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Equality
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A sure basis for workplace equality

New laws requiring wage disclosure are meant to promote equality between male and female employees. Yet a faster route might lie in fostering qualities from both genders.

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Women walk up the stairs of the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, Germany, March 7. The stairs are decorated with reminders of equal pay for women and International Women's Day on March 8.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

In a few weeks, Japanese companies will start disclosing their wage and salary levels under a new law designed to reduce a gender pay gap of 22%. The law is one of several taking effect this year around the globe in response to a stall in achieving pay equality. Yet despite the slow progress, a mental and cultural shift may be happening anyway, hastening equality in the workplace more than shaming or cajoling might.

In much of the corporate world, leadership has become less about biological sex and more about a blending of qualities associated with masculine or feminine. This shift presumes all individuals have a capacity to express such qualities.

“It is vital to balance masculine and feminine leadership styles within organizations,” notes Christophe Martinot, a Barcelona-based leadership consultant with Seeding Energy. “The idea of Feminine Leadership is not intended to create a binary opposition between men and women,” but to recognize that masculine and feminine qualities are not a matter of biology.

That idea is embedded in an observation in The Economist’s latest glass-ceiling index, an annual survey of women in the workplace published Monday. It found that “where fathers take parental leave, mothers tend to return to the labour market, female empowerment is higher and the earnings gap between men and women is lower.”

Such role reversals were hard to imagine in even the most progressive societies a generation ago. Now they yield quantifiable benefits. According to a survey of 163 multinational companies over a 13-year period, Harvard Business Review found that “firms with more women in senior positions are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide safer, higher-quality customer experiences.”

A study by the business schools at Columbia, Stanford, and Duke universities found that “when women are in power, there is no longer a semantic tradeoff between likeability and strong leadership – shattering the myth that women can’t be both capable and kind.” “Breaking down gender norms,” the study observed, “increased women’s confidence and advancement into positions of power.”

It is unclear if laws compelling wage transparency will result in more equitable work employment between men and women. That uplift already rests on an active recognition that talent and worth are neither defined nor limited by physical identity.

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