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Christie Hunter Arscott
March 15, 2016
What is the main reason women in their early thirties are leaving your company?
Organizational leaders report that women are leaving primarily because of
flexibility needs and family demands. Women in their thirties disagree.
A recent global ICEDR study revealed that leaders believe that the majority of
women around the age of 30 leave because they are struggling to balance work
and life or planning to have children, whereas men leave because of
compensation. However, according to women themselves (and in sharp contrast to
the perceptions of their leaders), the primary factor influencing their
decision to leave their organizations is pay. In fact, women are actually more
likely to leave because of compensation than men.
Not only are women s reasons for leaving misunderstood, differences between
women and men are overstated. Four out of the five top reasons thirtysomething
women and men leave organizations overlap.
This research boils down to two simple findings. Firstly, women care about pay.
Secondly, women and men leave organizations for similar reasons. Based on these
insights, here are a few key actions that leaders can take:
Ask, don t assume: Women in their thirties should play an integral role in
developing talent retention strategies. Instead of talking about them, talk
with them.Want to know why women are leaving your organization? Don t assume.
Ask them and then develop data-driven strategies based on these findings. To be
successful, retention initiatives must be rooted in the needs and desires of
the talent segments that they are designed to target.
Address challenges beyond family and flexibility: While options for flexibility
and work-life balance are important, the bottom line is that motherhood is not
the primary reason why talented women are leaving organizations. Focusing
retention strategies on this alone, without also considering pay and
compensation fairness, will ultimately jeopardize retention and advancement
efforts.
Propose women s strategies as broader talent strategies: Gender appears to have
little impact on an individual s reasons for leaving an organization. This is
good news for organizational leaders. By implementing strategies and programs
informed by the needs and desires of women, leaders will simultaneously be
addressing what matters most to broader talent pools, men included. There is
less of a need to segment and complicate talent strategies by gender. Instead,
there is the opportunity to create broad impact through strategies that address
the desires of both mid-career women and men.
As a result of the misperceptions about why women leave their organizations,
there is a disconnect between current talent retention strategies and the
desires of top female talent. While work-life balance, flexibility, and family
are important, they are not the only or even the primary reasons women
leave companies. With men and women expressing similar concerns about why they
leave their jobs, leaders have the opportunity to retain and advance their top
talent, both male and female, by focusing on common priorities: pay and fair
compensation.
Christie Hunter Arscott is a leading millennial expert on gender and
generational strategies. She is a Rhodes Scholar, World Economic Forum Global
Shaper, and Principal of ICEDR s NextGen Women s Leadership Institute. She s on
Twitter at @CHunterArscott.