CEO Blueprint – How to Build and Lead Gender-Balanced Organizations

This Blueprint provides a starting point for CEOs once they understand the importance of gender balance to build a vision, structuring and mobilizing management teams, and focusing on gender diversity initiatives. This blueprint aims to help frame the CEO agenda through the following steps:

1. Build your vision: Start with introspection of why you believe gender balance is important, then consult with peers and experts to identify symptoms and causes of gender inequality in your organization, and declare your commitment, making sure to consider choice of words, consistency, and frequency.
2. Make it mission critical: Embed gender diversity within your strategy and corporate values by building a gender diversity strategy. Ensure that it is firmly linked to the business strategy by setting targets and measuring progress regularly and holding yourself and others accountable.
3. Focus on high impact practices: Focus on activities that generate the highest return on investment (ROI) to prevent feel-good initiatives that do not create positive results. For example, mentoring women address the gender pay gap, gender-inclusive flexible work models, and interventions at inflection points in a woman’s career. Also, avoid one-time training sessions, creating women-only corporate networks, and recruiting external senior role models.