To mark its celebration of International Women’s Day 2016, Accenture has conducted a global survey investigating how digital is impacting women’s careers.
Each year, Accenture in Belgium and Luxembourg joins other Accenture practices around the world to celebrate International Women’s Day. With more than 130,000 women working for Accenture around the globe, it’s a big celebration! The 2016 theme is ‘Being Greater Than’: going beyond boundaries and expectations to advance women, empower their careers and grow the next generation of women leaders. Participation also underscores our commitment to gender equality as a key enabler of an inclusive and harmonious society, where diverse perspectives fuel innovative solutions to address global issues and make the world a better place to work and live for all.
Gender equality is fundamental to the success of our business today and for the next generation of leaders. That’s why our CEO, Pierre Nanterme, has set the ambitious goal to grow the percentage of women Accenture hires around the world to at least 40% by 2017.
While our annual International Women’s Day celebration is an important moment for us to stand still and reflect on the current state of gender equality locally and globally, to exchange experiences and best practices with colleagues, to discover new ideas, and to celebrate being a woman at Accenture, I believe it is equally important to carry this progressive spirit into everyday life. By raising our daughters to speak their minds, teaching our sons to share household responsibilities, daring to challenge our own and other people’s unconscious gender bias, supporting young fathers in same way as young mothers in finding the right work/life balance… we also contribute to a more equal society in the future.
Nevertheless, gender equality at work remains a challenge in many countries around the world today. Can digital help to close this gap?
To investigate this question, Accenture conducted a survey of almost 5,000 men and women across 31 countries to gauge their digital fluency (the extent to which they have embraced digital technologies to become more knowledgeable, connected and effective) and together with internationally comparable data for the same 31 countries, developed a Digital Fluency Model to analyze how access to digital technologies and digital skills impact men’s and women’s careers:
- In education – as they prepare for work
- In employment – as they get and retain jobs
- In advancing in their jobs – progressing towards leadership
The research reveals a strong correlation between digital fluency and gender equality at work (countries with higher rates of digital fluency among women tend to have higher rates of equality in the workplace). However, men still score better in digital fluency than women in three quarters of the countries studied. The survey results shed some light on why: men use digital more (76 percent of men versus 69 percent of women) and tend to be more proactive about learning new digital skills (52 percent for men versus 45 percent for women).
Nevertheless, there are reasons to be optimistic: survey respondents (men and women alike) believe that women will thrive as a wider variety of working arrangements, enabled by digital, replace traditional ways of working and nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of men and women alike said that “the digital world will empower our daughters.”
The research concludes that by accelerating the pace at which women become technology users at every stage of their career (education, employment and advancement), gender equality in the workplace can be achieved faster, both in developed and developing countries.
View the key research findings on SlideShare
