Where women lead, the world follows.
In 2018, the CWLI board of directors set out to discover how best to accelerate the impact of female leaders across our community. For the next year, we conducted more than 12 focus groups, numerous interviews, a member survey, and a community assessment.
That research led us to imagine what our region might look like if businesses aspired to become "7" certified. These seven practices are already in play in many of our local businesses. They are proving their worth in recruting and retaining high-quality female leadership talent.
The reality is this: women experience barriers that are unique to their varied roles within our society. In order to usher in more equity and capitalize on the vast reservoir of talent they offer our economy, we must be proactive in our approaches to remove these barriers.
Our hope is that new and existing businesses will share our mission to increase the leadership capapbilitites and influence of women by adopting most if not all of these practices into their company culture in the pursuit of elevating women within the organization. Each year, we recognize businesses who are achieving progress toward these standards at our annual Women's Summit held in the fall.
We desire to see Greater Chattanooga emerge as one of the best communities for attracting female leaders who will fuel the growing economic engine in our region. We desire to help cultivate leaders indvidually while also cultivating an ecosystem where their talents can best thrive. Together, we can map a positive future for professional women.
We surveyed our members asking them to rank seven practies that emerged from our community assessment. We asked them to rank them in order of most importance in helping businesses retain their talent while also creating an on-ramp for more female leaders in higher levels of organizations. What follows is the ranking our members gave each practice. To learn more about this initiative please contact Kim Shumpert at kim@cwli.org.
1. Improve wage disparity
2. Provide flexible work schedules/remote working
3. Provide female-centric professional development
4. Implement coaching/sponsorship program
5. Implement integrated promotion program
6. 7pm to 7am communication pause
7. Caregiving expense matching program