🔒Here’s why more CT companies are committing to gender parity in leadership ranks

While statistics show the number of women in top business leadership roles is improving, all sides agree more needs to be done to achieve gender equity in Connecticut and across the country.

According to the Russell 3000 — a market index that measures the performance of the top 3,000 U.S. publicly-traded companies — 46.9% of companies had at least three women on their board of directors in 2021, a 21.7% increase from two years prior. The percentage of companies with greater than 30% of women on their boards also jumped 16.8% during that same period.

Meantime, according to a September 2020 Hartford Business Journal analysis of C-suites at the 31-largest publicly traded companies in Connecticut, women held about 21% of senior leadership roles and 25.9% of board seats.

Minorities, both women and men, had even less representation in leadership positions.

Amid that backdrop, and with mounting pressure to diversify their workforces in the wake of the #MeToo movement and murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an increasing number of Connecticut companies are joining a national pledge to ensure that women hold 50% of senior leadership positions by 2030.

The so-called Paradigm for Parity pledge was launched in 2016 by a coalition of U.S. business executives, board members and academics, and it has slowly built up its membership ranks across various industries. Eighteen Connecticut companies have now signed the pledge, with nearly half of the local signatories — including Hartford HealthCare (HHC), Trinity Health of New England and Jackson Laboratory — joining in the last year or so.

Some Connecticut companies that recently signed on say they have already reached, or are close to reaching the 50% goal, and they joined the effort to be part of the gender equity conversation moving forward.

“I think if you are not engaged with others and are operating in a vacuum, then you are not really able to support gender parity priorities that are important,” said LuAnn Ballesteros, the vice president of external and government affairs at Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research nonprofit that has a major facility in Farmington. “We like to share our successes and learn from others who have had success in this area. We also want to engage with others who are seeking to improve.”

Gender parity efforts aren’t simply being made for moral or public relations purposes.

It can also be a good financial move, according to a report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, which found that companies with a higher percentage of women in decision-making roles generate better market returns and superior profits.

Defining leaders

Many of the Connecticut companies taking the Paradigm for Parity pledge have different ways to measure leadership posts. At Jackson Laboratory — where 49% of the company’s approximate 3,000 employees are women — seven of the top 15 senior leaders (or 47%) are female, company officials said.

HHC and Trinity Health both have workforces that are predominantly female. Seventy-eight percent of their respective employee bases — HHC employs 27,947 people, while Trinity Health has 10,237 workers — are women, they said.

At HHC, anyone with a vice president title or higher is considered a top leader. Of the 65 positions that fall into that category, 46% are held by women, the health system said.

Trinity Health lists its leadership positions more broadly to include managers and above; 66% of those 391 positions are currently held by women, Trinity said.

Still, even with those promising percentages, both healthcare systems say much more can be done to maintain or improve the numbers.

“We really like to train people within the organization, and there is no limit on who can be a leader,” said Sarah Lewis, Hartford HealthCare’s vice president of health, equity, diversity and inclusion. “I’ve seen it with my own two eyes; many men and women and people from different backgrounds here have risen through the ranks.”

Proactive steps

Jackson Laboratory, HHC and Trinity Health said they have all undertaken major initiatives to address and encourage gender equality.

All three organizations offer mentors who help guide and encourage often-younger employees.

In 2020, HHC’s senior leaders participated in their first-ever inclusive leadership training course.

In addition, HHC offers a 12-month graduate administrative fellowship program aimed at recruiting diverse promising graduates from the top U.S. master’s degree programs in public health and administration.

“We are recruiting from a wide number of universities, more than before, to get a more diverse population,” Lewis said. “For example, we never recruited from the University of Alabama before. That university has one of the best healthcare administrative programs in the country and we were able to get more diverse students from the south.”

Carolyn Alessi is the regional director of community health and well-being at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, part of the Trinity Health network.

Alessi said Trinity Health in January 2022 launched a women’s inclusion network — known as WIN — that encourages women to come together for networking and professional development.

In addition, Alessi said, the healthcare system has an annual unconscious bias training program that provides tools “to adjust thinking and eliminate discriminatory thoughts and behaviors” toward both women and minority groups.

“[For example], you can look at hiring practices and how we look at resumes and in interviewing candidates,” Alessi said. “We can look at a name and make an assumption on someone who comes from a different culture.”

Ballesteros said Jackson Laboratory senior leaders are part of the Million Women Mentors Connecticut chapter, a group that promotes engagement and retention of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers.

State government diversity

In addition to the Paradigm for Parity pledge, Gov. Ned Lamont also addressed the disparity issue last June when he signed legislation encouraging equitable gender and racial representation in state government.

The law was developed based on recommendations from the Governor’s Council on Women and Girls and it addresses barriers parents face when running for state elected office, while also promoting greater gender and racial diversity on state boards and commissions.

For example, the law allows political candidates to use public campaign funds for reasonable childcare costs while they are running for office.

While women make up more than half of the state’s population, in 2021 they only held 27.8% of state Senate seats; 35.1% of House seats; and 33% of constitutional offices, according to Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who chairs the Governor’s Council on Women and Girls.