This International Women’s Day, PwC shared the voices of women from around the world through research-based insights on empowerment – and explored what more can be done to propel women’s empowerment in the workplace, the technology sector, and the economy.
The women are significantly more likely to ask for a raise (55%) and significantly more likely to ask for a promotion (52%). This compares with scores of 31% (24-point gap) and 26% (26-point gap) respectively for women in the survey overall.
The most empowered women are also more likely to recommend their employer as a place to work (67%), a significant 32 percentage points higher than women respondents overall. They are also significantly more likely to say they are very satisfied with their job (54%), compared with 25% of women overall (29 point gap).
According to the empowerment scores, the most empowered women workers are working in the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications sector, driven specifically by the technology industry for which women are slightly more empowered than men.
Women working in the Financial Services and Energy, Utilities, and Resources sectors are the second and third most empowered, but men are significantly more empowered than women in Financial Services.
Unsurprisingly, the more senior the position the women hold in the survey, the higher their level of empowerment at work – a message that should be amplified to highlight the benefits of career advancement to women. Fear over rising work demands can often be a factor holding women back, when in fact the more senior they rise the more control and autonomy they are likely to have.
Fifty-one percent of women overall said their job could be done remotely/from home, with this rising to 74% for the most empowered women.
As new ways of working become more entrenched in the long term, the research shows that women who have a hybrid work pattern (50% remote and 50% in-person) have the highest empowerment scores, followed by women who work remotely full-time. Those who work full-time in person have the lowest empowerment scores.
This trend follows suit for men – suggesting that autonomy over how, where and when people work fuels empowerment across the workforce. Demand for flexibility is a talent-wide proposition and one that can’t be ignored by employers as they seek to enhance diversity, fuel engagement, and innovation, and position themselves as an employer of choice.
The research also showed that Millennials had the highest empowerment scores, followed by Gen Z.
What’s most important to women?
Globally, women workers identify the four most important workplace empowerment factors as being fairly compensated financially at work (72%), job fulfillment (69%), a workplace where they can truly be themselves (67%), and having a team that cares about their wellbeing (61%).
PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2022, one of the largest workforce surveys conducted, draws insights from the views and experiences of more than 52,000 workers across 44 countries.
To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, they delve deeper into this research, sharing fresh gender-focused perspectives from the almost 22,000 working women across the world who responded to the survey.
