This is taken from a LinkedIn post the doctor posted on Monday, March 11. It’s being reposted here for those who don’t follow LinkedIn and because, as expected, he hasn’t heard a single peep from any organization that was spewing platitudes last Friday as if praise one day a year was doing enough.

If you truly celebrate women, then please tell me:

What are you doing TODAY to

1. increase the number of women in Management, STEM, Executive Suites, and Investment Firms,
2. close the pay gap that is still 15% to 30% across these areas,
3. encourage women to join your company to pursue their career, and
4. enable the work life balance they need to be AS or MORE successful than their male counterparts?

As most of you are probably well aware from the deluge of “we support and honour our female leaders who … ” posts on LinkedIn last Friday, International Women’s Day was last Friday (2024-Mar-08). I stayed silent, as usual, because I found the majority of them very upsetting.

While some of the posts were very sincere, and some came from individuals I know had the best of intentions:

1. Lip service does nothing to address the four major issues above.
2. The lip service I saw in some of these posts was about as meaningful as a token thank you card at the annual Christmas party.
3. Few addressed the real issues women still face in “traditional” workspaces run, and dominated, by men.
4. Those few that honoured teams with equal representation or greater, or at least statistically average representation (in companies in fields where women are currently only 25% of the workforce, like STEM) have done nothing to educate their peers on how important this is and how successful they are because of it.

If you are a leader in a company (with actual employees) that truly cares, then I challenge you to celebrate their achievements and capability every day, and once a month make a post on efforts your company is taking to increase the number of women, close the pay and rank gaps, and support their work life balance, either through hiring, training, support for community programs that do such or at least make a post on the stellar accomplishments they have accomplished that would put an average salesman to shame.

And to keep doing this until they have the equality, and the respect they deserve.

The simple facts are

1. women are half the population,
2. are just as capable of men (as there is NO difference between average IQ scores), and
3. should be half the workforce.

If women are not half the workforce at your company (or at least not represented statistically in line with the average representation in the field your company is in), it’s not their lack of achievement, dear men, it’s yours!