Women’s Day special. It’s been a tradition in our UX Team that we check on Gender Equity every year. Here is our 5-minute analysis tool (a sheet), so you can check up on your team.

What insights do you get?

If you make a copy of our sheet and fill it with your team’s data, you will get this neat chart.

Ratios of men and women within the team (sample data)

This chart gives insights on:

• Does the team have an equal number of male and female colleagues?
• Are men and women equally represented in leadership?
• Do you have a balance with regard to seniority levels?
• Is there a bias in promotions?
• Is attrition affecting men and women at the same rate?

In our sample UX Team 65% are women. If we had total gender equity, we would see that same 65% show up across all the bars in the bar chart. In other words: if men and women had the same probability of getting into leadership, then the leadership ratio would be the same as the ratio of men and women in the team, which is 65%.

This team, however, is in a pretty bad situation. Although 65% of team members are women, they are only represented as 40% in leadership. Women are underrepresented in senior positions (conversely: overrepresented in lower-level positions), and have a lower probability of getting promoted.

As for attrition, men and women have a more-or-less equal probability of leaving. (remember: 65% is our expected ratio, simply because there are more women in the team. If everyone has an equal probability of leaving, there will be more women leaving.)

Is this significant?

When I first ran this analysis our UX Team had a little more than 10 members. Not it has 20+. If we have 20 UXers, the number of leaders/managers are even less, so we might compare very little numbers. E.g. 3 male managers, 1 female manager.

Statistically speaking, these comparisons are not significant. This means that e.g. when we see women being underrepresented in leadership positions, we can’t be sure that it’s not a coincidence. Maybe it’s just that 1 of our female leaders had been poached this year and there was a male talent who was ready to jump in and take her place.

That said, you shouldn’t wait to act until the numbers get statistically significant.

Let’s say you have a leadership team of 5 men and 0 women. This diversion from the 50–50 ratio is not significant statistically. But it may very well prevent a female colleague to join your team.

Check your numbers and see what you can do.

Thanks for reading. I am a Sr UXR at SAP Emarsys. More of such thoughts at zombor.io