Panelists at the IREM Global
Summit share best practices for mitigating bias and advancing diversity.
Cultivating talent is the industry-wide mission for the property management profession and all of the commercial real estate. At the Institute of Real Estate Management’s Global
Summit last week in San Francisco, an international panel of rising leaders
shared best practices and strategies for advancing that goal through diversity.
Signs of progress for women in real estate stand side by side
with persistent contradictions. Women entrepreneurs enjoy a rising profile;
nearly one-third of all privately held firms are owned by women. On the
educational front, women bring more to the table; they hold more undergraduate
degrees than men and earn 50 percent more graduate degrees than their male
counterparts. Women’s workplace priorities are led by flexibility and quality
of life, according to national studies; compensation ranks third.
The speakers also recounted the
qualities that women in business tend to bring to the table. “The more diversity, the better your product
is going to be, the better your bottom line is going to be,” noted Anne
Loehr, executive vice president at the Center
for Human Capital Innovation and the panel’s moderator.