Gender Equity Inequality – Are ESOPs the answer?

In a recent article by Simone Stolzoff, based on a report from Carta, she reported that while women make up 35% of equity-holding employees, they hold only 20% of employee equity. The data, which was compiled from 180,000 employees across 6,000 companies, shows women employees own just $0.47 for every dollar of equity owned by their male colleagues.

As we all know, a fundamental concept of an Employee Stock Ownership Plan is the ability to provide broad-based employee ownership to all eligible employees.  Thus perhaps the solution to gender equity inequality is simply an increased number of Employee Owned companies and ESOPs. When I examined the relationship of allocated shares vs gender at one ESOP Company there was an improvement (females held a greater portion of allocated shares) than was enumerated in the Carta data (see Table 1).

Table 1 – Distribution of Equity by Gender

Note1: This data is from only 1 ESOP and may not be representative of the larger ESOP population.

An interesting research question would be:

Do ESOPs have a reduced gender equity inequality as compared to (non ESOP Companies) the companies represented in the CARTA research report?

If you are interested in participating in the research to answer this question I have set up a short 4 question SurveyMonkey survey to capture the number of eligible employees, gender, and the number of shares allocated to each gender.

The Survey asks:

1. Is your company an ESOP?
2. Please provide your company name (to prevent duplicate submissions).
3. With regards to total share allocation in your company:
   1. Number of male participants
   2. Shares allocated to male participants
   3. Number of female participants
   4. Shares allocated to female participants.
4. If you would like a copy of the completed survey please provide your email.

The data will remain anonymous, no company specific data will be released.

If you are interested in examining ESOP and gender equity inequality in more detail please contact Dr. Van Doel.

Based on the Data collected as part of the Employee Ownership and Well Being Research conducted by the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) we know that ESOPs create wealth.  The next question, do ESOPs assist in reducing gender equity wealth inequality.  I hope you will help me answer this important question.

Rick