Jane Sassienie, Client Director at BRIDGE, and her colleagues, interviewed 40 women to date (as of Oct 2022). These conversations started in 2019 and continued throughout the pandemic and the list of women being interviewed continues to grow. After these interviews, we surfaced initial hunches that were emerging from their stories. These were sense-checked by releasing a survey that was answered by 128 women.

In collaboration with LeftField, our thought partners, we dug deeper into the interviews to reveal further patterns and insights. Several key observations emerged from our research that may go some way to explaining how these women were able to reach the top whilst remaining true to themselves. Together, we explored the current thinking in the field, highlighting and building on the discoveries (which we share throughout this piece) by thought leaders as well as studies conducted by consultancies, universities and institutions. We pulled all the threads together to uncover, make sense of and then share the essence of our findings.

With the support of a wider community of experts, as well as inspiration from prominent thought leaders in the field, we pooled together several starter ideas and solutions that we hope organisations will find helpful.

If the status quo remained i.e. if women continue to be significantly underrepresented in senior roles, what would the consequences be? For those working on DE&I, it is already obvious that doing something to shift the current reality is not an act of benevolence for underrepresented groups, it’s a form of survival, for organisations and for all of us.

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. Our conversations with women revealed an even greater need for organisations to act. The challenges that organisations are facing today are becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. During our interviews, we discovered that the skills that are required to solve these challenges, are in fact the very qualities that these women excel at. It is therefore extraordinary to consider that organisations have an untapped resource that can give them an edge, and most of them are failing to effectively harness it.

In short, our conversations 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.There are no quick fixes for organisations; the challenges are systemic. We hope that the observations and starter solutions that we provide enable organisations to take stock of where they are and begin to make the necessary changes to enable everyone to thrive.

We sometimes hear this comment from the DE&I department within organisations – a desire to move on to other challenges, with the assumption that this box has already been ticked having implemented some initiatives for women. A certain amount of fatigue has set in.

The insights we share, however, show that organisations are very far from closing the gap and resolving the significant issues that women face at work. If anything, looking at how the recent pandemic has disproportionately affected more women than men when it comes to their working lives, one could argue we are even going backwards. In this study, we demonstrate how business-critical this challenge is for organisations.