potential and contribute to a more equitable future.

About this author

Bernadette (she/her), Senior Manager Diversity Equity and Inclusion ANZ, began working with Hays in 2022 and has over 15 years leadership and human resources experience. Bernadette is passionate about delivering innovative, human-centred and contemporary people strategies that provide an exceptional employee experience and achieve diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces.