Invest In All Women | IWD Talk with FoundHer Events
Talk transcript below:
(ide)ate’s mission is to promote the social & economic inclusion of marginalised populations, so the IWD theme this year is deeply aligned with our mission.
There's been a lot of talk about WGEA's gender pay gap release not long ago which shines a bright light on the difference in paid & unpaid labour between men & women.
As welcome as this analysis is, I can't help but be distracted by those who aren't accurately represented by the data.
When we look beyond the gender binary to identify forces that might create inequities, it is those who have multiple minoritised identities who are excluded from the benefits of the data reveal & its subsequent actions.
Examples are:
***People who identify as non-binary: Data this time around was not collected on those who identify as non-binary.
***Women in regional Australia: Employers with more than 100 staff were required to report on their gender pay gap, however, the majority of regional businesses employ less than 100 people
***Women from minoritised demographics: Women who are underemployed for example, women with a disability or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have, on average, lower employment rates than other Australians
A binary focus on this demographic or that demographic (in this case, gender), is a fractured foundation upon which to build an inclusive & equitable people strategy & gets us
If you want to create happy, healthy, thriving organisations, we must look beyond the binary.
for example, a talent strategy to attract more women into the organisation will look starkly different to a strategy that seeks to employ women with a disability, or women from culturally and racially marginalised backgrounds - 2 demographics who face greater rates of underemployment because of the intersecting identity-based discrimination faced
Which brings me to my main point today.
invest doesn’t have to mean in the financial sense, although of course it absolutley can.
As a white woman who has been born into a life of great privilege, I won’t pretend to know what this is like.
My personal story isn’t interesting or unique or one that we should be centring on International Women’s day in my opinion.
That work is better done by women like Gulalai whose people experience the ongoing effects of oppression and exclusion to this day/
Today I will talk about what I learned during my time in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion about things such as the biases that create the systems that perpetuate and uphold exclusion and why we want justice over empowerment.
Before I get there, what I think you should know about me & what my perspective has been informed by is my 7 of years helping some of the world's biggest companies design & deliver DEI programs.
For those that dont know what DEI is, it's the intentional effort that companies make to create organisations that are diverse in terms of people, inclusive in terms of culture & equitable in terms of their processes.
DEI's roots lay in the 1960s and the civil rights movement, and its since gone on to broaden its reach over time to include different groups and identities.
The field has existed since the exists because our organisations, and certainly our world, continue to be exclusionary & homogenous.
