Celebrating Women's History Month with a Focus on Gender Equality & Equity

The month of March is for women, globally. And in solidarity, many of us will roll out events, campaigns, conferences and content that touches on important issues like women empowerment, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, gender equality and professional opportunity and advancement.

It goes without saying that diversity is NOT only about gender equality. And gender equality is not only about an equal number of cis-gendered women (from a majority racial or ethnic group) represented in companies, leadership position and boards. Gender equality should be equitable and must also be representative of women across racial, ethnic, religious, socio-economic and political lines, among other diversity parameters. 

Consequently, in this particular month, we are centering women, without losing sight of the larger picture on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB). To this end, it is important that we reflect on our intentions. Is the advancement of ALL women a priority on our mandates? If yes, then we must ask ourselves, “Is every woman in the room?” 

Diversity and inclusion should always be demonstrated in our work, projects, brand, and the people we engage and collaborate with. Centering a diversity of women in our work (and in the workplace) should be an intentional and ongoing process. It should not only take place in March or for International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8, it should happen all year round. 

Here are two concrete things we can aim to avoid this month and thereafter.

1. Intention-action gap. 

I know all too well that sometimes, our work can be thwarted by the intention-action gap. New to this term? I’ll explain. The intention-action gap is basically having every intention of doing something; such as going to the gym or checking that warning light on your car; but never getting around to it. For the former, failing to close this gap between intention and action can be frustrating at best, but for the latter, it can be fatal. 

Do you intend on making DEIB a priority in your workplace? In the words of the famous Nike, “Just Do it.”

1. Tokenism

Tokenism is the practice of making only a symbolic effort to be inclusive, especially by recruiting people from underrepresented groups in order to prevent criticism and give the appearance of fairness of gender or racial equality within a company. A quite common way to partake in tokenism is by using stock photos on your website to reflect diversity in your team, whereas in reality, the employees in your company are largely homogenous. Stock photos should represent people currently in your company, so people with disabilities, people of colour, women or minority groups shouldn’t be on your website or in your company promotional materials if your workforce does not actually reflect them.

So how can we ensure that the intention-action gap and tokenism does not foil our work on circumspect gender equality, equity and diversity?

This requires a high level of commitment, and a rebrand of DEIB as a “need to have” rather than a “nice to have”. There’s got to be a willingness to do better, and thus, mandates an in-depth understanding, emotional intelligence and humility to get it right. And as we are human, we will likely make mistakes along the way, hence the need for humility because it is a constant process of learning, unlearning and improving.

The business case for gender equality and equity in the workplace has been made a hundred times over. Nonetheless, I’d be remiss to not mention that it is beneficial for productivity, the bottom-line, growth, society and overall happiness of the masses. As the saying goes, happy women, happy world! So, this month and for the rest of this year, let’s all commit to doing better.

In this spirit, I’d love to invite you to a monthly panel discussion my team and I facilitate on Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace. This time, we are addressing gender equality and equity. Join us on March 24 at 1pm to hear from me, Astrid Sundberg, Jacob Thomas and Hyacinth Walters-Olsen as we investigate gender.

This panel is free of charge for all to attend, you can register here. We look forward to seeing you!