How to create a long term approach to closing Gender Pay, Talent and Tech Skills Gaps

Supermums has been working with individuals for over 6 years now, enabling them to upskill, progress and get great jobs in the Salesforce Ecosystem.  With this experience, we turn our focuses to employers, and what they can do to close gender pay gaps and digital skills gaps.  

The widely recognised gap in our sector was discussed in a recent blog by Supermums’ course sponsor, Atlantic Technologies, with a senior consultant Yetunde stating: 

Launching our #LevellingUpWomen campaign on International Women’s Day this year, Supermums gave employers 40 top tips for creating a more inclusive workforce, and this is only the beginning of our work to support employers on this journey, and making sure that contributions to more inclusive society are meaningful. 

Using a national focus day and week is a great way to demonstrate to employees that your organisation recognises barriers which exist, and potentially hamper people’s chances to thrive.  However the day itself should also be used as a way of signposting more meaningful work. Enhanced policies, staff benefits, support networks and ongoing training provisions.  

10 ways employers aren’t creating long term success towards Gender Equality

Here are 10 ways in which employers attempt to demonstrate their commitment to gender equality, but aren’t creating long term success: 

1. Running pulse surveys on gender inclusion, or wider company surveys but doing nothing with the results, and/ or giving no staff feedback. 

2. Having great role models in some areas of the business but not all, or not creating good success stories out of their career journey.  

3. Having employee resource groups but not allocating budget, or enough time for the person chairing the group to give it the attention it needs and deserves. 

4. Only having one woman within the pool of candidates through to interview. (According to Harvard Business Review there is even less chance of that woman being recruited because of perceived tokenism) 

5. Recognising national focus days and weeks but not using them to signpost employees to policies, initiatives and networks offering longer term focuses.  

6. Stating an intention to close gender pay gaps but not including it in company values, visions and mission statements.  

7. Accepting gender pay gaps and challenges with closing them but not including the desire to close the gaps in company strategies, to create targets and timescales.  

8. Having a goal to attract, recruit, retain and progress more women but keeping the goal within the HR department when every department lead could assume some accountability.  

9. Telling employees that learning and development is key but not committing to training programmes.  

10. Employing/ retaining/ progressing women but not measuring how this has been done, in order to justify continued investment and resource. 

Next Steps

Organisations have a lot of large ever-shifting priorities regarding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, with nine protected characteristics to consider, and a workforce adapting to continued changes to working life on the other side of the pandemic.  However, your gender pay gap is here, and your data challenges are too. Making sure your approaches to closing two gaps in one go has never been more urgent.  

Supermums is excited to launch a new Employer Partnership Programme, which enables businesses using Salesforce to work with us on a longer term basis to demonstrate their commitment to meaningful, long-term change with their Salesforce talent.  They can work with us in other capacities too – recruitment consultancy, training.  The packages include discounts on recruitment, access to training, resources and toolkits. Contact us at Stella@supermums.org to find out more in advance. 

Seeing and experiencing the positive changes the training has made to the lives of people who have really wanted or needed to change career track is truly inspirational. At a recent networking event, a new graduate from our Admin course waved goodbye to the team by saying “Thank you for changing my life!” 

We look forward to improving life for organisations now as well as individuals directly, and can’t wait to have you join us in our next phase of success! 

Join us for a series of #LevellingUp Events

Please join us for the first in a series of #LevellingUpWomen events, where we will bring employers and sponsors together to speak about opportunities and challenges for organisations working with Salesforce and working to address gender parity:

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