Here's How Men and Women Disagree on Diversity, According to Study

If you want your company to attract more talented women, evidence suggests that there’s one way that will make this vision a reality. A new survey from Ladders reveals a discrepancy between the importance men and women employees place on diversity. Sixty-six percent of women surveyed stated that company diversity is "very important," while only 43 percent of men said the same.

The survey also suggests that men and women employees have different standards when it comes to evaluating their companies' diversity. Forty percent of men believed that their companies were taking diversity very seriously while only 23 percent of women believed the same.

What does this mean for your organization? To increase the chances of female recruitment and retention, incorporate better diversity and inclusion practices. If you want to attract more applicants, the initiatives should be taken to build an inclusive, diverse environment. One way to potentially help facilitate this is to include more women on boards and to promote more women into leadership positions. Thirty-six percent of executive leadership teams are seen as being extremely male-dominated compared with just 6 percent of teams being extremely female-dominated.

Even if you've set these programs in place, it's important to ensure men and women in your organization understand and value diversity practices. A third of those surveyed said that they were unaware of what diversity initiatives their companies had in place, and only 39 percent of those surveyed were certain that their company had diversity programs in place. To combat this lack of knowledge, companies could make use of internal surveys to see how well diversity promotion strategies are recognized by employees.

Kayla Heisler is an essayist and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. She is a contributing writer for Color My Bubble. Her work appears in New York's Best Emerging Poets anthology.