Choose to Challenge gender bias - not just today, but every day

Today is International Women's Day. A day of truly global significance not only to remind us the critical importance of true gender equality for us all – in business, personal and wider societal terms – but also, much more sadly, how far away we still are from real gender equality in all of these areas.

Despite the important contribution made by women to every aspect of economic and social life, there are still many - far too many - areas that are systematically and fundamentally male dominated.

For instance research from PWC has shown that only 3% of females say a career in technology is their first choice, and only 16% have had a career in technology suggested to them, compared to 33% of men. A key element of this may well be a lack of female role models in the industry, with just 5% of leadership positions in the technology sector held by women.  This is painful imbalance that I clearly observe across the entirety of EMEA as I and the team look to recruit new talent into our organisation.

The last 12 months and onset of the global pandemic has created even more challenges to tackle gender inequality, as our too-often-accepted-societal-norms have placed even more pressure on working women.  Being too often perceived as the primary caregivers in their family has meant that many women have been forced to take on more family orientated responsibilities, like home school-teacher, or domestic office manager in addition to their job.  Tech Radius  statistics show that women (72%) were 1.5 times more likely to feel a greater childcare burden than men during lockdown scenarios.  Obviously this makes it more challenging to focus on work with these additional responsibilities and in an unfair percentage of scenarios it has been women that have been forced to reduce working hours or quit work altogether to manage the additional burdens that COVID has caused.  

These failings are not just in the tech sector but equally apparent in the wider professional working world, and it is important to consider that these are not only fundamentally unfair – but also have huge negative business impacts.   

The presence in an organization of different people, coming with the different perspectives that gender diversity brings, can only enrich the culture and internal structures, creating better flexibility, empathy and ability to adapt to a global market that will never stop evolving. If we allow any processes, prejudices, scenarios or bias to prevent this any business is fundamentally weaker.

The ways for businesses to address this are plentiful. The small shred of positivity from COVD for organisaions as whole must be the recognition that more remote, flexible working processes do not negatively impact productivity.  

It's only through changing our expectations and processes, emphasizing and highlighting success stories, and cooperating to develop organizational models that embrace gender difference, can we make genuine progress towards gender equality in our workplaces and wider society.

This is why we must continue to #ChooseToChallenge.