This scenario could feasibly happen if an HR worker tends to regularly interact with an equal number of male- and female-identifying individuals.
But there could be a substantial gender imbalance seen in other departments or shown by people who dont often deal with the HR department.
A data analytics platform can show useful statistics, such as the gender breakdown in particular parts of the company or the percentage of females in leadership roles at a company.
Then, HR teams can understand if gender problems exist.
If data analytics platforms uncover such issues, people can see where the problems lie, then get to work addressing them.
Without the concrete information that data analysis programs provide — or in the absence of people complaining about a gender gap in a particular workplace — HR professionals may never realize how severe the issue is or that its there at all.
As mentioned in the introduction, people often discuss the gender gap by citing wage discrepancies.
For example, statistics revealed the earnings of corporate compliance officers.
They showed that female compliance professionals earn 76% less than their male counterparts.
In another case, researchers built a big data tool to check the gender ratio of sources quoted online by Canadian news outlets.
It keeps track of each instance in near real-time.
Unfortunately, considering that the results showed women never mentioned more than 26% of the time, theres a great deal of progress to make.
Even when HR professionals are lucky enough to work in organizations that strive to offer equal pay regardless of gender and feature womens perspectives regularly, the data-driven examples above could help them learn which mistakes not to make by showing them whats happening in society at large.
When companies work to increase diversity, they often narrow the gender gap in the process.
Of course, hiring more people of the less dominant gender to work at a firm is only one way to boost diversity.
An enterprise could also change by hiring people from other cultures or countries, individuals who are disabled or professionals of a wide variety of ages.
HR professionals should still see the connection between diversity and gender balance though.
When the financial brand U.
S.
Bank started using data-driven hiring practices, the results had a positive impact on diversity.
But becoming more diverse was not the primary goal of the company.
Instead, it hoped that Gallup Analytics could help find more top-tier managers, or so called “A-level talent.
“Due to a tweaked process that applied predictive analytics early in and throughout the process, U.
S.
Bank found more of those desirable candidates in five weeks than it had during a year of using the old method.
Concerning diversity, there was a 17% overall increase in diverse new hires and a 74% uptick in diverse top managers.
The examples here should make HR professionals and the entire workforce feel more hopeful that the gender imbalance is a conquerable problem.
Theyre only a glimpse of the options, but these applications could keep people motivated to work for positive changes in hiring and improve related aspects like wages and available positions.
Further Reading: Bio: Kayla Matthews discusses technology and big data on publications like The Week, The Data Center Journal and VentureBeat, and has been writing for more than five years.
To read more posts from Kayla, subscribe to her blog Productivity Bytes.
Related: var disqus_shortname = kdnuggets; (function() { var dsq = document.
createElement(script); dsq.
type = text/javascript; dsq.
async = true; dsq.
src = https://kdnuggets.
disqus.
com/embed.
js; (document.
getElementsByTagName(head)[0] || document.
getElementsByTagName(body)[0]).
appendChild(dsq); })();.