The pandemic’s negative impact on women in the workforce will not be reversed for a very long time. In the first year of the pandemic alone, 54 million women around the world left the workforce, almost 90 percent of whom exited the labor force completely. The participation rate for women in the global labor force is now under 47%, drastically lower than men at 72%.

These losses deliver a devasting impact to gender parity, career progression, and female representation in leadership positions. But we are underestimating the scope of the problem if we are just looking at the impact on women. The collateral damage is the loss of engagement and productivity from every employee who now won’t be working for a woman, since women leaders have more engaged teams, drive better job performance, and save their organization millions of dollars as a result. At a time when so many employeees are resigning to seek opportunity elsewhere and companies face a 15-year high in talent shortages, retaining and promoting more women leaders is the best and most urgent solution for securing one’s entire workforce.

Women Do Hard Things Better

Potential Project conducted a multi-year study of leaders and employees from approximately 5,000 companies in close to 100 countries. We wanted to learn how leaders do the hard things that come with their top jobs while still remaining good human beings. We distilled the analysis into two key traits: wisdom, the courage to do what needs to be done, even when it is difficult; and compassion, the care and empathy shown towards others, combined with the intention to support and help. Both traits are important, but when they are combined, there is an exponentially higher impact on important metrics. For example, job satisfaction is 86% higher for an employee who works for a wise and compassionate leader than an employee who does not. (To gauge your own wisdom and compassion as a leader, feel free to take this quick assessment.)

When we parse the data by gender, the differences, if not shocking, are pretty stark. 55% of the women in our study were ranked by their followers as being wise and compassionate compared to only 27% of the men. Conversely, 56% of the men in our study ranked poorly on wisdom and compassion, landing in a quadrant we call Ineffective Indifference. By a 2:1 margin, followers said that women leaders versus male leaders are able to do hard things in a human way.

Before we began the study, we had no idea that “doing hard things in a human way” would in essence become job #1 for leaders. When a global pandemic changed the very fabric of work and irreversibly upended our lives, leaders had to make incredibly difficult decisions with no playbook to fall back on. They were called on to navigate their teams through waves of grief, anxiety, and uncertainty, to help protect their mental health, and to show their own vulnerabilities along the way.

It isn’t surprising then that women who stayed in the workforce, and who excel at wise compassion, have emerged as the heroes of the pandemic. A recent McKinsey report confirms how women are rising to this extraordinary moment as stronger leaders and taking on the extra work that comes with it, compared to men at the same level. In their study of 65,000 employees, women managers were scored higher by their employees as taking the people-centered actions that helped them through the pandemic: providing emotional support (12% more), checking in on overall well-being (7% more), taking action to help manage burnout (5% more).