Women Roar and a Few Corporate CEOs Bet on Them

By Sarah Bostwick Stromoski, Manager, CEO Leadership, CECP
Jan 5, 2018 9:00 AM ET
Campaign: CECP Insights Blog

As Originally Featured on CECP’s Insights Blog

By far the best thing CEOs and their companies can do to combat sexism, gender discrimination, and sexual misconduct–in short, to support women–is to put diverse women into half of the positions of power and leadership. This is how we resolve a foul, permissive culture.

Can you hear the roar in the corporate corridors?

Just days ago, Uber whistle-blower Susan Fowler and all the other women who broke their silence after suffering sexual harassment and assault became TIME’s and the Financial Times’ 2017 people of the year. This acknowledges the roar heard round the world from women of all ages, places, religions, backgrounds, cultures, professions, companies, industries, and seniority. That roar sent companies’ risk managers scrambling to redraw their matrices and reimagine employee training.  It is so powerful that it has turned entire companies upside-down and aborted the careers of some of the most admired and accomplished businessmen of our time.

In its wake, Uber dumped disgraced founder & CEO Travis Kalanick and more than 20 implicated managers. The Weinstein Company, discredited by founder & former CEO Harvey Weinstein’s predation, promptly put itself up for sale. And the list continues. In the business world, the roar has forced women’s workplace safety squarely into the front of the minds of board directors, executives, managers, lawyers, investors, legislators, industry regulators, and insurers.

What’s a company to do? Reversing decades of treating women as objects and haplessly trying to control the damage or buying accusers’ silence in a company culture that was determined by the worst behavior tolerated by its leaders, some are rolling up their sleeves and getting to the business of making themselves a better place to work. Let’s examine three important steps they are taking....

Read more at CECP Insights Blog http://cecp.me/2E5CGJy