I know that might sound strange coming from someone who does so much work on diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and in particular the advancement of women and gender equality.
But hear me out — when we put women in the diversity bucket, we're limiting our thinking in terms of changes, innovations, and solutions relative to gender equality, and here's why — because it's fundamentally inaccurate.
If we look at the population overall, women are actually just over 50%. If we look specifically at the workplace we’re now at 41.2% globally. At what point does a group that represents half of everything stop being seen as a special interest or “diversity” group that needs to be accommodated?
The real challenge is that workplace structure has not kept pace with the changes in the workforce. The workplace was historically developed with the idea that the workforce had someone at home, usually a woman, who was looking after all the domestic, community, and caregiving responsibilities. If that's your assumption going in, you build a workplace a certain way. You say, I want people to be here when I want them, I set the hours, I want people to be completely focused while they're here and I want consistency (no parental leaves). And here we are in 2026, with women being almost half of the workforce and those assumptions are no longer true. Not for women for sure, but they're not actually true for most of your workforce regardless of gender. Very few households have that dedicated domestic and caregiving resource anymore.
When we think of women as a diversity issue we come up with solutions like increasing representation, which is certainly needed in many industries, especially in leadership. Or we look for accommodations to address individual needs or concerns. But what we don’t do is fundamentally examine and innovate our workplace systems and structures to meet the needs of a changing workforce.
The real opportunity here is to look at the diverse and changing workforce as an innovation challenge and to ask questions to fundamentally redesign our organization systems and structures to be more optimal and sustainable for both our people and the organization.
That is why I think it's limiting and inaccurate to be talking about women as diversity at this point. We’re half of everything and it’s time for the world and the workplace to adapt accordingly.
Let's move on.
— Belinda
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