What Should Security Companies Address to Avoid the Gender Gap?

Trackforce

January 9, 2017 · 12 min read

Inclusive leadership helping security companies close the gender gap

While women are steadily becoming more prevalent in the work force, we still see that males dominate many companies. Studies have shown that businesses benefit from hiring women on their staff. Some of these benefits are an increase in profit margins, innovation, and it provides a more equal and fair work environment. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses aren’t seeing as many women taking roles in their companies, especially when it comes to leadership roles. Security companies are one type of business that often sees more male hires than female. Here are some ways on how to address the gender gap at your security company.

Key takeaways

Find out where your own funnel narrows. Applicants, shortlists, hires, post assignments, promotions and leavers tell very different stories. Measure each stage before deciding what to fix.
Awareness training alone rarely changes outcomes. Bias has less room to operate when decisions rest on a recorded performance history rather than on a supervisor’s recollection.
Scheduling is the practical lever most firms underuse. Predictable rosters published in advance, and shift patterns that are not all nights and weekends, widen who can realistically take the work.
Post safety decides who accepts which assignment. Isolated posts with no refuge, no check-in and no reliable way to call for help narrow your available pool whether or not anyone says so out loud.
You cannot manage what you cannot see. Firms running TrackTik can look at completion, incident handling, training records and attrition by cohort, which turns a cultural debate into an operational one with numbers attached.

Where the Gap Actually Shows Up in a Security Operation

Most discussion of this subject stays at the level of attitude, which is hard to act on. It becomes tractable when you treat it as a funnel and look at where your own numbers narrow. The stages below are where security firms most often find the drop, and each one has a concrete change attached rather than a sentiment.

Stage	What a narrowing looks like	What to change
Sourcing	Adverts placed only where your existing workforce already looks, with wording copied forward from old postings	Widen the channels and describe the post by the work it involves. Applicant tracking shows you which sources actually produce hires
Shortlisting	A healthy application rate that does not survive to interview stage	Screen against written criteria and record why each candidate advanced, so the decision can be reviewed rather than recalled
Post assignment	New officers from one group routinely landing on the same narrow handful of post types	Track the assignment mix by post type in guard management and rotate deliberately rather than by habit
Scheduling	Rosters published only days ahead, with the least wanted shifts falling to whoever joined most recently	Publish further out and spread unsocial hours across the team. Scheduling and retention are the same problem
Progression	Promotions settled in conversation, with nothing written down about what qualified the person chosen	Publish the criteria, keep the supporting evidence, and review who was considered as well as who was picked
Retention	Attrition reported as a single company-wide figure that hides where people actually leave	Break it down by site, tenure band and cohort. A data-driven approach to retention sets out the method

Unconscious Bias

During the hiring process, men are often given more opportunities than women. This is often due to unconscious bias. In a company that is predominantly male, hirers might relate to the males who are interviewing more than the females. To address this issue, it’s important to discuss this unconscious bias and make leaders aware of it. The best way to combat unconscious biases is to be aware of them and work towards changing this mindset.

Invest in Your Female Employees

While there are a few females in leadership roles, there isn’t enough. Investing in the female employees you have will help provide role models for other female employees, it shows them that there are opportunities for them to work their way up. Offer unbiased training for both men and women and engage them in the company.

Avoid Stereotyping

We are still coming out of the traditional gender roles that have been placed on women in the past. The idea that women should stay at home and take care of the kids and do all the household work, while their male counterpart was expected to go to work to pay the bills. Due to this there has been an established gender bias for a long time. To get through this communication and education need to take a forefront.

Educating people about their thought on stereotypes that have been given to them through societal views, is how to work past this. By breaking the thinking that gender stereotypes are true, you give women more of a chance to prove themselves in the work place. More women will be encouraged to step out of these established roles and start working in male dominant fields.

Offer Flexible Work Hours

In the past, women were expected to do more of the housework than men; this has been changing in the recent years, but women still statistically do more at home. Due to this, women have less time to invest into their jobs, especially if they have children. By offering flexible work hours, you give women the option to work and take care of additional responsibilities.

Sexual Harassment

With a more gender mixed work place, leaders might fear that they are setting themselves up for a lawsuit. Educating your workers on appropriate working behavior can stop this from happening. Men and women can coexist in the same working environment without issues arising.

Replace Impressions With Records in Promotion Decisions

Awareness of bias is useful, but it is difficult to audit and easy to forget under pressure. Changing how the decision is made is more durable than changing how people feel about making it, and in a security operation you already hold most of the evidence you would need.

Write the criteria down before the vacancy exists. A role defined after somebody already has a candidate in mind has a habit of describing that candidate.
Use the record you already collect. Tour completion at the harder posts, incident handling, report quality and training completion are all captured while officers work. Pulling them from business intelligence gives you a performance history rather than a recollection of one.
Review who was considered, not only who was chosen. If the same people never reach the shortlist, your sourcing or your criteria are doing the filtering long before the decision is taken.
Keep a short written rationale for each promotion. It takes a few minutes and it is the only thing that lets you spot a pattern a year later. Holding it in business administration records keeps it with the employee file rather than in somebody’s inbox.

Make the Post Safe Enough to Take

Conditions on a post determine who will realistically accept it, and that shapes your available workforce whether or not anyone raises it in an interview. An isolated overnight position with no refuge, no check-in and no dependable way to call for help narrows the pool you can recruit from. Fixing those conditions is worth doing on its own merits, and it happens to widen the hiring pool at the same time.

A securable post with somewhere to withdraw to, rather than an open position with no refuge at all
Timed check-ins and a duress alert on the phone the officer is already carrying, through the guard tour app
One escalation route that always reaches a staffed desk, not a supervisor who finished at six, run through a command center
Lighting and camera coverage on patrol routes, or a route change where neither is available. Lone worker strategy covers the usual gaps
De-escalation training that recurs in short sessions rather than appearing once at induction
A stated position that asking to be moved off a post is reasonable, and is handled as a scheduling matter rather than a performance one

Five numbers worth tracking

Applications, shortlists and hires at each stage. A single headcount figure tells you the outcome but never where the funnel narrowed.
Assignment mix by post type in the first six months. Early assignments shape who gains the experience that later qualifies them for promotion.
Training and certification completion by cohort. Uneven access to training is one of the quieter ways a progression gap gets built.
Promotion rate and average time to first promotion. Two groups can have the same promotion rate and very different waiting times.
Attrition at 90 days and at twelve months, by site. Early attrition usually points at onboarding or post conditions. Later attrition usually points at progression.

When it comes to the workforce, women still have a lot of work in creating an equal and fair work environment. Hiring more women can be beneficial to companies, but stereotypes are still holding women back. Women still have work to do in shattering that proverbial glass ceiling. Investing in a diverse work place, is not only right, it will benefit your company in the long run.

The practical version of all this is unglamorous. Measure each stage of your own funnel, write down the criteria you promote against, publish rosters far enough ahead that people can plan around them, and fix the posts nobody wants to stand. If you want to see what that looks like when the hiring, scheduling, training and attrition records sit in one system instead of four, you can book a TrackTik demo and run it against your own roster.

Frequently Asked Questions

Several structural reasons stack up rather than one big one. Recruitment has traditionally drawn from military and law enforcement pipelines that are themselves male-dominated. Shift patterns are often built around nights and weekends with little notice. Many posts are isolated, and the conditions on those posts affect who will accept them. Job adverts frequently describe the role in physical terms rather than by the work involved. Each of those is a hiring practice rather than a fact of the industry, which is what makes them worth examining.

Start by finding out where your funnel narrows rather than assuming. Then widen the sourcing channels, rewrite adverts to describe the actual duties, publish rosters further ahead so shifts can be planned around, and fix the post conditions that make certain assignments unattractive. Tracking which sources produce hires through applicant tracking tells you which of those changes is working instead of leaving it to impression.

It is the tendency to favour candidates who resemble the people already doing the job, without intending to. Training helps people recognise it but is hard to audit. Changing the mechanics is more reliable: written criteria agreed before the vacancy opens, structured questions asked of everyone, a recorded reason for each advance or rejection, and more than one person reviewing the shortlist. The aim is a decision you can inspect afterwards rather than one you have to trust.

Within limits, yes, and the useful version is usually predictability rather than true flexibility. Contracted hours have to be covered, but publishing the roster weeks instead of days ahead, allowing shift swaps within qualification rules, and spreading unsocial hours across the team rather than loading them onto the newest staff are all achievable. Scheduling and retention are closely linked, and the scheduling side is usually the easier one to move first.

Measure the stages, not the total. Applications, shortlists and hires separately, assignment mix in the first six months, training completion, promotion rate and time to first promotion, and attrition at 90 days and twelve months by site. Headcount alone tells you the result and never the cause. Reading those through business intelligence reporting rather than assembling them by hand is what makes the review something you can sustain quarterly.

Two concrete ones, without needing to appeal to broader research. First, labour supply: in a market where firms compete hard for officers, recruiting from a narrower pool than your competitors is a self-inflicted constraint. Second, contract requirements: healthcare, retail, education and event work frequently need female officers on shift for searches, escorts and welfare duties, and firms that cannot staff that lose bids or subcontract the work. Both show up in the numbers without any debate about culture.

It supplies the evidence and removes some of the discretion that bias works through. TrackTik holds scheduling, assignment history, training and certification records, performance data and attrition in one place, so you can see which stage narrows, publish rosters further ahead, promote against a recorded history rather than a recollection, and put a duress alert and check-ins on every isolated post. None of that decides anything for you. It does mean the decisions are visible and reviewable.

With a documented procedure that exists before you need it, and a route to report that does not run through the person being complained about. Take the complaint seriously, record it, investigate promptly, keep the complainant informed, and protect them from retaliation while it is open. Treat it as a duty to your officers rather than primarily as a legal exposure, because a firm known for handling complaints properly has an easier time recruiting. Obligations differ by state, so have your procedure reviewed by HR and counsel rather than drafting it from a template.