Happy International Women’s Day 2020. Another year of celebrating women’s empowerment and this year’s theme is each for equal.
To me this theme is about making empowerment everybody’s issue, challenging assumptions, bia’s the status quo and most importantly ensuring that men and woman collaborate and work together to achieve equality.
Every year I am challenged by someone about why we need IWD day. The best way I can respond to this is to share data from my 2018 Ambition survey.
This was an industry first survey with over 200 responses, we know that the issue of equality, parity and diversity is one that will be solved if men and women work together, when leaders make deliberate decisions on who they hire and promote and most importantly are unaccepting of inappropriate behavior.
According to the survey some of the issues that women are facing are conscious and unconscious bias, bullying, parity, balancing work and family, lack of respect in the workplace, managing stress and loss of confidence; sadly none of these behaviors lead to equality.
We all know that one of the ways that we can start to make changes is to promote women into executive or leadership roles.
According to the survey 70% of women were interested in directorship or shareholding however only 36% had opportunities to buy in. Opportunities are either nonexistent or women simply are overlooked. Interestingly 83% were interested in a leadership role yet we have a distinct lack of women in such roles across the country.
Alarmingly over 52% of the women who responded had experienced inappropriate behavior in the workplace. We have recently seen many women share their experiences on this issue, my call to leaders is that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Make sure that if behavior is being reported to you on an ongoing basis that you pay attention or if you see it you call it out.
With each for equal being the IWD theme for 2020 let’s review what women are saying on how leaders and other women can work together to change the current paradigm
Understand women’s ambitions
Our survey showed that only 22% of respondents actually have a business plan, if leaders are not sitting down and understanding what women in their organization want then you won’t connect or understand their ambitions.
Women often require support, sponsors to open the door for them to step through into leadership roles. For many women in our industry who are in leadership roles today, a male leader opened the door for most of them. Imagine if this became the norm across the industry?
Equal billing at conferences
I recently saw a well-known trainer running an all-male leadership panel, imagine if those same men had asked the question – have you got a female leader, I can suggest a couple to you who would be great to bring a different perspective and point of view to the discussion.
Acknowledge there is an issue
How can you not? We don’t see women in leadership roles, and what you can’t see you can’t be. The future generations will demand this, and companies will lose talent if they don’t make these changes.
Women need to step up as well
We need to find a way to step up, to ask for what we want, and if we don’t get it to have the courage to find it elsewhere. If you are talented someone will recognize it and give you a place to belong to.
The boys club
The boys club exists because leaders allow it to. By not making deliberate hiring decisions, accepting inappropriate behavior and not promoting talented women into leadership roles we do become the boy’s club.
To change this, we need to keep the conversation going and men and women need to stand together to accept that this is an issue, the lack of diversity and parity is unacceptable and agree on how change can be made.
Each for equal is a great theme. It should make us reflect on if we don’t want equality and parity for each other than what do we want – inequality?
That if we don’t step up and make these changes now, our industry will become less attractive to talent.
Equality in our workplace and community is something that we are all responsible for. Happy IWD day.
