It is International Women’s Day today, and this year’s theme is Count Her In: Invest in Women, Accelerate Progress.
Women’s economic empowerment is central to a gender-equal world, where women are given equal opportunities to earn, learn and lead.
And while progress has been made in achieving equal participation in the economy, women continue to face significant challenges.
Just last week, the latest WGEA data revealed that the gender pay gap in Australia currently sits at around 19%, and an even worse 24% in the tech industry. Women are still mainly in lower-paying roles while men continue to occupy the majority of high-paying roles.
We know that key reasons behind not enough women progressing into senior roles include fewer women being promoted to front-line manager roles, and that almost 50% of women drop out of the tech industry before they hit 30 years of age.
So, there’s still a lot to get right.
Which is why this topic is so important. After 30 plus years of concerted effort, setting gender diversity targets, implementing diversity training and seeding conversations in the workplace, it’s easy to see why people, often men, don’t think it’s a problem anymore. Haven’t we moved the needle enough yet? Why are we still talking about this? But the data is telling us we’re not there yet, and we need to turn the heat up in the kitchen. Actually, we need to burn the kitchen down.
Over the last few years, we have been playing our part at DiUS by balancing our efforts between supporting our women internally as well as supporting external community groups that are focused on empowering more women to get, and progress in, roles in the technology industry.
Internally, we have strategically driven our gender pay gap down to a neutral range (currently 2%) as well as invested in leadership programs for our women. Underpinning it all has been a holistic focus on inclusion and equity, and creating an environment where all of our people feel safe, as though they belong, and where they can grow their skills and their career.
Externally, we have been working with the Girls In Tech community and have been involved in sponsoring meetup events, leading panel discussions, and contributing to thought leadership conversations. More recently, we have been donating our time to over 20 women in this community, of all ages and experiences, to help them get their foot in the door of the tech industry or navigate their careers—we have been connecting some with mentors, and provided others with a career consultation.
This year, our commitment to our women at DiUS will be to take a more personal and tailored approach, connecting them to external mentors or an alternative of their choosing that will help support them in their career over the next 12 months.
There’s always work to do and there’s always areas to improve, but if every organisation makes small changes in the areas they can best impact it will go a very long way. A waterfall begins with only one drop of water.