Empowering Future Women Leaders through Gender-Aware Education

Women’s Success in the Highest Leadership Levels Starts with Gender-Aware Education

We have embarked on a critical conversation that can transform the workforce and the workplace. Our focus lies in a significant disconnect -- women represent most undergraduate and graduate school degree-earners yet represent a fraction of leaders in every field and every industry. This is most evident at the top. Women comprise 10.4% of the Fortune 500 company CEOs and about 36% of their board members, while women comprise only 29% of Congress. For women, educational attainment does not translate as clearly into leadership attainment. 

As women’s leadership and workplace diversity experts, Mine The Gap partnered with the Hewitt School, one of seven independent girls’ schools in New York City, to launch The Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership in Society to more deeply understand the way girls learn and close the massive gap that is keeping women from co-leading in our world.

If you look at graduates by field of study, women enrolled in graduate school outnumber men in 7 out of 11 graduate fields. Yet, women are roughly 1 in 4 of C-suite leaders and women of color are 1 in 16. Women at the director level are leaving at a higher rate than men, dubbed the “Great Breakup,” leaving fewer senior women in the pipeline to promote.

We brought our lens of what is missing for women in the private sector, to think about preparing girls now. We are proud to be part of one of the first efforts to bring together industry perspective, research, and academia to support girls’ leadership for the workplace. 

In the past year the Center has garnered a diverse collection of partners and researchers committed to breaking new ground on solutions and convened leading scholars, higher education institutions, and corporate leaders, to prepare girls for their professional lives.

Most recently we developed a curriculum called, The Girl Advantage, and trained Hewitt’s middle school educators on creating an environment where girls’ leadership can be better explored and expanded. The curriculum provides faculty with a guide to consider pedagogical ways to open space for girls to explore their growth and authenticity rather than recommending how girls should lead. 

As we came together with the knowledge of the practical challenges women face in the workplace and the faculty experiences, we immediately saw how the social and gender norms that begin to influence girls early in life play out in similar ways in the classroom and in the workplace today. 

Our efforts are meant to disrupt this trajectory and break the patterns we see in the workplace – of women undermining their credibility, not putting themselves forward for opportunities, or not knowing their value – which appear early in the classroom and are rooted in early socialization. Our training tapped into new ways to unlock girls’ power and potential, including girls of color or from immigrant families. 

What are some tangible pedagogical changes we can make to influence the choices and paths of women when they leave high school and graduate school? Launching the curriculum is the beginning of a conversation that will require the investment of thought partners including industry leaders to find pathways for girls that bridge this gap between educational performance and leadership in the professional world. 

We are proud to be a key part of Hewitt’s intentional, collaborative, research-backed effort across sectors and hope that others will contribute to this dialogue. With more authentic women leaders in business, we will see the range of benefits that research says it brings – innovation, greater competition, and a more positive work environment that attracts and retains great talent. We can also look forward to many more nuanced styles of leadership and workplace dynamics that can emerge when we have enough women in leadership to disrupt the status quo.

1 Women Earned the Majority of Doctoral Degrees in 2020 for the 12th Straight Year and Outnumber Men in Grad School 148 to 100, AEI. 

2 https://leanin.org/women-in-the-workplace