Substantial progress has been made in gender diversity in all areas of business. Women currently occupy 14.7% of the board seats at 3,000 largest companies globally and there has been an unprecedented amount of female CEOs among Fortune 500 companies (Credit Suisse, 2016; Fortune, 2017). But even though women today account for more than half of tertiary education graduates, they continue to systematically fall behind in the career pipeline (Dyrchs & Strack, 2012; OECD, 2017). Thus, the issue of gender diversity is in leadership cannot be solved by simply putting more women in the C-suite. Women need to receive sufficient training, mentoring and promotional opportunities to help them gain the skills to take over executive roles. Organizations often fail in providing that, because they do not understand the benefits of diversity.

As Hillary Clinton said in one of her speeches, “Women are the most underutilized resource on this planet”. Gender diversity has positive implications for company performance. Firstly, diverse leadership team possesses a richer information set that provides better direction of company’s strategy (Carpenter & Westphal, 2001; Carter, D’Souza, Simkins, & Simpson, 2010). Secondly, women are more risk-averse and are subject to less groupthink than the ‘old boys club’ (Bao, Fainshmidt, Nair, & Vracheva, 2014; Brennan & McCafferty, 1997; Huse, Nielsen, & Hagen, 2009). Thirdly, having women in leadership teams increases information sharing and thus, greater utilization of individual skills of the members (Jeong & Harrison, 2017). Furthermore, leadership diversity improves innovation (Lorenzo, Voigt, Tsusaka, Krentz, & Abouzahr, 2018). This is only some of the evidence that diversity is good for business. As the representation of women grows, so do the studies of women in leadership that make a business case for it. Why is there still such a large gender gap in leadership and how can we solve it?

I first started thinking about that sitting in one of my undergraduate lectures. It struck me how in the transition from high school to university braver but less hard-working guys were replacing the conscientious girls at the top of the class. My fellow female classmates and I often remained quiet while the guys talked. I found some answers to that in two of my favorite TED talks by Sheryl Sandberg and Reshma Saujani. From a young age, women are taught not to take risks. Thus, they do not get to learn through failure. Furthermore, they are stereotypically perceived less suitable for leadership positions and they are perceived more negatively when they demonstrate behavior associated with leadership (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Thus, they do not pursue leadership opportunities as much as men do.

I found a great team of women with which I worked on the majority of the class projects during my bachelor. Yet, when we had to present our work, we often felt uncomfortable being only females. Luckily, we had enough self-reflection and ambition that we decided to end this. We established an Association of Female Students of Business Studies at the University of Ljubljana and we have been working on empowering each other ever since. There were many barriers on our path, with everyone from university administration to student council members doubting us. The association offered us a platform to speak about this issue and encourage other girls who may not be as brave as us. We follow a slogan ‘Behind every successful woman they are other successful women’. In two years since our establishment, we grew to 30 active members and we hosted some of the greatest female leaders in Slovenia for a discussion table on International Women’s Day. Words of encouragement from them can go a long way.

The first day of my master studies, I realized that two-thirds of my class is male. This demonstrates that the lack of diversity starts before we even enter the workforce. More women should be recruited to programmes like mine and universities should have a platform to talk about the barriers women will face on their career path. Educational institutions and employers have to not only recognize the need for greater diversity but actively offer support in recruiting, training, networking and empowering women to pursue their professional goals. With odds against us, we will have to work harder to achieve our dreams, but by standing together and encouraging each other, we can do it.

Inja Knavs

Co-founder and former vice president of DŠPV