🔒CT companies stake ground in gender-parity movement

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Corporate America is looking to diversify its c-suite and broader workforce and it wants the public, particularly women, to know about it.

In two separate announcements this year, Farmington-based United Technologies Corp. and General Electric unveiled aggressive plans to hire more women in executive and technical roles.

UTC recently pledged to have women hold half its approximately 1,000 corporate leadership positions around the world by 2030, roughly doubling the number in senior roles today.

GE, which is based in Boston but still has a significant Connecticut presence, said in February it wants 20,000 women to fill science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) roles by 2020, with gender parity in all its technical entry-level programs.

It's even airing TV commercials promoting its gender-diversity play.

The pledges are part of a growing trend by companies to publicly commit to diversifying their workforces — especially positions traditionally held by men — in order to shrink the gender-parity gap and gain an edge in recruiting top female talent.

“We know that diversity is key to innovation, and innovation and diversity go hand in hand,” said Gail Jackson, UTC's vice president of diversity and inclusion.

UTC, in its quest, committed to follow a plan by Paradigm for Parity, a coalition of business members pledging to have 30 percent of corporate leadership positions filled by women near-term and half by 2030. UTC already has about 28 percent of its top jobs filled by women.

Paradigm for Parity — whose three co-chairs include UTC board member Ellen Kullman, retired chairman and CEO of DuPont — provides a five-step action plan for attaining gender parity. So far, about 45 companies have pledged to seek gender parity among senior leadership by 2030, including Bank of America, Frontier Communications, KeyCorp, LinkedIn and Voya Financial.

UTC has focused on diversity in the workplace, including gender and color, for more than a decade, “but the Paradigm for Parity pledge was an opportunity for us to sort of put a stake in the ground and publicly talk about our commitment to diversity inclusion broadly and to the advancement of women specifically,” Jackson said.

It's a good financial move, too, according to a report by Credit Suisse Research Institute, which found that companies with a higher participation of women in decision-making roles generate higher market returns and superior profits. Companies where half the senior operating roles are held by women show 19 percent higher return on equity on average, the report said.

Carolyn Treiss, board president of the recently launched Connecticut nonprofit Permanent Commission on the Status of Women Inc., praised UTC's move and said more companies should follow suit.

“I think it highlights the fact that … at the rate we're going, women will never achieve parity in leadership in UTC or major corporations across the country without a committed effort on the part of corporations to do so,” Treiss said.

She hopes it sends a message to Connecticut companies large and small that if a company the size and stature of UTC seeks leadership parity and its benefits, others will want to as well.

UTC’s challenge

UTC, which has about 200,000 employees globally and puts its senior leadership tally for women at about 280 of the 1,000 top jobs, will have to raise its number of women about 1.7 percentage points a year, on average, to reach its 50-50 goal by 2030. That will come through new hires and promotions.

Titles in those top 1,000 jobs are senior directors and up, including vice presidents, senior vice presidents, executive directors and presidents.

UTC will incorporate elements of Paradigm for Parity's action plan with efforts it already undertakes. UTC, for example, already has 114 employee resource groups around the world that address workforce issues, including diversity and gender, 42 of which are focused on the advancement of women, Jackson said.

Additionally, UTC has long mentored women, but it's also developing sponsorship programs for high-potential female employees, which aligns with Paradigm for Parity's plan.

“Mentors counsel and they give advice and sponsors do that as well, but sponsors also have influence and authority to help you make those career moves,” Jackson said. “So sponsorship is sort of the next level of investment in an employee.”

UTC also has an inclusion-training program it's rolling out globally that meshes well with what Paradigm for Parity calls unconscious-bias training, she said.

In that training, companies engage men and women at all levels, starting with the CEO and senior leadership, to ensure that company leaders comprehend, own and address the conscious and unconscious biases that prevent women from succeeding.

That's step No. 1 of Paradigm for Parity's five-step plan. Other steps include significantly increasing the number of women in senior operating roles and setting measurable diversity goals and holding the senior team accountable.

Treiss said such actions will motivate change. Despite the many qualified women out there, they are not rising to senior leadership positions in major U.S. corporations, she said.

“If there is not an active effort on the part of corporations to look at why that is and to try to tackle it, it's not going to happen on its own,” she said. “It hasn't happened yet.”

Women hold only 14.2 percent of the top five leadership positions at S&P 500 companies, according to a CNNMoney analysis. Only 24 companies had female CEOs, or 5 percent.

Moving the needle

Sandra Beach Lin, Paradigm for Parity co-chair and retired president and CEO of solar silicon maker Calisolar Inc., said Paradigm emerged from a summer 2015 meeting of 50 women, including former or current CEOs, board members and academics, but mostly women who had been in business many years and not seen women leadership numbers increase. Their action plan emerged from several days of discussion, giving CEOs a practical guide to move the needle. The organization launched last December.

The group plans an early June annual meeting, including companies that have taken the pledge, to review best practices for implementing the action plan, roadblocks that arise and best practices to help companies learn from each other, Beach Lin said.

She said the leadership needle is moving, perhaps only by a decimal point, but the group wants to see improvement by whole numbers.

Jackson said there's a lot of emphasis on UTC's target of gender parity, “but it's really about ensuring that we have the ability to attract and develop the best workforce … and then, once they're here, to make sure that we're able to have people contribute to their highest potential, that's really what it's about.”