You’ve likely heard that hiring more women can be a game-changer for your business. It fuels innovation and drives performance. This isn’t conjecture. It’s a fact backed up by robust evidence. More gender-diverse teams lead to higher profitability, increased sales, and greater commercial success.

But turning that knowledge into action can be tricky, especially when budgets and time are tight. So, how do you build a powerhouse diverse team in practice, not just in theory? Over the past decade, our organization, Value for Women, has worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and companies around the globe on this very topic. Many of those engagements have been in collaboration with Acumen’s portfolio companies. 

We’ve learned that if you want to hire women and promote them to leadership positions within your company, you need to be concrete and intentional every step of the way.

To illustrate, let’s look at Koolboks, one company that took action to hire more women and saw quick results from their meaningful efforts.

Women reps power growth for Koolboks 

Koolboks offers solar-powered refrigerators to micro-entrepreneurs in Nigeria. In 2023, Koolboks’ leadership team began to look at the gender gaps in their company. They learned that women sales agents, although few on the team, excelled at customer service. They were also particularly talented at engaging women customers, already a large percentage of the company’s customer base. Koolboks realized there was a potential business opportunity to hire more women.

With this insight, the Koolboks leadership team jumped into action. In just four months, they saw impressive results. They increased the number of women sales agents by 77% and the share of women in technical roles from 5% to 23%.

So, how did Koolboks achieve these results?

In 2023, the leadership team explored the gender gaps within the company and uncovered striking statistics. Just 16% of Koolboks’ sales agents were women, despite women making up 60% of their customer base. Just as striking, only 5% of the engineering team were women, while women comprise 35% of the overall employee base.

In this data, the team saw a real business opportunity. Koolboks knew its women agents connected better with women customers. And a diverse team, they knew, could bring fresh ideas to the table. To bring in more women sales agents and women in technical roles the team, with Value for Women’s support, took the following actions: 

• Set a hiring target of 50 new women sales agents.
• Launched a campaign to rebrand sales roles, as super opportunities for women, with women on the cover of these ads. 
• Re-engaged inactive women agents by emphasizing the benefits that Koolboks offered.

• Conducted training for leadership and project teams to address unconscious biases.
• Revised technical job descriptions to be more appealing to women.
• Implemented diverse panels to reduce unconscious bias in hiring.

Their efforts were a success. 

How your business can take meaningful steps to hire more women

Start by conducting a quick self-assessment. Look at the percentage of women and men in your workforce across different departments and levels, including the C-suite and board. 

Now that you have a baseline, you have options. To get started, consider the following actions:

• Track sex-disaggregated metrics at different stages of the hiring process, including applications received, interviews, evaluations, and candidates hired.
  • Use this data to understand where women aren’t present or are dropping off, and adjust your processes by consulting the ideas below. 
• Set targets for the percent of women in your workforce - and track how you’re doing. 
• In your JDs, make it clear which are required skills - and which are “nice to have” (because women tend not to apply if they don’t meet 100% of criteria).
• Avoid pronouns and stereotypes. e.g., using he/she in job ads or terms such as workman or deliveryman, etc. 
• Make sure the hiring team is gender diverse. 
• For your interviews, use a standard assessment.
• Ask your team to refer qualified women candidates.
• Try using various channels to reach a diverse pool of job seekers. For example., affinity groups, social media, recruitment sites, and referrals.
• Finally, set up a regular review process to check how things are going. For larger companies, you might do this quarterly, but if you're running a smaller business with fewer hires, you can do it less often. 

Once you’ve got women in the room, what’s next? Create a workplace that makes everyone want to stick around. That means implementing practices and policies that allow everyone to grow, feel included, be heard, and feel safe at work.

Ready to take it a step further? 

This blog offers insights from the Pathways to Growth: Gender-smart business actions that work report. It is one piece of building and nurturing an inclusive workforce. The report offers detailed case studies into topics like fostering an inclusive culture here and creating a safe space at work. These are essential steps to kickstart your journey toward an inclusive workplace, perfect for early-stage companies and even more established ones across all sectors.

This blog post was guest-authored by Erica Berthelsen and Asya Troychansky from Value for Women.