Proco Group

Changing the Talent Tide Report

By: Proco Group

An analysis of the challenges faced when recruiting and retaining women, and how to overcome these to achieve gender parity

Created to celebrate women’s achievements, raise awareness about discrimination and take action to drive gender parity, this year’s theme for International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8th March is “Inspire Inclusion”, and a key pillar is the promotion of diversity in leadership and decision-making positions.

Organisations around the world have made concerted efforts to readdress gender imbalance by lobbying to attract and retain women leaders and to some extent, progress has been made to improve the representation of women at the leadership level.

For example, in 2010 women held 17.9% of board seats in the consumer goods and retail industry. Flash forward to 2020 and this percentage had risen to 25%. Similarly in 2010, 14.4% of executive or senior-level positions in S&P 500 companies were held by women, compared to 28.6% in 2020.

However, although progress has been made, it’s not happening quickly enough. In fact, the 2023 Global Gender Gap Report predicts that it will take 131 years to achieve gender parity, so there is still a lot more work to do.

We’ve compiled this report to highlight the current state of play across our three core markets – Commodity, Industrial and Consumer – and to share key changes that need to be implemented to attract and retain talented women into senior, executive and board-level roles.