The road toward gender parity across beauty’s workforce is encumbered by a unique double-bind: the industry’s need to see more women employees rise to the top, while attracting more male employees at the entry level.
“Men are a minority of beauty’s workforce but they are all concentrated at the top; women are a majority, yet they are concentrated at the bottom,” said Aniela Unguresan, founder and chief executive officer of diversity, equity and inclusivity firm Edge Empower.
Despite comprising roughly 69 percent of the workforce and 63 percent of junior management positions across 25 of beauty’s largest publicly listed companies, data from Edge indicates representation of women drops to 36 percent at the senior management level.
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“The industry is over-indexing on women’s representation in operational roles and at the beginning of the management pipeline; the reverse is true for C-suite roles,” said Unguresan. Among beauty’s senior male executives are those who have migrated from other CPG industries, as well as fashion and luxury — the latter of which reflects a similar workforce gender composition. “This particularity is specific to beauty and luxury — no other industry has this precise double-bind.”
A sentiment analysis conducted over the last 10 months by Edge Empower among 8,284 male and female beauty industry employees across all levels in eight countries (the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, Philippines, Russia, Switzerland, Brazil) sheds light into what’s driving this gender gap at the top.
While the findings indicate some promising alignments — for instance, male and female employees are in relative agreement about the value of diversity to an organization’s competitive advantage — it also illustrates the disparity between the groups’ respective workplace experiences and hurdles.
Men are significantly more likely to feel a compatibility between having a career and a family, for example, while a survey among employees at the middle management level or higher shows nearly a 10 percent drop in the likelihood of women versus men to agree that their current assignments are preparing them for a key leadership role.
Women also report feeling less familiar with the criteria for career advancement and promotion within their organization. “That is the real killer,” said Unguresan, adding that proactive pay transparency and efforts toward balanced representation in profit and loss responsibility roles are among the meaningful steps certain companies are doing well in striving toward gender parity.
Here, a glimpse into the respective experiences of male and female beauty industry employees with regard to career advancement and diversity, equity and inclusion, per Edge.
