How Did She Get There?
A new approach to closing the gender gap. Our co-authored paper that's making waves.
A new approach to closing the gender gap. Our co-authored paper that's making waves.
We had the privilege of co-authoring a research paper that takes a revolutionary approach to shifting the reality for women at work.
The lived reality of women and men at work is vastly different. Despite being aware of this gap, organisations are barely any closer to closing it. Many of the approaches that organisations have adopted have focused on fixing the women rather than the organisation, asking them to be more demanding, to lean in, to be more like men.
There are, however, women within these organisations who - despite the odds - are thriving. BRIDGE Partnership interviewed dozens of women at the top of their game who represented an exception - succeeding without changing themselves to fit the prevailing paradigm. Previous studies have not honed in on this particular group of women.
The aim of the paper was to shift the existing paradigm and drive engagement for our client.
Taking an investigative approach, LeftField joined the research in order to help dig deeper and surface key insights as well patterns from the interviews and data. In addition, we explored the latest thinking in the field and researched extensively, bringing in key observations and solutions from studies, books, prominent voices and institutions.
We pulled the threads together to shape the central arguments, co-authoring the paper that will hopefully enable organisations to take the necessary steps to allow more women to thrive. Five key patterns started to emerge among these women, certain aspects they had in common that enabled their success. Inspired by these patterns, we share several practical solutions that organisations can implement to truly shift the status quo, crowdsourced during brainstorming sessions with dozens of experts in the field, in addition to thought leaders (via literature).
Finally, we enabled BRIDGE to share the paper with a targeted audience by creating a digital hub, a unique brand identity for the research, and a marketing strategy (PR, Organic, Email, Online advertising with a modest budget, creative concepts for advertising etc.).
Why should organisations care about this research? Put simply, diversity wins. The business case for gender diversity is clear - diverse teams perform better and organisations who fail to create this much needed diversity, do so at their own peril. What we discovered along the way was that the women who were interviewed demonstrated numerous skills that are being highlighted by several studies as 'skills of the future.' In short, these interviews revealed that organisations should not be trying to fix women, rather they should be learning from them and creating the conditions for them and others to thrive.
// Over 1000 downloads of the paper & potential leads for BRIDGE, including dozens of Fortune 100 brands.
// A 30% increase in BRIDGE's networking ecosystem.
// Featured articles in Business Leader and CEO Monthly.
// The paper resulted in several high profile speaking engagements for BRIDGE including Meta.
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