Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Intuit's Women's Training Plan

Training and Business Strategy

Intuit revolutionized the accounting industry with innovative applications that assist with financial analysis and tax preparation. Since 1983, Intuit has been a proud leader, providing its most famous products — Quicken and TurboTax — to a wide variety of customers, from individuals to small businesses and corporations. The company has prided itself on providing an excellent workplace that sparks creativity and builds long-term relationships, fostering an atmosphere of continual learning and growth.

However, this focus on growth also means there is always room for improvement. The following examines a new training plan designed to take advantage of one area that could be improved. Although Intuit attracts young, ambitious employees, women have recently complained that their needs are being ignored. The following will examine a plan to include women in the Intuit workforce in a way that gives them truly equal opportunities compared to their male counterparts.

Equal Opportunity and Competitive Advantage

The key business strategy of Intuit played an essential role in the development of a largely male-dominated company. This was not intentional, but rather a result of operating in a male-dominated sector of the economy. It resulted in the unintentional development of a glass ceiling within the company and an atmosphere that favors young men over women.

In 2008, Intuit revealed a new Connected Services strategy that recognizes the growing importance of small businesses. The cornerstone of the strategy is the development of new online services that use QuickBooks as its backbone (Intuit Inc., 2008). The launch of a new business strategy requires corresponding changes in the training strategy. All employees must be aware of and understand how this new business strategy will affect their roles at Intuit. This will be an essential part of the successful launch of the new approach to QuickBooks core products and services.

Improving equal opportunity not only increases Intuit's attractiveness to the female workforce and other minority groups in the business sector — it also helps improve the company's overall competitive advantage. Promoting an inclusive environment for women in the workplace is known as gender diversity. In the United States and many other countries, promoting gender diversity is a legal requirement. However, aside from being a legal requirement, one must ask how important it is for the company on a strategic level.

The concept of gender diversity first began to gain scholarly interest in the 1990s, when human resources research started to focus on organizational performance (Ali, Metz, & Kulik, 2007). The central question is whether women contribute significantly to the competitive advantage of the organization, or whether a team comprised solely of men can perform equally well. Gender diversity in the workforce promotes the development of psychological categorization. When the workforce consists unequally of one gender, members of the underrepresented gender will feel isolated. This isolation can reduce communication and interaction between workforce members, producing a feeling of being either in-group or out-group. Either way, unequal gender representation reduces team performance and can create negative behaviors and diminished problem-solving abilities (Ali, Metz, & Kulik, 2007). Both of these outcomes significantly reduce productivity and decrease competitive advantage for the organization.

In an unequal workforce, those who feel isolated will often become less functional team members. For instance, in a workforce with nine males and one female, the female is unlikely to function as a full part of the team. Gender equality has been found to create better overall production for the organization as well as more functional teams (Ali, Metz, & Kulik, 2007). The innovation of female team members is more likely to be recognized in a gender-equal organization. When gender diversity is unequal, the contributions of women are often ignored by male team members because the female employee experiences isolation. This leads to decreased innovation and, consequently, decreased competitive advantage overall (Ali, Metz, & Kulik, 2007).

Hiring and Keeping Women: A Targeted Approach

Intuit operates in a relatively male-dominated sector of the market. Difficulties attracting and retaining women affect not only Intuit but its competitors as well. While this problem originates in a larger industry-wide dynamic, that does not lessen the effects of workforce inequality at Intuit. The ability to resolve this industry-wide problem will give Intuit a decided competitive advantage over organizations that remain male-dominated.

The quest for workforce diversity will require a targeted approach toward women, rather than the general human resources approach taken in the past. Currently, Intuit offers many amenities to its employees, including a gym and a game room. Women may be less attracted to these amenities than the male workforce, which only serves to increase gender inequality at Intuit. A woman is less likely to frequent a gym or game room where conversation and socialization are dominated by men. She will not feel a part of the activities and social life of the organization, which can only intensify the sense of isolation she may already be experiencing.

A targeted approach for women means including amenities that speak to their interests. Women need spaces where they can gather with other women and feel part of the social network of the organization. Providing amenities targeted toward women will go a long way toward attracting them to Intuit.

Aside from attracting women to Intuit, retaining them poses another challenge. Studies indicate that women are disappearing from the workforce, particularly in male-dominated occupations such as technology (Griffiths & Moore, 2010). This is a global trend driven by many factors that individual companies cannot fully control. Research has found that women are more likely to leave the workforce during periods of transition in their lives (Griffiths & Moore, 2010). Certain life events — such as starting a family, getting married, or having children — cannot be controlled by the organization. The inability to balance work and family represents a key reason for this growing trend (Griffiths & Moore, 2010).