Let’s move beyond conversation and take real action to accelerate women’s career progression.
#IWD #AccelerateAction
Unlock What Really Works for Female Talent
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What This Session Covers
Whether you missed it live or want to revisit the insights, here's a snapshot of what Ines covered:
Why good intentions are not enough
The gaps between what organisations commonly do for women's development and what the evidence actually supports.
What genuinely accelerates progression
Which interventions drive real advancement, and why the strategies most organisations rely on have limited impact on promotion rates.
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Small but powerful programme tweaks
Low-cost, high-impact adjustments that elevate outcomes, without a full redesign or significant additional budget.
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Speaker
Ines Wichert
Head of Talent, Leadership & Inclusion at Informa. She brings a wealth of experience from leading one of the most impactful HR transformations at Informa.
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Questions This Webinar Answers
These are the questions HR leaders most commonly bring to this topic, all addressed in the session.
What strategies genuinely accelerate women's career progression?
Stretch assignments and critical job experiences have the strongest evidence base. Dr. Wichert's research shows women are significantly less likely to receive these than men with equal performance records. Closing that assignment gap, combined with formal sponsorship rather than mentoring alone, produces the strongest progression outcomes.
What separates a women's leadership programme that works from one that doesn't?
Effective programmes combine diagnostics, real on-the-job development, and structural changes to the organisational environment. Programmes that focus only on building women's skills without addressing the conditions that limit progression tend to improve individual capability without improving promotion rates.
What are the 9 critical job assignments for women leaders?
They are the specific role experiences that most reliably build senior leadership capability: leading major change, managing large teams, holding P&L responsibility, working internationally, and leading high-visibility strategic projects. Women are systematically less likely to be offered these assignments than men with equivalent records, which is a significant driver of the pipeline gap at senior level.
How does unconscious bias affect women's career progression?
It operates at multiple points: performance review language, talent nominations, stretch assignment allocation, and promotion decisions where women are more often assessed on past performance while men are advanced on perceived potential. Addressing it requires structural interventions such as standardised processes and diverse decision panels, not awareness training alone.
What small changes make the biggest difference to women's development programmes?
The highest-impact adjustments are structural: applying gender equity criteria to stretch assignment decisions, adding formal sponsorship alongside mentoring, reviewing assessment language for gender-coded patterns, and involving managers of female talent as active programme participants rather than passive supporters.