How To: Cater to Your Female Employees
Happy Women’s History Month!
It’s important to celebrate women year-round, but this month presents employers with a great opportunity to express their appreciation for their female team members and consider the ways they could be offering them a greater degree of assistance. To be the best they can be at work, your female employees need support in handling the non-professional aspects of their lives. If they’re stressed because of a personal matter, it’ll inevitably spill over into their job and negatively impact their productivity and the calibre of their work (not to mention their overall quality of life).
As an employer, you’re uniquely positioned to offer your employees the support they need and benefit in return. A stressed out team is a distracted team; time that your employees spend at work concerned about non-professional matters translates to lost time and wages for your business. Research shows that 50% of stressed out employees spend 3+ hours each week at work focused on their personal issues. This could be due to stress in familial relationships or related to health issues, but is most often directly tied to their financial health. On the other hand, research shows that a happy, financially stable employee is much more likely to be dedicated to your organization’s goals, care about their work, be more productive and more pleasant to work with than one who isn’t. So, when it comes to crafting a benefits plan for your employees, and ultimately, the culture of your workplace and organization, consider how the wants of your female employees might differ from those of their male co-workers.
For starters, the degree of importance your female employees place on certain benefits are going to be different than what you’d expect from their male counterparts. A great example is paid parental leave. It’s an attractive benefit to both genders, but you can bet that it’s much, much more important to young or prospective mothers than it is to most young fathers. Giving dads paid time off to help with a new baby is a major plus, but moms need time off to care for their newborn. Having a steady source of income during that time can make a huge difference in easing a new mom’s stress by reducing her household’s financial burden while she’s not able to work.
Another benefit coveted by many female employees is the ability to work on a flexible schedule, and remotely if possible. For women with children, it can be difficult to evenly manage the responsibilities of being a mother and being a full-time employee on a typical 9-5 schedule. Since the start of the pandemic, thousands of women, particularly those with children under the age of six, were forced to choose home life over work with schools closed and capacities at daycares across the country reduced. Canadian women also make up a disproportionate amount of our country’s single-parent households; according to Statistics Canada, 8 out of 10 single-parent homes are female-led. Scheduling trouble also applies in cases, pandemic or otherwise, where a woman is the primary caregiver for an elderly or disabled loved one. A study from the Institute for Work and Health from 2019 shows that Canadian women are 73% more likely to leave their job for eldercare than men are. As such, having the flexibility to work at times that suit their needs better can be immensely beneficial to women, and to some might be the difference between staying employed and leaving the workforce altogether to care for their children.
Beyond just benefits, consider your pay structure - are you paying your female employees the same amount you’re paying the men? Despite the fact that women are equally as capable as their male counterparts in the workplace, the wage gap is still prevalent in our country. Between 1998 to 2018, Canadian women earned on average 13.3% less than their male co-workers; that translates to women earning roughly $0.89 for every $1 earned by men. Women don’t get a break on the cost of living just because of their gender, but still too often take home less income than men do to cover the cost of living. Particularly when you consider how much more likely Canadian women are to the primary caregiver to children or other dependents, this is exponentially more significant. If your organization isn’t paying employees at the same skill/position level the same wages and you want to be doing more for women, this is an obvious place to start!
Even with the wage gap considered, we must add that extra financial support is something all people need, regardless of gender. Offering your employees an additional type of financial support, separate from their wages, can have a major impact on their ability to achieve a level of security with their finances. If you want to learn more about how match-based saving plans can help your employees better meet their financial short-term financial needs with liquid cash, click here.
Be mindful of the fact that your female employees are likely to have an interest in what your business’s core values are and the way your business interacts with the world at large. This isn’t to say you need to bring politics into the workplace, as it could easily become more harmful than helpful. But having your organization give back to your community, engage in some form of philanthropy or offer products and services that serve others in a positive way in something that’s likely to resonate with women and strengthen their desire to work hard for your organization.
Female employees are also going to be watching the way your business operates internally. In general, women don’t respond well to a manager who shows little compassion or who treats employees negatively. In fact, research has shown that whereas men are most often driven by their compensation level when considering their career, women are more likely to prioritize a job where they’ll have a good manager. It’s also important to be mindful of who’s getting the opportunities within your organization as well. If capable female candidates are always getting passed up for the big promotions or projects you’re working on, the women that work for you will notice. Research shows that women are 30% less likely than men to be promoted to manager from an entry-level position, and 60% less likely to be promoted from manager to senior executive in our country. A professional environment in which there’s no real shot at moving up is not one where women will stick around for a long time - if they can find another, more favourable opportunity, they’re likely to take it.
On a more serious note, retaining your female employees in the long run is going to involve your organization formally and immediately putting its foot down in the event of any type of workplace harassment against women. According to a 2016 report by Statistics Canada, 1 in 5 working women between the ages of 15 and 64 were harassed at their place of work. Women were shown to be twice as likely to face physical violence at their workplace than men are, and five times as likely to face sexual harassment. It’s horrible to think how prevalent these issues are for women who just want to earn a living, but workplace harassment unfortunately happens more often than you’d think. For your female employees to be productive, they need to feel safe at work and when collaborating with their co-workers. A business that lets any kind of harassment go unnoticed (or worse, unpunished) is one that should expect to see high levels of turnover with their female staff members.
Ultimately, as an employer, you have an immense amount of power to shape the lives of your female employees. Women face a unique set of challenges every day, just by virtue of being women, and the pandemic has exacerbated many of the inequalities that already existed for working women. Pre-pandemic, research showed that closing the wage gap and increasing female participation rates in the workforce could add an additional $150 billion to our country’s GDP. As such, it should be clear that getting women involved in our country’s workforce and creating conditions where they can remain employed in the face of challenges is not only the right thing to do, but is essential to our country’s recovery and growth looking into the future.
If you’re a Canadian employer interested in adopting an innovative benefits package to retain your employees, reduce the effects of financial stress in the workplace and set yourself apart from your competitors, match-based saving benefits may be right for your business! QUBER is an industry leader in Canadian match-based savings and can offer employers a customized experience using the QUBER platform to facilitate match-based savings with their employees. If you’re interested in seeing a demo of how QUBER can help strengthen your relationship with your employees, send us an email at contactus@quber.ca or visit our Employers page and send us a message using the contact form found at the bottom of the page.
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