Charting Progress: Aniline’s Gender Score
The month of March is Women’s History Month. Last week included both International Women’s Day - celebrated annually to recognize women's achievements and advocate for equality - and Women’s Equal Pay Day, which marks how far into the year the average median woman must work in order to have earned what the average median man had earned the previous year.
As we celebrate Women’s History month, it feels fitting to leverage Aniline’s applied Generative AI to assess the current landscape of gender equality in the workforce. We took a closer look both at Aniline’s Gender Score and at Aniline’s AI agent, Annie’s, insights into specific companies.
The Aniline Gender Score
A component of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Score, Aniline’s Gender Score measures how employees perceive their work experience based on their gender identity. Aniline’s database contains ~2.5 million employee opinions on DEI, with 300k+ employee opinions specifically on gender. Aniline’s Generative AI categorizes and contextualizes employee opinions across thousands of companies, extracting insights directly from employee perspectives. Each of the 70k+ companies in the database is scored on a variety of workplace-critical topics and subtopics each month, yielding millions of company scores over time.
First, we examined the overall trend in Aniline’s Gender Score. Across the entire database, the average Gender Score has been trending slightly but consistently upward since January 2023. This is a marked change compared to 2021 and 2022, where the Gender Score trended slightly downward. Encouragingly, this suggests that employee sentiments about gender in the workplace are broadly trending upward.
In Aniline’s scoring methodology, GenAI contextualizes, categorizes, and scores employee opinions to bring the score up or down from 50, driven by positive or negative sentiment. Across millions of company scores, changes that are quite small numerically are often substantively very meaningful.
We also looked at how the Gender Score impacts other scores. First, the Gender Score has a strong and significant positive impact on the overall DEI Score. On average, for each one point increase in a company’s Gender Score, its DEI Score increases by about 0.18 points. A higher Gender Score is also significantly, positively related to both the Integrity Score and the Leadership Score, lending further support to the idea that gender inclusivity has broader positive impacts across different facets of organizations.
Top-Scoring Industries & Companies
We also took a look at the industries where the average Gender Score is highest and lowest as of March 1, 2024, as well as the highest and lowest scoring companies from across the entire database.*
*Among industries with at least 1,000 companies in database and companies with at least 100 reviews on gender
The industry with the highest average Gender Score is Social Assistance, while the industry with the lowest average Gender Score is Food Services & Drinking Places. However, even the lowest-scoring industries have been on an upward trajectory since the start of 2023.
Many of the top-performing companies listed here have high-profile gender equity initiatives that have earned them various public accolades. Capgemini, Accenture, and IBM, for example, have received awards, launched research agendas, or landed on high profile lists for their multifaceted commitment to advancing gender equity. But other top scoring companies listed here have largely flown under the public radar, and many companies publicly lauded for their commitment to gender equity have a Gender Score much lower than their public perception might suggest.
These patterns highlight the unique value of Aniline’s data. Because Aniline’s data is derived from employee perspectives, it offers an authentic, behind-the-scenes look at company culture and gender equity that may starkly contrast with public image and proclaimed initiatives. This inside-out view reveals the real impact of policies and practices on the workforce, uncovering disparities between the public accolades and the lived experiences of employees and underscoring the importance of employee feedback in assessing genuine progress in gender equity.
Best Practices
What exactly are companies with the highest Aniline Gender Scores doing? We asked Annie, Aniline’s AI agent, to tell us more about how these companies prioritize gender equity. Here are the top three factors they have in common:
1. Work-Life Balance & Flexibility: Top-scoring companies understand the importance of allowing employees to manage their personal and professional lives. They emphasize flexible work arrangements, including remote work and flexible scheduling. This flexibility is especially beneficial for women, who may have caregiving responsibilities or personal commitments alongside their careers.
2. Safe, Supportive & Inclusive Work Culture: The companies with the highest Aniline Gender Scores create safe and supportive work cultures. This includes the creating and enforcing clear zero-tolerance policies on harassment and discrimination, prioritizing women’s security, and continually emphasizing a culture of respect and collaboration for all employees.
3. Professional Development and Career Growth Opportunities: These companies place a strong emphasis on mentorship, professional development, and career growth opportunities. Many have initiatives specifically designed to support women’s professional development. Top performing companies also emphasize women’s advancement, prioritizing equitable representation by creating pathways to leadership.
By contrast, the lowest-scoring companies tend to have problems with harassment and discrimination, which are often swept under the rug or ignored entirely. Women at these companies describe feeling unsafe and unsupported, and often describe a glass ceiling effect. Many of the companies with the lowest Gender Scores have problems with nepotism and favoritism, with opportunities for advancement seemingly reserved for members of what many employees describe as the “boys’ club.” Along the same lines, employees at most of these companies cite a lack of female leadership, particularly in the upper echelons.
Leveraging Employee Perspectives to Support Gender Equality
The research team at Aniline has been tracking employment trends and talent signals that significantly advance organizational cultures and ultimately drive organizational performance outcomes. A recurring theme has been the positive influence women have on organizations overall, highlighting the benefits of greater representation of women in leadership and overall gender parity while underscoring the impact of their absence.
Organizational leaders must cultivate a deep understanding of their existing employer perceptions regarding progress on gender parity and the realities of the workplace for all employees. That means identifying women's experiences inside organizations and taking action based on what they say. This means going beyond observing Women’s History month or celebrating International Women’s day - it means taking substantive actions that allow every woman a pathway to thrive in the workplace.
Aniline’s unique approach to understanding the collective voice of employees in real time helps to elevate performance by revealing what drives success. To learn more, contact us at info@aniline.ai to schedule a brief introduction to our generative AI solution.
