Author Archives: Suki SOHN

8 Tips for Creating a Gender Balanced Workplace

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A diverse workforce brings varied perspectives that contribute to an organisation’s prosperity, yet only one in five C-suite leaders is a woman and fewer than one in 30 is a woman of colour, according to a new study from LeanIn.org and McKinsey.

Overcoming this disparity is critical to the success of top companies. In fact, investment analytics firm MSCI ESG Research found that companies with strong female leadership generated a higher return on equity versus those without and suffered fewer governance-related controversies.

INSEAD alumnae from the INSEAD Women in Business Global Club and National Alumni Associations weighed in on what women need to thrive in the workplace, as well as how companies can attract, retain and leverage top talent to cultivate a more diverse workforce. Based on their input, here are eight tips for companies.

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Enhancing INSEAD’s strength: INSEAD’s Global Women in Business Club

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One of INSEAD’s core strengths is its diverse community. Students are encouraged to understand different perspectives and are offered tools to thrive in an ever-changing global business ecosystem through a curriculum that leverages personal differences and conflict to achieve intellectual and professional growth. Alumni continue to strive to be effective leaders in their chosen field and to advance their professional and personal goals. Most alumni rely on their INSEAD experience and alumni connections to support their ongoing efforts.

At INSEAD “I found my people”
INSEAD’s community is unique. As one of nine distinguished alumni panelists who shared a round of special toasts to INSEAD at the Global INSEAD Day celebrations in New York City on 12 September, alumna Ripa Rashid MBA‘00D shared that at INSEAD “I found my people”. This statement was met with a collective nod in the room of about 140 alumni. If that sentence resonates with you, it may be because you too found your people at INSEAD, through a uniquely diverse community that fit your specific needs.

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Building Gender Balance Through Behavioural Design

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Motivated by many conversations with global business leaders working toward creating gender equality and gender balance who are struggling along these lines, we at INSEAD’s Gender Initiative (https://www.insead.edu/centres/gender-initiative) are investigating solutions ourselves, and watching for others’ rigorous scholarly work. Thus, we were delighted to host Professor Iris Bohnet on our Singapore campus. She presented insights from her book and current work with organisations, and we share a few highlights here. This article is co-authored by Clarissa Cortland, and it is published on our Knowledge website.

What can organisations do when changing mindsets isn’t enough?

For advocates of workplace gender balance, one of the chief obstacles is the immobility of mindsets. Regardless of our intentions, traditional stereotypes about how men and women work dwell within most of us and can affect our decision making without our necessarily being aware of them. And because unconscious gender biases often have deep cultural foundations, they can be very difficult to shift.

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