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3 skills women need to succeed in the future of work
Here’s why upskilling women with negotiation, game theory, and advocacy skills can help level the professional playing field.
In 2023, nearly 80% of companies reported having woman-focused programming as part of their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And President Joe Biden committed $3 billion to advance gender equity and equality globally in 2024. Yet despite these initiatives, gender parity is estimated to take another 131 years. So why can’t women get ahead?
As someone who trains teams and leaders to create inclusive work cultures for women, I study organizations’ practices on how they aim to achieve this. Companies overwhelmingly fall short.
I believe this is partly because many organizations host training sessions only as a surface-level effort to address the challenges women face at work, without imparting any actionable skills that can help women get ahead.
For instance, I once attended a women’s leadership event where I was asked to teach successful business skills. Naturally, I suggested that I teach a hard skill, like negotiation—an area in which data suggests that women tend to trail men. However, due to a concern that their employees would attempt to use the training to renegotiate their salaries, the organization asked me to speak about soft skills like effective listening and communicating with empathy.
While soft skills are important for any leader (regardless of gender), women already excel in these. What I believe women actually need is access to training for hard skills that will advance them professionally.
Organizations should arm their female employees with skills that level the playing field because it is the right thing to do. But this kind of upskilling can also provide reciprocal benefits to an organization. So, here are three cutting-edge skills organizations should provide their female employees to enhance their professional capabilities and contributions to the company.
NEGOTIATION
Research suggests men enter negotiations two to four times more often than women. And women are reportedly less confident negotiating their salaries than men, which contributes to the gender pay gap. Researchers have found that women show greater aptitude in negotiating on behalf of others than for themselves.
Organizations need to invest in training their female employees to be confident negotiators in a multitude of scenarios. And leaders should encourage women to excel in this traditionally male-centered behavior. Investing in women to develop these skills protects a company’s interests and can help women earn a seat at the table.
GAME THEORY
Business cannot be done alone. The mathematical concept of game theory teaches workers how to navigate others as it models decision-making strategies that adapt in real time to the decisions of other actors involved.
Women make up only 26% of all math and statistics undergraduate degree recipients. This means fewer women are exposed to mathematical decision-making models. Many women must rely on principles from psychology and social science training to make difficult decisions. And while all disciplines are critical, understanding approaches from soft and hard science is advantageous to any professional.
Training female employees in game theory enhances their innate abilities for rational decision-making, team collaboration frameworks, and effective bargaining capabilities when negotiating on behalf of the organization.
ADVOCACY
While some believe increasing the number of women in leadership will improve the pipeline for other women to enter leadership, data has not uniformly supported this. In fact, some competitive corporate environments undermine women’s efforts to work collaboratively with other women.
One study by Yale University found that when given identical résumés, even female faculty were more likely to select a male candidate over a female candidate. While implicit-bias training can highlight the introspective soft skills needed to recognize toxic biases that exist even within the same group, we need to also recognize these soft skills impact how we objectively assess candidates.
Instead, I would suggest that women prioritize learning advocacy skills. And organizations should prioritize “collaborative reward cultures” in which employees are incentivized to advocate and promote one another. While men benefit professionally from the social support of other men in the workplace, women sometimes lack a similar experience.
Collaborative workplace cultures are not only more productive but also can help set women up for professional success.
