PriceWaterhouseCoopers discusses enablers and barriers to women's economic participation.

Why does gender diversity matter?

The ageing population across the developed countries is having the effect of shrinking the labour pool. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be a shortfall of 10 million US workers by 2010; and in Western Europe, where birthrates in many countries are well below the population replacement level, the shortage of workers is likely to occur earlier and be more acute.

In emerging economies, particularly growth economies such as China and India, rapid economic development make it necessary to optimise all available human resources. In these countries, underutilising half of the potential workforce is no longer an acceptable option.

Moreover, a recent article in The Economist magazine cited research indicating that over the past few decades, women in general have contributed more to growth in the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) than either new technology or the emerging economies of China and India.

Accordingly, it is apparent that any success in promoting gender diversity in the workforce will have a tangible positive impact on economic growth in both the developed and the developing worlds, and that continued focus on this area is therefore warranted.

Download Women’s Economic Participation: Enablers, Barriers, Responses

PDF format, 842KB, 24Pages. Provided by The Women’s Forum.

This report was prepared by members of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Genesis Park Program. Genesis Park is an intense five-month leadership development program with campuses in Washington, DC, and Berlin.

“We cannot build a world which is livable if it walks only on one foot— continuing to neglect, by obscure prejudices, 50 percent of the talent, skill, and energy available.” Aude Zieseniss de Thuin, President and Founder, The Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society

Further questions:

There are issues raised by our research and interviews that deserve further exploration. Below, we highlight three.

In almost all of the countries in our study, government appeared to be a powerful force in promoting women’s economic participation. Businesses, too, in particular large multinational ones, demonstrate impressive gender diversity efforts. The question, however, remains: Are these institutions doing enough or should their efforts be seen as merely incremental? Certainly, in many countries, the male-manager-with-stay-at-home-wife model has not been fundamentally altered; and many corporate interventions have been designed to assist women in working within the traditional model rather than changing the model itself.

Is it time for the basic model to be reexamined? Even if the answer is no, should organisations look to design a small number of high-impact interventions rather than a multitude of lessimpactful ones?

Our interviewees in developing countries spoke enthusiastically about the role of women in the workforce and opportunities for their advancement.

Even at the senior management level, these interviewees felt that women were making progress, and their expectation was that this progress would continue. What was striking, however, was their repeated reference to financial gain, as in the following remark: “Unless my husband makes a lot more than me, I will be working for the rest of my career.” Indeed, a number of the women we spoke to in the developing countries indicated that many women there would no longer work if their husbands began to make “lots of money.” If financial gain is the key driver of ambition in these countries, one wonders whether women’s economic participation at the middle and top levels of organisations will taper off as these women and their families become more financially secure.

Closing the gender gap in a way that is both supportive of families and economically advantageous to business could be seen as the holy grail of gender diversity interventions. A final question raised by our research is whether those twin goals might benefit from a partnership of government and business working together to solve questions of gender diversity and women’s economic participation.

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PricewaterhouseCoopers (or PwC) is one of the world's largest professional services firms. It was formed in 1998 from a merger between Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand, both formed in London.

PricewaterhouseCoopers earned aggregated worldwide revenues of $25 billion[4] for fiscal 2007, and employed over 146,000 people in 150 countries.

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