Many large organisations now publish workforce diversity targets alongside plans for achieving them.
These commitments often involve significant changes to workforce composition over time. Quantitative modelling can help organisations understand how such targets interact with workforce structure, recruitment patterns and employee turnover.
This article illustrates the principle using publicly available workforce data.
Starting position
At 31 March 2024 the organisation reported:
- Total employees: 47,000
- Female employees: 16,000 (35%)
- Male employees: 31,000 (65%)
The published objective was to increase female representation to 46% of the workforce.
What does this imply?
If the total workforce size remained broadly stable at around 47,000 employees, achieving this target would require approximately:
- 21,600 women
- 25,400 men
This implies an increase of roughly 5,600 female employees, accompanied by a corresponding reduction in male representation.
How such a change might occur depends on several factors, including:
- recruitment patterns
- promotion pipelines
- employee turnover
- workforce growth or contraction.
Possible pathways
There are several theoretical ways the organisation could move toward this outcome.
For example:
Scenario 1 – Recruitment-driven change
If workforce size remains constant, the organisation would need to recruit substantially more women than men over the period while natural turnover gradually reduces the male share.
Scenario 2 – Attrition-driven change
Alternatively, if female hiring remained stable, the shift would need to occur primarily through male departures.
Scenario 3 – Workforce expansion
If the organisation were growing rapidly, new hires could change workforce composition more quickly.
Each pathway involves different operational implications for recruitment, retention and workforce planning.
Why modelling is useful
Changes in workforce composition often appear straightforward when expressed as percentages. However, once the underlying headcount changes are examined, the scale of organisational change can be significant.
In this example, achieving the target involves changes affecting several thousand employees.
This is precisely where quantitative workforce models — such as those in the Diversity Maths toolkit — can help organisations test the feasibility of targets and understand the timelines involved.
Such models allow organisations to explore questions such as:
- how quickly workforce composition can change under realistic recruitment assumptions
- how promotion and turnover influence outcomes
- what recruitment patterns would be required to reach specific targets.
From targets to strategy
The aim of this type of analysis is not to challenge diversity objectives, but to help organisations ensure that targets are supported by realistic workforce dynamics.
By modelling recruitment, promotion and attrition together, organisations can move from high-level commitments toward evidence-based workforce planning.