A report from McKinsey’s Global Institute, called The Power of Parity crystalized this. It provides evidence that the best source of future economic prosperity for the world as a whole lies in the economic inclusion of women.

But we are stuck in a world where the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take over 200 years to close the economic gender gap at present rates of change, the WEF’s Director of Economic and Social Agendas saying “overall gender equality has stalled.” A world where women globally are paid 63% of what men earn and where there are more male CEOs named Dave (8) or Steve (7) among the top 100 UK companies than there are women of any name (6), or where companies offer excuses for a lack of women on their boards such as: “all the good women have been snapped up” or “we have one woman already on the board, so we are done, it’s someone else turn.”

What’s new is that there is a fresh will amongst global leaders to address gender inequality. But as, the much-loved author and pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said nearly 80 years ago “a goal without a plan is just a wish.” How do we turn the goal of greater equality between men and women into achievable change?

Remember those toys of coiled coloured wire called slinkies? If you set them up straight at the top of the stairs they turn over themselves neatly to reach the bottom and come to a halt. That’s what’s gender equality needs, a system that enables us to travel down the stairs elegantly and effectively. This isn’t a matter of good intentions or tinkering round the edges, it’s a matter of fitting the steps together in a system.

An important first element of a system is that organisations need to know where they stand at present and where they are heading. This is why we set up Equileap three years ago with the aim of accelerating gender equality at work.

We developed a detailed way to measure gender equality and gender balance in organisations from the boardroom to the shop floor and down into the supply chain, creating the Equileap Scorecard, which has 19 data clusters. This includes measures of gender balance at every level of the company, promotion ratios broken down by gender, progress towards closing the gender pay gap, flexible working, reaching international standards of parental leave for primary and secondary carers and looking for legal or regulatory cases the company is involved in that relates to gender discrimination or violence at work.

Equileap’s data hands power to bring about change to the companies themselves and importantly to those who invest in them. The gender lens investing movement is tipped to be one of the fastest growing investment sectors in the next decade, as more women of wealth become investors and seek to align their funds with their values, and as institutions and sovereign wealth funds deploy their capital to lessen environmental damage and encourage equality. To enable them to use their funds effectively Equileap licences its data to the financial sector for new gender lens investing products. Its data now underpins about USD 600 million of investments in public assets, around 25% of the total global sum under investment with a gender lens.

At the same time governments are also beginning to bring in new legislation seeking much greater transparency from all employers on gender pay gaps. Iceland, France, and the UK have reporting legislation in place, with Ireland and possibly the U.S. not far behind. Germany and Australia also have different forms of reporting. Some of the pay gaps disclosed have been shocking with more than 8 in 10 companies and public sector organisations paying men more than women, and in some of the highly paid sectors such as accounting, financial services, and legal firms, it is quite normal to see overall gender pay gaps of well over 60%.

Two companies that currently top the Equileap rankings in Europe and North America are the French beauty and personal products company, L’Oreal, and the U.S. car-maker General Motors. It’s hard to image two companies further apart in output, and yet they both do gender equality and gender balance exceptionally well.

Here’s what Jean Claude LeGrand, Director of Corporate Diversity at L’Oreal told Equileap when L’Oreal was presented with the 2018 Equileap prize for the European based company making most progress towards gender equality: “We looked round and realised that we had started as a company of men, and we were still a company of men, selling products to women! This was not sustainable and we needed to change it. We took the decision but it wasn’t something we did overnight, it has taken more than 20 years for us to address every part of this system and to make sure that it works, and we are still looking for improvements: can we do this better, would this make a difference? The work never ends.”

General Motors—once male dominated from the boardroom to the shop-floor is currently the only company globally that has no overall gender pay gap and has also published figures showing that it pays equal pay for equal work in all its occupational quartiles. It’s headed by Mary Barra, who was the first auto-industry CEO. In a recent interview at Duke University, she says: “To me diversity is all about the pipeline.” Adding: “One of the best kept secrets is that General Motors was working on gender diversity 20 years ago. If I hadn’t been pushed and given stretch assignments 20 years ago I wouldn’t have been in a place where I would have been considered for the job I am in now. At GM for all of our executive positions we require a diverse slate of candidates, and if they aren’t able to have diversity—because they picked this candidate, then we say what are you doing so that in 3 years you will have a diversity of candidates.”

The message from both companies is that change takes its tone from the top and that rushing around trying to find a woman to make your figures look better in the short-term isn’t going to work. Embedding change takes time and joined up systems to ensure that company pipelines are diverse.

There is more evidence too, some of it surprising, from the Behavioural Insights Team at the UK Government’s Equalities Office. This unit uses behavioural science combined with evaluation of outcomes, usually in randomised trials to understand what’s effective and what’s not in the real world. Its aim is to produce evidence based actions for employers and it’s a good starting place for any organisation that wants to make progress on gender equality and closing the gender pay gap.

The team have grouped actions into three categories: 1) Effective, which have been tested in the real world and have a positive impact. 2) Promising, which need more research and evaluation to improve evidence on their effectiveness; and, 3) Mixed Results, those that sometimes have a positive impact, but at others times may have a negative impact.

Effective Actions include diverse shortlists, with multiple women, for recruitment and promotion (just one woman will not work), skills-based assessment tasks and structured, rather than unstructured, interviews in recruitment, transparency on promotion, pay and rewards, encouraging salary negotiation by showing salary ranges, and finally appointing diversity managers, and/or a diversity task force.

Promising Actions include shared parental leave, increased workplace flexibility, recruiting returners coming back to work after extended leave, mentoring and setting internal targets.

Mixed Results. There is little evidence to show that the following actions work, so think hard before reaching for them. Unconscious bias training or diversity training, with evidence to show that they can actually reduce the diversity of candidates selected afterwards, leadership programmes for women, which can lead to women being perceived as in need of support and less capable than their male counterparts; diverse selection panels, and performance self- assessments are also unproven strategies.

Big leaps in gender equality have been made globally in the past 50 years, especially in health and education. But economic participation by women lags far behind and no nation has yet achieved equal economic participation for men and women. The World Economic Forum 2018 Report on the gender gap says that Lao PDR is the country that has come closest to eradicating the economic gap, showing that increased wealth does not necessarily go hand in hand with increased participation.

Gender discrimination remains one of the prime causes of global economic marginalisation. An important part of overcoming these obstacles is to ensure that women share fairly in the economic life of a country by taking part in the workforce on a more equal footing with men, and at the same rates of pay. Moving towards this will play a vital role in helping the world achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, reducing poverty in every nation, and improving life for women and men, for their families, communities, and countries.