The Value of Multiplying the ‘Gender Multiplier Effect’
Helping women reach their potential has a ripple effect that benefits families, communities, companies, and even global economies.
By Andrea Stevenson Conner
We all know how a multiplier effect works. When you cook a cup of rice, it yields three. When you multiply three by five, you get 15. The “gender multiplier effect” works in much the same way.
When you apply the GME to a company, government agency, or even a developing country, you get more than a 1:1 return. That is, when you invest in women, the effect ripples out, benefitting not only the women you helped initially but also the people close to them—their families, friends, and communities or their teams, departments, and business units. In the biggest picture, the gender multiplier effect can have a positive impact on the global economy.
I advocate for the gender multiplier effect not only because it is a well-documented phenomenon but also because I have seen its success firsthand.
Data Supporting the Multiplier Effect.
More than a decade ago, McKinsey published its report, “The Business of Empowering Women,” which presented a case for why and how the private sector should intensify its engagement in the economic empowerment of women in developing countries and emerging markets.
“Skilled women who hold jobs and enjoy a meaningful status in their communities and countries are healthier and more productive,” the authors wrote, “and they make their societies healthier and more productive.”
The United Nations espouses gender equality as crucial to sustainable economic development. And the Adelante Foundation finds investing in women to be the “most effective” means of sustainable development.
True Story of the Multiplier
Back in 2012, I experienced what the research shows. My helping one woman led to a program for 40 women. By one calculation, paying this program forward over 15 years will have a positive impact on more than 465,000 lives. Here’s what happened to make me such a believer in the gender multiplier effect.
While working with the World Academy for the Future of Women, a nonprofit organization supporting the leadership development of university women in rural China, I met Connie Han, a senior member of WAFW’s leadership development program. Helping her travel from her hometown to Shanghai for a job shadow experience opened key opportunities for her.
In Shanghai, Connie visited the offices of multinational corporations and accepted a job offer from a company that provided international sales training. Now, she leads a sales team for India and Africa for a mining equipment company.
Mentoring Connie inspired me, so I added a year to an existing WAFW leadership program. That add-on, Academy in Action, initially provided 40 young women job-seeking skills, job shadowing experiences, and internships—the tools needed to pursue their passions and to transition from being university students to leaders in their careers and global citizens. Individually, Academy in Action participants changed their own futures and positively impacted their families. Collectively, they showed others from their villages that they can achieve economic empowerment too.
The gender multiplier effect can be applied in so many ways—to so much benefit. As an example, a 2017 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that a nation’s poverty rate of working women would be cut in half if women earned as much as men. The research also found that equal pay for women would add $512.6 billion in income to the U.S. economy if men’s wages stayed the same.
Gender Multiplier Effect Next Steps
My passion is to boost the use of the GME to help women, their families, their communities, their teams, and their companies—and, therefore, the world. But this is not all about me. Because the gender multiplier effect exemplifies the impact a single, positive action can make, it’s clear that each one of us can take action.
Boosting the effects of the GME could start with the simple step of inviting a female emerging leader to lunch, shining the spotlight back on a woman who is being talked over in a meeting, or advocating that your organization invest in an initiative to spark its own gender multiplier effect.
What can you do today to elevate a woman? Do it. And then watch the good multiply.
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