By Brice Wallace
Utah’s tech community has been a beacon of innovation for years, but it also is at the forefront of pushing for gender diversity inside companies.
One effort to boost diversity, the nonprofit organization Parity.org, has received commitments from more than 80 companies to interview more women for executive roles, and Utah companies represent half of that group.
Cathrin Stickney, founder and chief executive officer of Parity.org, said at the recent Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City that major non-Utah companies involved in the effort are Lyft, Adobe, Best Buy, Ralph Lauren and Cisco.
“For many of them, this message about gender parity at the very top of the company — where the real issues are — has resonated with them, Stickney said. “Each of these companies has great diversity programs. This was just something that is a focus that wasn’t part of their diversity program, necessarily, and they really wanted to make a statement, [to] send a message to not only their employees but the public.”
Parity.org’s website features statistics that show that despite women accounting for 51 percent of the U.S. population, women are in only 5.2 percent of S&P company CEO roles, are 11 percent of those companies’ top earners, occupy 21.2 percent of board seats and represent 26.5 percent of executive/senior-level officials and managers.
The Parity.org push encourages companies to “commit my organization to simply interview and consider at least one qualified woman for every open role, VP and higher, including the C-suite and the board. That’s it. No quotas. No deadlines.”
Individuals who sign up “commit to speak up for, support and celebrate the advancement of women into all corporate roles — in particular at the levels of VP and higher, including the C-suite and the board — where the lack of gender parity is most acute. That’s it. Speak up. Support. Celebrate.”
The Parity.org effort is patterned after the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which calls on team to interview qualified minority candidates for head coaching and senior football management roles.
“It does make a difference. It does lead to change,” said Josh James, Domo founder and chief executive officer and a member of the Parity board of directors. “We signed up for it a few months ago and started implementing it and it does lead to change.”
Often, he said, companies needing someone to fill a vice president position go after one “perfect” person. “And we’re like, ‘Oh, wait, maybe we can find a better person.’ And that’s what it forces you to do. No one wants to interview someone for the sake of interviewing, so how can we find better people?”
Companies that have gender diversity, particularly at those higher levels, are 15 percent more profitable than those that do not, Stickney said. “That really is the business case,” she said. “It’s not only the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do, to bring women into your organization.”
James concurred, saying more gender diversity “makes your companies better, it gives you more diversity of thought, it gives you better ideas, it makes you more compassionate, it makes you understand your employees better, understand your customers better. It’s good for business. That’s why people do it, and this is a really simple way to take your company to that next level.”
Stickney said the more women who are on company boards, the more women will be hired for C-suite positions, which leads to more women being hired in the company overall.
“You’ve got this virtuous cycle that goes when you start bringing women into these senior roles,” she said. “It really is ‘what goes around comes around,’ and you end up with a very diverse, positive organization as a result of it.”
Stickney said she was moved to create Parity.org, which launched last September, after reading a World Economic Forum report in 2016 that indicated it would take 100 years for the U.S. and the rest of the world to achieve gender parity. Now that projection is 175 years, “so we’re actually going backwards,” she said.
“It was really the report in 2016 that prompted me to say, ‘We really need to do something more than helping one woman at a time. We really need to speed this up,’” Stickney said.
“I want to see gender parity in my lifetime and not have to wait for my grand-children’s grand-children’s lifetime to do that.”