Getting Action-Oriented About Gender and Racial Equity at Work

Although the overall unemployment rate is hovering at a historically low level in the United States, that statistic obscures the uneven experience of women, especially women of color, since the beginning of the pandemic. Recent data shows that over 200,000 Black and Latina women have left the workforce since 2020. These losses to the pipeline of women leaders are exacerbated by the fact that sexism and racism still persist in the workplace. Several recent books tackle these issues and offer actionable steps to create a more equitable workplace.

In their book Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), Tina Opie and Beth A. Livingston point out that gender equity can’t happen without a concurrent effort to achieve racial equity. They define Shared Sisterhood as a “philosophy that emphasizes collective action toward dismantling racial and gender inequity at work, grounded in deep introspection and authentic emotional connections.” Authentic connections, according to Opie and Livingston, are ones characterized by four components: empathy, vulnerability, trust, and risk-taking.

The authors emphasize that diversity training focused on individual bias alone often ignores issues of interpersonal microaggressions and organizational culture and power, thereby minimizing true organizational change. Opie and Livingston offer an actionable model for people of all genders to audit individual assumptions around racioethnicity, gender, and power. They suggest building authentic interpersonal connections to bridge divides and work together to create systemic change using collective action.

In her new book Building a New Leadership Ladder: Transforming Male-Dominated Organizations to Support Women on the Rise (MIT Press, 2023), Carol J. Geffner, director of the Executive Master of Leadership Program at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, draws on her experience as both a researcher and a former C-suite executive to explore why women still face challenges moving into leadership roles. Geffner argues that in order for women to succeed, male-dominated organizations must be transformed to support women’s rise. The book, which draws on more than 200 hours of interviews with women leaders across sectors and industries, offers a framework for achieving transformation success using five key steps: creating a vision for change, assessing the current state of the organization, designing interventions, implementing those interventions, and evaluating their impact.

Geffner points out that this uneven progress for women leaders is clear across trends in the C-suite. In the Fortune 500, for example, 25% of the top five critical C-suite positions (CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, and CHRO) are now occupied by women. This percentage, while still too low, indicates progress relative to recent decades. But looking at these top roles individually tells a less optimistic story. According to Geffner, “Only 6% of CEOs and 12.5% of CFOs are women, whereas 55% of CHROs are women.” This shows that women are being funneled into some but not all types of leadership positions, she contends, namely those that emphasize people-centered caring skills. Unfortunately, these roles are also where the largest gender wage gaps persist.

Geffner notes that no amount of “leaning in” on the part of individual women will change these systemic patterns. Collective work must be done by leadership teams, organizations, and industries to address inequality, and she suggests that organizations need to adopt a systems-thinking approach to leadership development. This involves looking at the entire organization and identifying areas where gender bias and inequity may exist.

In The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work (Simon & Schuster, 2022), authors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart examine the issue of work within organizations that no one wants to do — the office “housework,” such as party planning, intern management, search committee participation, and more — which disproportionately falls on women. This work, described in the book as non-promotable tasks, or NPTs, leaves women overburdened and underrecognized and cuts into the time available for their own development. The authors found that women spent 200 more hours per year than the average male on these tasks.

The book provides effective strategies for women to negotiate for better opportunities in the workplace and also illustrates how organizations can rethink how work is assigned and rewarded in order to create more equitable environments. Like the two books mentioned above, The No Club also illustrates that while NPTs are an issue for women across the board and can become major roadblocks to career advancement, they represent an even larger challenge for women of color.

All three books can serve as valuable resources for anyone who wants to take action in promoting gender and racial equity in the workplace, and each provides a wealth of practical advice and insights that can help senior leaders create a more inclusive and supportive culture at work.