Why the Workplace Needs Women in Leadership

Female leadership matters now more than ever. Having women in central leadership roles is key to navigating the pandemic-accelerated rise in service disruption and digital transformation.

A global survey of nearly 8,500 companies across 61 countries found that women CEOs illustrated greater empathy, adaptability, and diversity than their male peers.¹

Research shows that we’ve reached a tipping point in the proportion of leadership roles held by women worldwide, and there’s now a window of opportunity.² In 2017, only 25 percent of leadership roles were held by women, and in both 2019 and 2020, the number stayed static at 29 percent. In 2021, the number grew to 31 percent. If the trend holds, women will hold more than one-third of all senior leadership roles in the next few years.

This growth will immediately benefit businesses across all industries thanks to the leadership traits that women bring to the workplace. Large-scale scientific studies show that women score higher than men on measures of competence, humility and integrity.³ “Women are naturally endowed with emotional intelligence skills,” says Emma Seppälä, Faculty Director of the Yale School of Management Executive Education Women’s Leadership Program. “Organizations gain a tremendous amount by having women in leadership.”

The benefits of empathetic female leadership don’t end there. Here are four reasons to accelerate the recruitment and development of women in senior leadership roles:

1. Women build more diverse, inclusive teams and profitable companies

Diversity has never been more important in business. It addresses social inequalities, provides new perspectives and ideas, and future-proofs business growth and profits. It also increases productivity, creativity, performance, staff retention, and collaboration.⁴ Diverse teams are six times more likely to be innovative and 21 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability.⁵

These benefits are primarily due to diverse teams bringing in fresh perspectives that help overcome obstacles and manage change more effectively. “Having additional diversity of perspectives in leadership teams is critical in terms of which problems we identify, what approaches we use to understand, to analyze, and then to work through those problems,” says Rodrigo Canales, Co-Convener for the Women’s Leadership Program from the Yale School of Management Executive Education, in this video.

2. Women in leadership handle change better and take fewer risks

Harvard Business Review used a linguistic analysis of changes in company documents for 163 multinational companies over 13 years to explore how the firms’ top management teams changed their strategic approach to innovation after hiring female executives. The result: organizations became more open to change and less vulnerable to risk-seeking.⁶

It also revealed that the female-led companies gradually shifted from a knowledge-buying strategy focused on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to a knowledge-building strategy focused on internal research and development, which is a more collaborative approach.

Both shifts suggest that adding women to the C-suite doesn’t simply bring new perspectives and ideas to the top management team – it shifts how the entire team thinks and reacts to disruption and innovation.

In a separate study of male and female business leaders and their pandemic leadership decisions, women were rated more positively on 13 of the 19 leadership competencies.⁷ Men were rated more positively on just one competency, but the difference was not statistically significant. The gap between the sexes was even larger than previous leadership studies from the same research firm, highlighting that women tend to perform better in a crisis.

“With 21st-century problems being so complex, most organizations have started to recognize that what they really need is a variety of leaders with a variety of styles, able to approach problems from different perspectives, able to bring different things to their teams as leaders,” explains Kathryn Bishop, Programme Director of the Oxford Women’s Leadership Development Programme, in this video.

3. Women-led companies attract more talent and have better reputations

The inclusive and diverse workplaces that female leaders create work as an effective recruiting tool, especially among younger generations. A survey by recruitment firm Glassdoor shows that 76 percent of job seekers said a diverse workforce was important when evaluating companies and job offers.⁸

Within these younger generations, female millennials especially look for employers with a strong record on diversity. A survey showed that the employer policy on diversity and workforce inclusion was important to 86 percent of the female millennial respondents.⁹ The inclusive, diverse teams that women leaders create not only improve a firm’s ability to recruit from a broader talent pool, but it also enhances its reputation, creating a virtuous loop. This has a tangible return on investment across all aspects of the business, including the ability to overcome industry challenges.¹⁰

“The benefits of gender diversity or any type of diversity are that people come from different backgrounds, they pool their collective experiences and thought differences, and get to a much healthier and productive outcome for whatever problem they’re trying to solve,” says Amy McHale, Assistant Dean for Master’s Programs at the Martin J Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University in the Women as Business Leaders online short course.

4. Women are leading sustainability

The drive towards sustainability is being led by women. From Jane Goodall to Greta Thunberg, there are countless examples of high-profile women making positive changes. “Female leadership is vital to managing climate change,” says Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency.¹¹

GetSmarter’s research supports this. The global GetSmarter 2021 Sustainability Report reveals that women lead more sustainable lifestyles across the board. According to the United Nations, putting women and girls at the center of economies will fundamentally drive better and more sustainable development outcomes for all, support a more rapid recovery, and place the world back on a footing to achieve the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).¹²

“Many of the structural inequalities facing women have been further deepened as a result of the pandemic,” says Zoë Arden, fellow and leadership consultant at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and Course Convener for the Women Leading Change: Shaping Our Future online short course, in this video. “There is a unique opportunity to shape these transformations in a way that is systemic, inclusive, and addresses gender inequalities.”

Start the transformation

Research shows more women take a transformative, holistic approach to leadership: one which includes balancing financial and performance results with goals of increasing diversity on teams, building an inclusive culture, and driving positive change.

Invest in growing the women in your company and reap the benefits through female-focused leadership programs.