International Women’s Day: Celebrating Bright Spots and Embracing the Journey Ahead

As we celebrate another International Women’s Day and 8 years at Mine The Gap, we must honor the milestones and "Bright Spots" illuminating our path forward. We believe in recognizing our progress and highlighting the benchmarks that serve as beacons of hope for our continued work ahead.

At Mine the Gap, we provide diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting services. We specialize in gender and women's leadership to aid companies and organizations in navigating a more connected and diverse world. We started Mine The Gap to work with the private sector because we saw the impact of gender diversity in politics and other sectors. As global experts working in diverse regions and contexts, we are continuously inspired by the policy changes and workplace cultures that shift due to increasing gender diversity and its intersectional dimensions.

In the US we have seen Kamala Harris become the country’s Vice President - the first woman, the first black American and the first South Asian American to serve in this role. Justice Sonia Sotomayor became the first appointed woman of color to the US Supreme Court. Nashville’s Metro City Council elected a female majority and its first openly transgender person for the first time last year. This year, St. Paul, Minnesota became the first large city in the US to elect an all-female city council.

Ursula von der Leyen has led the European Commission since she was appointed President in 2019, and we’ve seen both the number of women speakers of Parliaments and the number of countries with cabinets that are more than 40% women on the rise. These exemplify exciting strides toward gender equality in global governance. These milestones are not just symbolic; they are testaments to a growing understanding of diverse leadership's impact on policy and society.

Despite a concerning period during COVID, women are also making notable gains on the economic front, with a Pew Research study highlighting improvements in labor force participation and earnings, with women now comprising “about a third of workers in the country’s 10 highest-paying occupations (35%)...up from 13% in 1980” according to 2023 Census data. While women make up only over 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, they are making strides in boardrooms. We are proud of our collaboration with the California Partners Project and California’s First Partner Jennifer Seibel Newsom to research the results of the landmark legislation on California (SB 826) which doubled the number of women on public boards in the state (to 33%), contributing to the 28% of women holding Russell 3000 public company board seats across the US.

This trend signaling a shift towards more inclusive governance structures is being encouraged by shareholders and other stakeholders pressing for greater transparency and reporting on diversity. Our Co-Founder, Jessica Grounds plays a role in efforts to align diversity and accountability measures as part of NASDAQ’s Insights Council and the 30% Coalition. The discussion on board gender diversity also extends to private company boards, with the 2022 Him for Her and Crunchbase study highlighting the slow but steady progress being made.

Mine The Gap recently launched The Inclusive Boardroom: Nuts and Bolts to Build a Modern Board, a two-part facilitation to strengthen boards using the critical lens of diversity, equity and inclusion, in partnership with The Leadership Edge.

Another tool we were proud to launch for women’s economic empowerment recently was a curriculum we developed with the Center for International Private Enterprise for women entrepreneurs in Papua New Guinea and in Ethiopia, the latter of whom had businesses in conflict-affected areas which they are in the process of rebuilding.

Our Commitment and Future Directions

At Mine The Gap, we are proud to contribute to this progress through our work, including our partnership with the Hewitt School in launching initiatives to support girls’ leadership and prepare them for professional success. Last year we collaborated to launch the Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership and recently developed curriculum for middle school teachers piloting these new opportunities for girls.

As we look ahead, we remain committed to building upon these achievements. Our upcoming projects and online training programs aim to further the conversation on inclusive leadership and gender equality.

By highlighting these "Bright Spots" in our journey towards gender equality, we remind ourselves of our progress and the potential for what lies ahead. Stay tuned for more updates on our initiatives and join us in celebrating every milestone on this journey. Together, we can mine the gap for untapped talent and leverage it for a more robust future.

DEI Is Here To Stay

Strong, Effective Leadership Starts with Inclusivity

I was recently transiting through Salt Lake City International Airport, and an announcement about embracing diversity caught my attention. 

Although our work at Mine The Gap is all about diversity, equity and inclusion, I realized just how much of a trigger the word diversity has become. 

Despite this fact and the fact that we will continue to see DEI used as a lightning rod and punching bag throughout the U.S. presidential election and beyond, DEI isn’t going anywhere. 

And, the companies that embrace it will be far more competitive as we become more globally interconnected and reliant upon each other. 

DEI will remain because being inclusive is critical to good leadership. It allows leaders to attract and retain diverse and outstanding talent, and identify the varied competencies and perspectives from people with different backgrounds and life experiences that uniquely position their company among their competitors.  

A 2019 McKinsey McKinsey & Company study across 12 countries found “that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 36 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians, while those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely to have financial returns above their medians.” 

Moving beyond the numbers, a recent study by Korn Ferry explains five traits that comprise 21st-century inclusive leaders. They build interpersonal trust, integrate diverse perspectives, optimize talent, apply adaptive mindsets, and achieve transformation – all of which are undergirded by leaning into and leveraging people’s differences.

Inclusive leaders are also curious and leverage this to learn about their colleagues and tap into their energy and creativity for the organization's benefit. They know their colleagues’ potential and create an environment where they feel encouraged to show up as their whole selves. Deloitte has identified six critical qualities, including the ability to recognize one’s own biases, make a visible commitment to inclusion, and prioritize diversity. 

In today’s world, leaders cannot afford to be exclusive or make decisions guided by a narrow vision of like-minded colleagues unless they want to stay in a constant, reactive state to the risks and challenges businesses now face. Leaders who invest in themselves and others are the leaders that will take us forward. DEI is about using our platforms to embrace change and innovate in a vastly different world. Mining the gap for untapped talent and leveraging it for our business’s success is not going out of style - this is only the beginning. 

We’ll release our online training on inclusive leadership soon. Sign up for our newsletter for updates and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.

Empowering Future Women Leaders through Gender-Aware Education

Women’s Success in the Highest Leadership Levels Starts with Gender-Aware Education

We have embarked on a critical conversation that can transform the workforce and the workplace. Our focus lies in a significant disconnect -- women represent most undergraduate and graduate school degree-earners yet represent a fraction of leaders in every field and every industry. This is most evident at the top. Women comprise 10.4% of the Fortune 500 company CEOs and about 36% of their board members, while women comprise only 29% of Congress. For women, educational attainment does not translate as clearly into leadership attainment. 

As women’s leadership and workplace diversity experts, Mine The Gap partnered with the Hewitt School, one of seven independent girls’ schools in New York City, to launch The Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership in Society to more deeply understand the way girls learn and close the massive gap that is keeping women from co-leading in our world.

If you look at graduates by field of study, women enrolled in graduate school outnumber men in 7 out of 11 graduate fields. Yet, women are roughly 1 in 4 of C-suite leaders and women of color are 1 in 16. Women at the director level are leaving at a higher rate than men, dubbed the “Great Breakup,” leaving fewer senior women in the pipeline to promote.

We brought our lens of what is missing for women in the private sector, to think about preparing girls now. We are proud to be part of one of the first efforts to bring together industry perspective, research, and academia to support girls’ leadership for the workplace. 

In the past year the Center has garnered a diverse collection of partners and researchers committed to breaking new ground on solutions and convened leading scholars, higher education institutions, and corporate leaders, to prepare girls for their professional lives.

Most recently we developed a curriculum called, The Girl Advantage, and trained Hewitt’s middle school educators on creating an environment where girls’ leadership can be better explored and expanded. The curriculum provides faculty with a guide to consider pedagogical ways to open space for girls to explore their growth and authenticity rather than recommending how girls should lead. 

As we came together with the knowledge of the practical challenges women face in the workplace and the faculty experiences, we immediately saw how the social and gender norms that begin to influence girls early in life play out in similar ways in the classroom and in the workplace today. 

Our efforts are meant to disrupt this trajectory and break the patterns we see in the workplace – of women undermining their credibility, not putting themselves forward for opportunities, or not knowing their value – which appear early in the classroom and are rooted in early socialization. Our training tapped into new ways to unlock girls’ power and potential, including girls of color or from immigrant families. 

What are some tangible pedagogical changes we can make to influence the choices and paths of women when they leave high school and graduate school? Launching the curriculum is the beginning of a conversation that will require the investment of thought partners including industry leaders to find pathways for girls that bridge this gap between educational performance and leadership in the professional world. 

We are proud to be a key part of Hewitt’s intentional, collaborative, research-backed effort across sectors and hope that others will contribute to this dialogue. With more authentic women leaders in business, we will see the range of benefits that research says it brings – innovation, greater competition, and a more positive work environment that attracts and retains great talent. We can also look forward to many more nuanced styles of leadership and workplace dynamics that can emerge when we have enough women in leadership to disrupt the status quo.

1 Women Earned the Majority of Doctoral Degrees in 2020 for the 12th Straight Year and Outnumber Men in Grad School 148 to 100, AEI. 

2 https://leanin.org/women-in-the-workplace

Partner Launch: The Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership in Society

The Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership in Society is a testament to Hewitt’s differentiated commitment to designing a K-12 academic program that improves girls’ lives and outcomes both in school and in the workplace. Through the work of our distinguished research partners and current research projects, the Center inspires girls and young women to forge a more gender equitable workforce and society, both for themselves and for the many generations of girls and young women to follow.

Read more here. https://www.hewittschool.org/about/research

Women in the Workplace 2022

About the study

Women in the Workplace is the largest study on the state of women in corporate America.1 In 2015, LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company launched the study to give companies insights and tools to advance gender diversity in the workplace. Between 2015 and 2022, over 810 companies participated in the study, and more than 400,000 people were surveyed on their workplace experiences. This year, we collected information from 333 participating organizations employing more than 12 million people, surveyed more than 40,000 employees, and conducted interviews with women of diverse identities, including women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities.2 Our 2022 report focuses on how the pandemic has changed what women want from their companies, including the growing importance of opportunity, flexibility, employee well-being, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Sign up to participate in the 2023 study at womenintheworkplace.com.

The report: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace

Why Should Companies Care about the Supreme Court Decision on Roe?

Why Should Companies Care about the Supreme Court Decision on Roe?
By Jessica N. Grounds & Kristin Haffert
Founders, Mine The Gap

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion fundamentally matters to the health and ability of our workplaces to succeed. Here’s why. Central to the ability to access abortion, is a woman’s ability to decide about how, when, and with whom she decides to start or expand a family. The decision to have a child is not small – it is shockingly huge. Anyone with children will tell you, it is life altering and impacts all aspects of life.

In the workplace, we do not live in silos where our work lives are somehow separate from our lives at home. The COVID-19 pandemic blurred these lines even more, it revealed that our lives inside and outside of work are inextricably linked, this accelerated as more of us worked from home. Women are disproportionately impacted by the responsibility to carry, raise, and care for children and care for aging and sick family members. Research shows that 2.3 million women left the workforce in 2020. In the first 12 months of the pandemic, women comprised more than half of those departing the labor force.[1] We have witnessed a massive exodus that has interrupted the career trajectory of millions of women who now have gaps in their progress.

As much as we are moving to share responsibilities with our spouses and partners, family care continues to fall to women much more often, and many families are run by single parents, often women. This impacts women’s ability to move into leadership.  Look around – there is not a single sector that has more women in top leadership compared with men. In our original research about solving barriers to workplace culture for women, we saw that flexibility and the ability to move up ranked among women’s top reasons for leaving companies prior to the pandemic. And we are still – just now – adopting policies in the workplace, like paid leave and hybrid work teams, and considering mechanisms to improve pay equity.

“We work with organizations across sectors, in companies that are big and small. The companies that are the most successful make the personal lives of workers a central consideration for their workers potential to move up a leadership track.  This is enhanced when they focus on women whose family dynamics become more complicating, a labyrinth to navigate. For men the support they tend to receive at home gives them the ability to rise to the top. The realities are not the same and they have far-reaching consequences.”

This court decision will continue to squeeze the progress we are making to advance women into leadership roles – particularly women of color who are disproportionately impacted by access to safe and affordable reproductive health care. This decision isn’t just about abortion – it is about striving for equity and the values of liberty. It is about building a culture in our society, and in our workplaces, that allows for everyone to be supported to make major life decisions that are best for them. The Supreme Court’s decision puts an even greater responsibility on employers to develop the values, policies, programs, that address this imbalance, these barriers for women. The companies who address this well, will effectively tap the talent and potential of our workforce.

[1] What We Lose When We Lose Women in the Workforce. McKinsey 2021.

The Big Picture: Our Latest Research with California Partners Project

This is the fourth report in a series of research we led to track the impact of California’s first-in-the-law nation that requires public companies in California to add women to their board of directors. We are proud to advise and support California Partners Project to highlight the incredible progress of this powerful legislation crafted and led by women legislators.

Some key highlights:

Women now hold nearly 32% of board seats in California, up from 15.5% in 2018.

65% of public company boards now have 3 or more women serving, up from 11% in 2018.

Read the report here: The Big Picture

International Women's Day 2022

This year marks 6 years since Mine The Gap was founded. We started this company because we felt that there was a deep lack of understanding about how the imbalance of women in leadership roles impacts the success and growth of companies. Beyond business success, the lack of women in leadership also affects funding that moves between the private and public sectors — impacting the acceleration and support for women to access positions of power.

As our company has grown, our work has also grown to more fully build diverse workplaces across industries and to focus on the wide range of underrepresented groups that leadership teams have too often overlooked. We work with companies and organizations to help their leadership develop inclusive leadership skills — a practice that serves everyone better. We have advised major initiatives, corporate boards, the C-Suite and leadership teams, and vast range of organizational leaders across sectors both in the U.S. and around the globe to rise to the occasion and make change within their own context.

As we mark another International Women’s Day, we pay particular attention to the women of Ukraine and Afghanistan. We have worked with women leaders in both countries. Their vision and skills are so desperately needed to help their countries. We are humbled by their dedication to living freely to pursue their dreams, in the face of tragedy and violence. 

We will continue to build more inclusive, supportive, and balanced workplaces — where all people, particularly women, can thrive. Thank you for your interest in our work, partnership, and support.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Jessica N. Grounds & Kristin Haffert 

All Our Talent: Women on Boards & Commissions: Workshop March 10

A key component of the All Our Talent: Women on Boards and Commissions initiative is engaging women at all levels to make a positive difference in gender diversity, equity, and representation in organizations throughout the region. Join us as we work to address the need for more women on corporate, nonprofit, and government-appointed boards & commissions in our region.

Gain the knowledge, inspiration, and background to develop an effective and persuasive board profile and make the most of your profile on theBoardlist so companies searching for talent find you. This workshop will give concrete tools for how to position yourself for a board seat and showcase your expertise to a company or organization looking to add board members.

This program is geared towards women who have established profiles on theBoardlist as well as those interested in learning more.

EVENT DETAILS

Date: Thursday, March 10, 2021

Time: 10:30 a.m. – noon (PT)

Log-in details: Zoom details will be sent to attendees the week of the event.

Event Contact: Monica Negrete, mnegrete@sdchamber.org.

Mapping Inclusion: Our Latest Report

Mapping Inclusion: Women’s Representation on California’s Public Company Boards by Region in Industry has fresh data and analysis on gender, regional and industry data, and thoughts from women directors and CEOs who are leading the way on board diversity. We encourage you to check it out.

Read the report