Mine the $3.1T gap: Workplace gender equity is a growth imperative in an era of uncertainty

The latest economic numbers, released this month, aren’t a pretty picture. Inflation is accelerating, GDP and market volatility is persistent, consumer confidence remains lackluster, and trade tensions are straining household budgets. All as jobless claims mount: The four-week moving average increased by 3,250 in May.

Rising unemployment signals an increasingly fragile job market, and women bear the brunt. They comprise 69% of the lowest-paid workers but pay more on average for imported goods marketed to them thanks to a gender tariff gap. They also remain overrepresented in the roles most vulnerable to economic downturns — when they’re even in them. My research shows that 430,000 women remain absent from the labor force since the pandemic. From an intersectional lens, 249,000 Black women have exited in just the past two months, and their unemployment rate has climbed to 6.07% — the highest since February 2022.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are currently 7.2 million job openings and 7.165 million people looking for work, meaning reinstating women who’ve been absent since the pandemic could close the 350,000-worker gap entirely.

And when we invest in women, we invest in everyone. When women earn more, household income rises, consumer demand stabilizes, and reliance on public assistance falls. All told, closing the wage gap could inject $512 billion into the economy, and eliminate one-third of the Social Security shortfall. There’s precedent, too: Women added $2 trillion to the GDP from 1970 to 2016 through their increased labor force participation.

The $3.1T design flaw

Despite this clear evidence of gender equity as a growth lever, we instinctively reach for more traditional ones in periods of economic downturn — freezing hiring, cutting budgets, pausing DEI initiatives. It’s not enough.

As a gender economist, I don’t just analyze gaps; I analyze the systems that produce them at the macroeconomic level and throughout the corporate sector where so many livelihoods are made and unmade. I study how bias is designed into workplace processes, how inequity is coded into economic structures, and how redesigning those systems for equity yields measurable returns. Not one day. Now.

Some argue we should stop making the business case for equity, that doing so reduces people to numbers. I understand that concern. But I make the economic case not to diminish the moral one, but to expose how deeply inequity is embedded in our systems — and how urgently we need to redesign them. Equity isn’t charity. It’s smart economics.

My research shows that a 10% increase in intersectional gender equity drives a 1–2% increase in revenue. The mechanism isn’t mysterious; it’s managerial clarity.

Let’s disaggregate that number:

• Raising women’s labor force participation: $1.9 trillion
• Reducing occupational segregation (e.g., women overrepresented in HR and underrepresented in higher-paying tech and finance roles): $699 billion
• Closing the gender pay gap: $512 billion

Each segment of the gap reflects a system that was never designed for women to succeed. That’s not a talent problem. It’s a design flaw.

Women are nearly 58% of U.S. college graduates and more than half of the professional talent pipeline yet hold less than 11% of Fortune 500 CEO roles and just 34% of S&P 500 board seats (PDF, p.10), underscoring the disconnect between women’s educational attainment and corporate advancement. In my own research and advisory work, I’ve consistently found that organizations unintentionally under-promote, under-pay, and under-resource women, especially women of color. These inequities accumulate, compound, and cascade into lost productivity and missed innovation. In short: inequity is expensive.

The redesign for results

Innovation is a systems outcome. It requires diversity of experience, perspective, and voice. When those voices are excluded, companies limit their ability to anticipate change, adapt strategy, and unlock new markets.

My research shows that a 10% increase in intersectional gender equity (gender PLUS race/ethnicity PLUS age) drives a 1–2% increase in revenue. The mechanism isn’t mysterious; it’s managerial clarity. Equitable systems unlock the full range of talent and ideas. And in a volatile world, adaptability is the new competitive advantage.

I recently advised a multinational tech company with over 100,000 employees. Despite ambitious DEI commitments, the company’s workforce data revealed persistent and costly gender disparities, particularly in representation, retention, and advancement.

Women made up only 27% of the company’s global workforce, compared to upward of 40% of the global labor force. We discovered that closing that 13-point gap could net the company between $223.2 million and $574.3 million in additional annual revenue. And that’s not accounting for the company’s plan to double its U.S. workforce by 2035, an expansion that will intensify demand for skilled technical talent.

We applied a labor economics lens to assess the opportunity cost of inequity. Through extensive data analysis, we surfaced that women — and especially women of color — were exiting the organization, not primarily because of pay, but because they lacked visible pathways for growth, inclusion, and belonging. My research found that men were promoted 21% faster than women, and twice as fast as Black women, even when performance ratings were held constant.

By aligning promotion criteria to outcomes, standardizing post-promotion resourcing, and redesigning performance reviews to remove bias signals in the first place (e.g., maternity leave framed as a performance gap, vague feedback lacking actionability, and accomplishments attributed to team effort rather than individual merit), the company could project measurable results within 12 months:

• A 3-point increase in gender representation
• A $52 million to $133 million increase in annual revenue, based on a 3-point increase in intersectional gender equity
• A significant improvement in talent attraction and retention — particularly among high-potential women and underrepresented groups

And the stakes are high. This client’s industry is projected to face a 130,000-person shortage in core technical roles by 2035. Without structural investment in people power — especially intersectional gender equity — the company risks falling short of its growth potential.

This is the economic upside of equitable systems. When we design for equity, we drive growth, reduce risk, and future-proof the economy.