Survey Analysis: Women in Supply Chain Survey, 2016

Gartner surveyed 125 supply chain professionals in 112 unique enterprises about goals and initiatives to improve attraction, development, retention and advancement of women.

We also collected baseline data on how many women are in front-line manager, senior manager/director, vice president and executive-level roles within supply chain organizations.

Another goal for this survey was to begin to identify practices that are increasing the engagement with and success of women in supply chain organizations.

We believe this is important to supply chain leaders for two reasons:

1. women make up more than 50% of the workforce in most developed markets, and, therefore, represent untapped potential in the "war for talent"; and
2. research studies show that diverse teams are more innovative and perform better.

Gartner's research partner for this project is AWESOME, a U.S.-based executive women's networking group focused on advancing women's supply chain leadership.

Data Insights
This report focuses on institutional data and practices that show the current state of companies' efforts to attract, develop, retain and advance women in the supply chain profession.

In the supply chain talent research we've conducted since 2008, we've encountered little interest in institutional practices that would target women in supply chain, and few active initiatives.

However, over the past two years, requests from Gartner clients seeking best practices in engaging and retaining female professionals have increased.

Our initial hypotheses that representation of women would decrease at senior levels and that few respondents would be engaged in targeted supply-chain-led initiatives to increase these numbers were confirmed.

The three sections of this report focus on representation, goals and specific initiatives. Where possible, we provide detailed contrast by sector, company size and geography.

In each section, we discuss the implications of our findings for supply chain leadership and make recommendations for action.

We also share respondents' predictions for what they think supply chain organizations will look like five years from now.