Gender Ratio

What is Gender Ratio?

This metrics calculates the proportion of people who identify as a certain gender across your business.

It is used to compare the amount of people across two genders (or groups of genders e.g. women and non-binary to men). It’s most commonly used to calculate the women to men ratio (also known as Sex Ratio or Male to Female Ratio).

How to calculate Gender Ratio?

First decide what two genders or groups of genders you’ll be comparing. For the example below, we’ve shown the calculation for the number of women to men.

# of female employees : # of male employees = Women to Men Gender Ratio

You can further simplify this ratio by dividing the number on each side by their highest common factor. For example if your Women to Men Gender Ratio is 28:84 you can simplify this to 1:3 meaning for every one woman, there are three men in your company.

You may also wish to show the ratio as a percentage of your whole workforce. To do that calculate the percentage of each gender or groups of genders in your company with the following formula and compare it with another gender shown as a percentage of the business.

( # of employees of one gender / total # of employees ) * 100 = % of gender in the company

Pros:

Knowing your Gender Ratio will help with your effort to create an inclusive and diverse workplace and allow you to identify whether there is any over or under representation in your company.

Cons:

Ratios can only show the relationship between two numbers. Only showing two genders (if more are represented in your company) or grouping genders can feel exclusionary to that group of people when shared or distort your data.

As with any metric related to diversity and inclusion, it’s important to understand what this ratio means to your company.