Katica Roy, Pipeline Equity

Gender equity leader: Gender parity is not merely a social issue, it’s an economic issue

                  

Did you know research shows that when firms increase gender equity, they see increased profits? That’s what Katica Roy, CEO of Pipeline Equity, found in a study across 4,000 companies in 29 countries: for every 10 percent increase in gender equity measures, firms saw a 2 percent increase in revenue. In this conversation with Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein, Katica discusses why gender equity is more than just equal pay, and why she’s optimistic about expanding opportunity for women in the workplace.

 

Gender equity as an economic issue

 

As the daughter of an immigrant and a refugee, Katica had long been interested in improving access and opportunity for others. She describes her motivation as “the return of the opportunity that had been provided to my family.” As a young professional with two master’s degrees and experience in data science and human capital, she realized that she had “the opportunity to both change the narrative, but also use my skills to make gender equity a reality in my lifetime—…and make sure that somebody else had that opportunity.

 

Before starting Pipeline Equity, Katica researched the ROI of firms’ investments in gender equity. In addition to the findings about revenue increases, she learned that while 96 percent of CEOs reported being committed to equity, only 22 percent of employees reported that they regularly saw that shared and measured. “So you had this 74 point gap and how do we actually fill that gap?” she says. “The need that we were really looking to solve in the market was about changing the narrative from a social issue to an economic opportunity, but also enabling companies to essentially live their pledge or live their commitments on equity.”

 

Katica launched Pipeline Equity with the mission of helping firms increase financial performance through closing the gender equity gap. “We have historically treated [gender equity] as a social issue or the right thing to do rather than a business imperative,” she notes. “But if you can improve your revenue by one to two points for every 10% increase in equity, that's a significant lever to maximize shareholder value.” 

 

Measuring the pillars of performance

 

Pipeline uses analytics to guide firms’ decision-making across several pillars of performance. “One of the things that we found is that you can't close the gender pay gap by starting with pay,” she tells Sam. “We found that pay is actually the symptom. It's not the disease. So in other words, pay is this quantitative value that you place on your talent. But the actual value happens before that in performance and potential.”

 

Katica identifies three key decisions that companies make across their talent each year as performance, potential and pay. At Pipeline, she says, they often start by addressing performance and de-biasing performance reviews. “In performance reviews, there are two types of recommendations we provide,” she says. “One is the actual language itself. That's in the performance review. We call out bias phrases. And then the second is actually calibrating those ratings to ensure that they are applied equitably, equitable performance, equitable rating.” She notes that Pipeline has found that about a third of all performance reviews within companies contained bias and four percent of the time that bias leads to lower performance ratings for women.

 

Encouraging internal hiring is another approach Pipestone employs. Katica notes that in 86 percent of all job requisitions that Pipestone’s customers post, they find five or more qualified internal candidates. And internal hiring has been shown to benefit women. “There's a fair amount of mobility and opportunity that actually exists for existing employees,” she says. “And employees don't have to apply for that position. We're actually proactively giving that [list of qualified internal candidates] to the talent acquisition team. And then they contact the employees to interview for those positions.”

 

Remote work and gender equity

 

Katica also discusses the current trend toward virtual work in her conversation with Sam. She notes that many people assume that the increase in remote work is good for women. And while that might be true for some, she notes that for many, it’s led instead to an increase in non-paid household labor competing for their time, as well as more subtle impacts. “There are really three key issues with remote work and equity,” she says. “One is that women become more invisible. And if they’re invisible, they are less likely to be promoted. The second is managers tend to undervalue employees that work remotely. And then the third is you have to now speak up over Zoom.” She notes that it’s already harder for women to speak up in person, and remote meetings increase that disparity.