A study by Brigham Young University* shows that women are interrupted 23% more often than their male colleagues.

The result: many women speak up less, and some become invisible. Yet there are numerous practices that can easily be put in place to counter this situation, including allocating speaking time and using the expertise of everyone around the table to determine speaking priority.

To benefit everyone’s talents, developing inclusive practices starts with creating an environment where everyone’s voice can be heard. The world of work can become an ally for gender parity, with simple actions that can make all the difference.

*Strength in Numbers: A Field Experiment in Gender, Influence, and Group Dynamics. Olga Stoddard, Chris Karpowitz, Jessica Preece, 2020.

Canadian women’s aspirations have shifted since the pandemic, according to the results of The A Effect x The Globe and Mail 2022 study. Career plans are not what they once were; priorities have changed. For Canadian women, the very definition of success is no longer the same.

Already in 2015, women’s ambition was seriously eroding within two years of their entry into the workforce, according to a study by the Harvard Business Review.

Companies have a direct impact on the situation. Lack of career opportunities is one of the first organizational barriers to ambition mentioned by women, especially ambitious women. This is followed closely by several organizational barriers: lack of support from direct supervisors, lack of incentives, or (yes) the male-dominated workplace culture.

Learn why women want to leave their companies.

Companies are struggling to provide meaningful career opportunities to retain talent, according to Gartner. Indeed, this is one of the reasons mentioned by self-identified ambitious women, as justification for wanting to leave their company.

When properly supported, women’s ambition becomes a performance driver: it promotes greater diversity and a higher rate of engagement from teams and ambitious women themselves. Ambition allows for greater innovation and risk-taking, better collaboration between teams, and greater talent retention (The A Effect x Léger study, 2020). Ambition thus generates an irresistible energy that is transformed into a powerful lever for growth through action.

By failing to clearly support women’s ambition, we run the risk of depriving ourselves of their talent.

Yet, more women on boards means more profit for companies! By evaluating 2,400 global companies, Credit Suisse, an international investment bank, determined that high net worth companies with women on their boards performed 26% better than those with only men.

Still on the topic of boards, McKinsey, an American consulting firm, reports that boards are 28% more profitable when they are diversified. Who’s to be credited for this? Women directors are, for their ability to attract the best talent and better understand the client base.

Despite showing (slow) improvement in the state of the talent pool in organizations,  the higher women climb, the lower their representation. One of the breaking points in this pipeline? Getting to the first level of management is the hardest: for every 100 men who become managers, only 87 women are promoted.

And worse still, as of 2019, far more women managers are leaving their companies than men managers: for every woman manager who is promoted to the next level, two women in management choose to leave their company.

So, how can you retain your female talents and support them if they want to move up the ladder? Find out more about what is holding back your female talent.