The Gender Gap of Supply Chain professionals: Your business isn’t hiring the most talented people

From a survey by Procurement Leaders this year, it was found that only 10% of the most senior supply chain management roles are filled by women; meaning there is a 9 to 1 imbalance of men to women in executive SCM roles (Forbes 2017).

Chew on that statistic for a moment…

How’s it taste?

As a Caucasian male living in a first-world society I consider myself grossly unqualified to write about the social injustices, and oppression, minorities face within the business world of today. I have never experienced these same societally constructed inequities, and therefore cannot relate to them on an anecdotal level.

With that being said, if there were more Caucasian males living in first-world societies speaking about, being empathetic towards and acting upon the inequities minorities face within the business world today, we’d probably see a better representation of women (also known as 50% of the world’s population) as supply chain executives.

Gender equality, in SCM professions, is a topic much discussed and seldom acted upon, ironically enough. But, speaking of the topic sheds light upon the systematic perpetuations of gender inequity in business, which society has built for years, in our curriculum, in our media and in our personal life.

Back to school

In a chapter from the book Integrating Gender Equality into Business and Management Education: Lessons learned and Challenges remaining, author, Maureen A. Kilgour provides poignant commentary about what she believes could be one of the main accelerants of gender inequity within the business management sector.

Kilgour theorizes that the sex-role stereotyping in curriculum assigned to students, in business management universities and colleges, reflects the actual imbalance of women in executive management positions.

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