HOW Women Mean Business - Latest Book by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox - Building Gender Balanced Business

The HOW section of the website is a one-stop shop for companies interested in improving the gender balance in their organisations.

For many organisations and managers, this is an old subject that they thought was solved long ago. But new 21st century realities are giving new urgency to a brand new, and truly enormous, opportunity.

HALF THE TALENT
Women now represent the majority of university graduates around the world. It is urgent that companies learn how to attract, retain and develop this huge part of the talent pipeline.

GENDER ASBESTOS
Companies have misdiagnosed the problem as a women’s issue, and a glass ceiling problem. The reality is that gender imbalance begins at the very bottom of corporate hierarchies and continues to worsen as you work your way through the leadership process. Companies need to proactively identify and eliminate the gender asbestos from their management cultures, mindsets and processes.

GENDER BILINGUALISM
This requires all managers, and the organisation as a whole, to become ‘gender bilingual’: fluent in the differences between genders, both as employees and as consumers, so as to harness the power and potential of both men and women.

MOST OF THE MARKET
Women represent the majority of purchasing decision-makers in an ever-growing number of sectors – from cars to consumers. Has your company kept up with the shifts in its customer base? Most customer segmentation models under-analyse the gender impact. We help our clients get a true measure of the opportunities that better responses to a more gender balanced market can yield.

20-first‘s proven approach is described in the book HOW Women Mean Business (Wiley, April 2010), and is developed in more detail in this section and in our groundbreaking Online Gender Toolkit.