THE

PACT 1
THE PACT
VERSION 1 • MAY, 2O19

INTRODUCTION 3
GOAL ONE: LEADERSHIP & CULTURE  5
GOAL TWO: EQUITY & RETENTION  6
GOAL THREE: HIRING & RECRUITING  7
CONCLUSION 8
BIBLIOGRAPHY 9
introduction
GENDER EQUALITY—it’s the business story of our time and for
good reason. Incentivizing parity is one of the most important
ways to attract and retain valuable employees, invest in long-term
financial growth, and generally act as an employer of integrity (at
a time in which employers are under more scrutiny to do so than
ever). When you zoom out, the potential impact of collective action
looks even greater:

This isn’t only a woman’s problem, and it

isn’t a zero-sum game. The labor-market
conditions that will generate convergence
in pay between genders… will make life better
for almost everybody.” (Goldin)

A variety of models and empirical studies…

suggest that economic gender parity could add
an additional $1,750 billion to that of the
United States.” (Goldin)

Female talent remains one of the most

underutilized business resources, either
squandered through lack of progression or
untapped from the onset… The talents of half
the world’s potential workforce are thus
often wasted or underutilized due to barriers
on the path to women’s successful workforce
integration.” (World Economic Forum)

INTRODUCTION 3
Where to start
WE’LL BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT THAT THE TASK IS DAUNTING.
There’s no recognized source of truth for what policies work best, and combing
through all the available information and opinions to assess what’s best for your
business is a time-consuming venture. Additionally, extremely public corporate
blunders have raised the stakes associated with failure exponentially in the past few
years, and you begin to see why progress has stalled at so many companies despite
their best intentions.

THIS GUIDE, THE PACT, IS MEANT TO GIVE YOU A STARTING

POINT IN WHICH YOU CAN FEEL CONFIDENT
Maybe you work at an organization that already has some diversity and inclusion
policies in place; consider this your way to check if what your company is doing
measures against cross-industry, academically-verified standards. The three goals
we’ve developed address real problems that systematically hold women back at the
different phases of their career and are built on the research and experience of our
partners: Harvard Business School’s Gender Initiative, Arjuna Capital, and the James
Beard Foundation.

WHY JUST THREE GOALS?

Complexity is often the enemy of action, so in the interest of creating an easily
adoptable initiative, we kept this phase of our research digestible. At the same time,
there are different challenges that arise at different times in a career. To ensure parity
across all, we need actions aimed at each, so you’ll find goals broken out in the
following pages by their corresponding career phase.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE FROM US TO MEET THESE GOALS?

The Pact is intentionally simple, but that’s not the same thing as easy. Still, we think
most industries will find the three goals manageable. We’ve included suggested next
steps for each, as well as the resources needed to help meet them. Perhaps most
importantly, the three goals should not cripple a healthy organization in the short
term; in the long term, we think they’ll be fundamental to your growth.

INTRODUCTION 4
GOAL one: leadership & culture
No male executive will appear on an
all-male panel at a public event.

THE C H A L L E N G E
A 2018 study found that nearly 70% of the speakers at global
professional events and conferences are men. The numbers get
even bleaker when you look at the industry-level breakdown;
men made up 78% of the speakers at tech events and 82% of
venture capital events. Most disheartening of all, progress has
been relatively stagnant; the percentage of women speakers only
you speak at a meeting, your reputation at your home institution
also improves, and that helps your chances of promotion”
(Casadevall). It’s worth noting that this goal is a good one to apply
to across all of your diversity and inclusion efforts – there’s no
reason you need to keep it limited to just women.
NEXT STEPS

increased 2% from 2016 to 2018.

What do we lose when we only treat men as experts? For women
at the beginning of their careers, all-male panels serve as a signal
that people like them do not belong in the upper echelon of
industry. According to a Harvard study, lack of visible female role
models dramatically impacts leadership identity development of
the next generation of female leaders.
Women leaders feel the negative effects, too. According to
seven female CEOs interviewed by the Harvard Business Review,
“If there’s a single barrier that affects all women, it’s exclusion
from networks and conversations that open doors to further
development and promotion” (Connolly & Groysberg). Panels
at industry conferences serve as some of the most notable
opportunities for leaders to direct their respective fields in a new
direction, and all-male panels all but ensure women are left out
of that process.
Equip your executives with a list of relevant, qualified women
to suggest when they’re invited to speak on a panel of three
or more people comprised of only men. By advocating
for their female peers, male executives have the power to
dramatically and quickly change this practice.
Here are some resources to build your speaker list:
+ Quartz’s female founders index
+ 1,000 qualified women in tech and science
+ Women in the music industry
+ Vetted female experts on breaking news topics
+ 70+ women of color who should be speaking at
marketing conferences
+ A compilation of resources for other industries

THE B E N E F I T S

For those already at the top who will be featured on the panels,
this helps to position them as a subject matter expert, give them
agency in their organization’s narrative and vision, and give them
direct access to a network of peers, all of which are essential for
further development at the senior leadership level (Ely, Ibarra &
Kolb). “It’s a cascade effect; once you’re a speaker, your work is
recognized, and you are more likely to make connections, have
your work funded, and to be invited to speak again. And when

GOAL ONE: LEADERSHIP & CULTURE 5

 GOAL two: equity & retention
Conduct an annual audit of pay
across gender and race.

THE C H A L L E N G E
Inequality takes many forms, but at its most tangible and
ubiquitous, if often boils down to money. As of 2018, the Global
Gender Gap still sits at 32%, which will take a grim 202 years
to close at our current rate of progress. Many countries have
already made this initiative a matter of public policy out of
recognition of its efficacy. In 2017, the UK government began
requiring companies of 250 or more employees to conduct
a gender pay gap audit annually and report the results to the
public. As some countries move ahead, others like the United
States fall behind.
study on the impact of mandatory wage transparency are
encouraging. Not only is disclosing discrepancies extremely
effective for narrowing the gender pay gap, but it also led to
more women getting hired and promoted at those companies.
Assuaging the concerns of many companies contemplating this
move, the study also found these firms lowered their overall
wage bills, which means “firms concerned about a negative
impact of these new laws on their profit don’t seem to have
reason to fear.” (Bennedsen, et al).
NEXT STEPS

It’s important that we not leave race out of the equation,
considering the dramatic wage disparities impacting women
and men of color. In the United States, “black women working in
full-time, year-round positions make 63 cents to each dollar
earned by a white man. “This gap is much wider than the
79 cents the average woman earns for every dollar made by a
man and the 87 cents earned by Asian-American women.
And other groups, including Latinas and Native American women,
experience a gap that is even larger, making 54 cents and 57
cents per dollar, respectively.”
The actual auditing process for your organization’s gender
pay gap is relatively straightforward.
First, you’ll want to accurately collect all of the data for
measurement. For the calculations, we recommend either
Glassdoor’s guide or the UK government’s instructions.
For how best to understand your results – and the difference
between your “equal pay gap” and “median pay gap” –
we recommend our partner Arjuna Capital’s Gender Pay
Scorecard.

THE B E N E F I T S

When surveyed, 24 global CEOs who ran companies with a

reputation for effective inclusion and diversity practice put
measurement and holding managers accountable as the top two
practices that really made a difference (Connolly & Groysberg).
According to a Salesforce study, employees who say their
company cares about closing the gender pay gap are “2.2x more
likely than those who don’t to say they are proud to work for their
company” (Salesforce).

For those companies willing to go the extra step and disclose

their median pay gap, recent findings from the first empirical

GOAL TWO: EQUITY & RETENTION 6

 GOAL three: hiring & recruiting
In a male-dominated field, interview 10% more
female candidates for a position than is industry-
standard for that position. In a female-dominated
field, do the same for male candidates.
THE C H A L L E N G E
Women can’t be paid properly or get recognized for their
leadership unless they’re hired in the first place. Unfortunately,
humans are hardwired to want to surround ourselves with people
who look like us; research has documented that decision-makers
tend to exhibit in-group preferences when hiring, which in male-
dominated fields can unwittingly lead hiring managers to consider
fewer women for an open role (McGinn & Milkman).
Even when we know better, committing to action can be difficult.
As an employer, we get it; we’re all laser-focused on growth and
business goals, so when a position opens up, all resources go
towards getting the right talent in place as quickly as possible.
In some industries, systemic education inequality means that
the pool of qualified female candidates is much smaller than
men, essentially rendering the potential for a 50/50 interview
pool impossible. Even well-meaning policies like quotas can fail.
According to a study in the Harvard Business Review, “When
there was only one woman or minority candidate in a pool of
four finalists, their odds of being hired were statistically zero.”
The UK government has echoed this same dismal reality in their
recommendations for effective action on the gender pay gap:
“Shortlists with only one woman do not increase the chance of a
woman being selected” (UK Government).
THE B E N E F I T S
Even a 10% change in the candidate pool can have a big impact
on hiring outcomes. The same Harvard Business Review study also
found that, “When we created a new status quo among the finalists
by adding just one more woman or minority candidate, the decision-
makers actually considered hiring a woman or minority candidate”
(Chan, Hekman & Johnson). Similarly, the UK government’s policy
mandates that “when putting together a shortlist of qualified
candidates, make sure more than one woman is included.”
GOAL THREE: HIRING & RECRUITING
Considering more women for open positions has demonstrated
bigger benefits. Companies that hire more women have a more
diverse set of candidates to consider for internal promotions,
ultimately increasing the diversity of the respective company’s
upper ranks (Connolly & Groysberg). A variety of models and
empirical studies reported by the World Economic Forum also
suggests that improving gender parity “may result in significant
economic dividends...notable recent estimates suggest that
economic gender parity could add an additional $1,750 billion to
GDP of the United States” (Goldin).
And why include men? Outdated ideas of what constitutes a
masculine or feminine job has kept qualified and talented men out
of fields in which they’ve remained historically underrepresented,
like education, health, and caregiving. Those fields lose out the
same way tech and venture capital do: “Fair returns to skills and
the availability of deeper talent pools are disrupted by existing
gender biases—and the fields most affected, such as the care
economy and the emerging technology sector, are losing out on
the benefits of diversity” (World Economic Forum).
NEXT STEPS
Check your country’s bureau of labor site to see the current
gender breakdown in your industry and calculate the proportion of
candidates you need to source for each open position. If sourcing
underrepresented candidates is a challenge, we recommend a
number of communities and organizations that work to connect
talent with the right company:
+ Women Who Code + Ada’s List
+ Women Who Design + 
Women Chefs &
Restaurateurs
+ Elpha
+  + 
Alliance for Women Film
Here Are All The Black
People Composers
+ MAIP + The Director List
+ ADCOLOR + Women in Manufacturing
7
 We wish three measures were all it took to get to parity in every
company and industry, but we’re all a ways from that being the
case. The Pact is meant to be an entry point, and the first step
towards creating a cross-industry standard. We’d like to thank
Harvard Business School’s Gender Initiative, the James Beard
Foundation, and Arjuna Capital for building this phase of work
with us – and to you, for helping us to build the next.

We hope you’ll join us in our ongoing efforts to create an actionable

playbook for gender equality that works across industries, company
sizes, and locations. In the next phase of our research, we invite
you to be the experts – and also less-than-experts, as we think
candidness is essential to bridging the current gap between
awareness and action. Our research team will reach out to
everyone who downloads The Pact, but if you’d like to talk to us
in the meantime, you can reach us at insights@qz.com.

We’re excited to build this with you. Best wishes for an equitable,
productive, and happy workplace.

CONCLUSION 8
bibliography
Bennedsen, Morten, et al. “Research: Gender Pay Gaps Shrink When Companies Are
Required to Disclose Them.” Harvard Business Review, 23 January 2019.

Casadevall, Arturo. “Boost careers of female scientists.” EurekaAlert!

Last modified January 7, 2014. Accessed August 9, 2018.

Ely, Robin J., Herminia Ibarra, and Deborah Kolb. “Taking Gender into Account.”
Working paper, INSEAD, Paris, September 2011.

Goldin, Claudia. “How to Achieve Gender Equality”.

Milken Institute Review. 2015; July (Q3):24-33.

Groysberg, Boris, and Katherine Connolly. “Great Leaders Who Make the Mix Work.”
Harvard Business Review. Last modified September 2013. Accessed August 8, 2018.

The Impact of Equality and Data Driven Business. N.p.: Salesforce Research, 2017.

Johnson, Stefanie K., David R. Hekman, and Elsa T. Chan. “If There’s Only One Woman in Your
Candidate Pool, There’s Statistically No Chance She’ll Be Hired.” Harvard Business Review.
Accessed August 10, 2018.

Lockhart, P.R. “Black Women’s Equal Pay Day.” Vox.

Last modified August 7, 2018. Accessed August 8, 2018.

McGinn, Kathleen, and Katherine L. Milkman. “Looking up and looking out.” Organization
Science 24, no. 4 (July 2014): 1041-60.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 9