Accenture Commits To Boosting Its Workforce To 50% Women By 2025

Accenture has taken a bold step for diversity: Today it announced a commitment to reaching a gender-balanced workforce by 2025. It appears to be the first major professional services firm to publicly set a 50/50 gender-balance objective.

Given the pace of change at Accenture over the past five years and that its current workforce is just below 40% women, reaching gender balance by 2025 seems like a tall order. For example, from 2015 to 2016, it only nudged its balance of women upwards by one percentage point.

But Ellyn Shook, Accenture’s chief leadership and human resources officer, insists it will come to pass, based on a focused effort and internal data she has seen. “I feel a huge sense of confidence, and I know that we’ll be able to get there,” she says. “We have an unwavering belief that diversity makes us smarter and more innovative.”

So far, one way Accenture has increased its female ranks is by setting diversity goals for each of its business segments and geographies and providing transparent progress updates. In early 2016, it reportedly became the first large professional services company to publish its demographics.

In recruiting, Accenture offers outsize referral bonuses for women and underrepresented-minority hires, an initiative Shook considers powerful and disruptive. And it has a program where C-suite mentors sponsor senior women in their career advancement. Debbie Polishook, an executive who participated in that program, went on to rise into the C-suite. Today, Accenture women stay longer and get promoted at higher rates than men, dynamics that support Shook’s confidence in achieving the new goal.

For senior women, Accenture pledged to raise the number of female managing directors from 20% today to 25% by 2020. Female executives are more difficult to recruit because they change jobs less often, Shook says. “When women find a job that helps them professionally and personally, they’re loyal ... the loyalty factor is real.”

The company’s C-suite is currently 25% women, one percentage point above the 24% average observed among the top 1,000 highest-grossing public companies. But Accenture stopped short of pledging to improve female representation on its leadership team. “To be frank, at Accenture, there's not constant turnover at the global management committee level ... the churn isn’t like other parts. We don’t grow this team,” Shook says.

What about pay equity? “Three years ago, the board asked us to look at it,” Shook says. “We did a thorough study led by an outside organization, and found some issues.” Shook and Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme chose to fix them immediately by boosting salaries. Today, they have a “rigorous process” of analyzing pay equity once per year, and they make adjustments when inequities seep in.

By setting its gender-balance goal, Accenture hopes to take a leadership position in diversity among professional services firms. Shook says, “I hope that by us making this public commitment that other companies will join us and do the same so the world can be a better place.”