NewAfricanWoman Issue 49 - Flipbook - Page 19
SPECIAL FEATURE
| WOMEN & WORK
The index also
tracks the other
ways in which
companies can ease
the financial burden
of starting a family.
Photography:Shutterstock/wavebreakmedia
How are companies supporting women
who want families?
Not all women aspire to have a family, but many
do, and the burden of parenthood still falls
unequally on women in most societies. In addition
to this, the burden of parenthood as a whole is
becoming more challenging to navigate as times
change.
This tricky balancing act affects the rates at which
women choose to pursue more senior positions,
which is one reason that a company’s parental leave policy is weighted so heavily in its GEI
Score.
GEI members (excluding those in the United
States) offer an average of 11.31 weeks of paid
parental leave for primary caregivers and 4.25
weeks for secondary caregivers.
In the US, as the only developed country without
a federally regulated mandate for paid parental
leave, figures for this metric for employees in the
US were analysed separately.
61% of GEI members offer some form of financial
support for childcare, 98% offer a flexible working location, and 94% offer a flexible schedule.
The index also tracks the other ways in which
companies can ease the financial burden of starting a family, by seeing how many companies offer
services like adoption assistance, support for
fertility services, and support for egg freezing.
The introduction by corporations of policies to
increase gender parity might seem like a one-
dimensional issue: women suffer from inequality,
so, for the sake of women, effort should be made
to reduce inequality, but studies also show that
businesses perform better with a more diverse
group of leaders.
Although framing the question as an issue of
women’s rights should be enough to incentivise
change, many companies around the world with
less progressive politics will be uninterested in
making change on this basis alone.
Framing the issue as a deciding factor in the
overall success of a business will perhaps inspire
interest in more businesses to make meaningful
change within their own corporate structures.
By creating an index that has cultivated a sense
of prestige, Bloomberg has already proven this to
be true. It is now a status symbol for a company
to be included in the GEI, a status symbol that
more and more companies across the world strive
to attain year after year.
However, if the rate of companies choosing
to apply to the GEI continues to outpace the
progress that they report, we must ask if this type
of index and its philosophy is truly succeeding in
decreasing gender inequality or if it’s just another
style of faux feminism.
■
Grace Stinson is an Editorial Intern at Impakter. She enjoys writing about literature,
health, and travel. (The article is published courtesy of Impakter.com)
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March 2023 New African Woman
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