Talking about 2019, the participation of women leaders as top-level executives was limited to 29 percent, which stayed to be the same in 2020 and then jumped to 31 percent in 2021, the highest ever. Though the stats might appear to be positive, there is still a huge need for women to encourage other women to add more value to the corporate landscape globally.

Greater Scope For Transformation

Women have always been a very significant part of the society. From nurturing families to society, the contribution made is beyond any descriptions.

Besides, the change in societal norms surrounding women leadership and participation of women in the corporate sector have placed female leaders in more influential positions. Such practices have even enabled a positive change in workplace policies attracting more diversity, pay equity, improved organizational culture, etc.

However, the sudden inception of COVID-19 pandemic changed things for worse causing extensive layoffs and voluntary quitting. To mention the statistics, 54 million women left the workforce within the first twelve months of the pandemic with around 90 percent of them never returning to work.

Adding to that, the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2022 report has found that, “around 2.4 billion women of working age are not afforded equal economic opportunity and 178 countries maintain legal barriers that prevent their full economic participation.”

Some of the most significant effects of such decline in women workforce reflected as career progression, gender parity, and leadership positions. However, the damage inculcated is not just limited to women but even causes the loss of engagement and productivity at workplace. It is because women leaders tend to have teams with better engagement which leads to added performance and therefore revenue.

In other words, when the corporate sector is already struggling with a long-hauled talent shortage, retaining women leaders can be the key to securing workforce.

Why Women Leaders Are Better?

According to a multi-year research made by Potential Project on employees and leaders from around 100 nations and 5000 companies finding how leaders take hard decisions without not being good humans. The analysis focused on two major traits, Compassion & Wisdom.

Both these traits have a very significant impact on the outcomes since they had the potential to increase the job satisfaction percentage to 86 percent, high for an employee who works under a kind and compassionate leader. More importantly, the results obtained were quite stark when filtered for the gender differences as 55 percent women were found wise and compassionate compared to 27 percent of the men. In other words, the followers of women leaders simply believed that women leaders could do hard things better compared to men.

Though these were certain metrics that were never recognized earlier, unless the pandemic made the hit and pushed leaders to make the toughest decisions of their life. And a large part of this decision-making was meant to take the teams out of grief and anxiety while sustaining the productivity.

The fact that women could handle tricky situations better could be easily witnessed with a 2021 report from McKinsey which showed women tend to take more people-centric actions, making them better at checking well-being, providing emotional support, and control burnout.

With that being said, let us quickly jump on learning how women leadership is a subject that needs all the attention.

When it comes to hiring or assigning high-profile jobs to women, there is always a stigma associated with the thought that makes thing tough. At times, it may even make young women leaders to avoid making the big moves and restrict them. However, there are so many important reasons that makes it necessary for women leaders to take command, even if we have successfully moved out of the crisis situation.

Women Have The Power To Redefine The Fut

Another research made on men and women in leadership identified that women were more transformational with a highly rewarding behavior. This transformational behavior enabled women to define better leadership traits and fetch success for the organization.

Improved Coordination Amongst Teams

According to Yashu Kapila, CEO BugRaptors, “women have natural tendency to have a nurturing mindset along with great capability.” And therefore, women could showcase the right set of emotional intelligence and knowledge to take bolder and bigger decisions without being too authoritative. Such qualities make women suitable for leadership roles as they bring the advantage to command and transform culture whenever necessary.

Enhanced Business Communication

Be it business decisions, converting sales, or compelling people to align with some decisions, strong leaders have strongest command when communicating. However, women leaders could use certain traits of their personality with quality communication to foster more meaningful conversations. Besides, women leaders are more likely to build enhanced communication stream with greater sense of clarity.

Achieve Higher Financial Outcome

Diversity at workplace encourages creativity which is the essence of sustainable growth. Though it is not necessary that women need to be prioritized, following an approach that has equal involvement of both the genders could enable an organization to flourish.

Also, diversity at workplace allows better staff retention and added performance with improved collaboration between teams. According to a study made by workplace.com, the 21 percent of the businesses witnessed above-average profitability due to better gender diversity.

Women As Mentors Do Better

Since youth makes the most part of global working population, having the right role models are vital. As people need the right guidance, women could coach the youth better. Especially, when 29 percent of women have a belief that gender at times can be an obstacle to career growth, allowing women to take leadership positions could be great help empowering next generation of corporate workforce.

Introducing A Fresh Perspective

When we say the modern business landscape needs diversity to drive creativity, the concept even applies to gaining new perspectives. As most executive positions in the present phase are occupied by male candidates, having more female executives involved could help enhance the decision-making with better perspective.

Closing The Gender Pay Gap

As we see in our routine, women are more adaptable when working on different roles. From balancing careers to taking forward any organization, women leaders could easily adjust focus as required.

Thus, aligning the women leaders towards leadership positions could help simplify the gender gap as the current landscape is found to complement men for high income positions. Besides, women leaders could even allow organizations to expand goals and therefore could set an example for closing gender gap.

Women Leadership: A Beyond Crisis Essential

Very often, organizations are found struggling with the decision-making process. However, the common narrative found says that women lead better during the crisis situations which makes space for the question that if leadership qualities in women are transitional? Though women leadership at global stage has been strengthened during the past two years, the situation still needs much attention. The truth is we all perform better when led by a woman. Moreover, research has even found that women are likely to be better than men in 7 out of 8 primary traits of leadership.

All in all, anyone that is taking on a leadership role has control. However, women as leaders are likely to be more robust. Thus, it is vital that more diverse leadership is advocated at companies to accomplish greater things in the long run while making women take on more significant roles.