My #PledgeForParity

At our SAP Australia Business Women’s Network event yesterday, I had the pleasure of welcoming a range of customers, partners, colleagues, friends and students as we made our #PledgeForParity for International Women’s Day.

The unfortunate truth is that progress towards parity has slowed in our industry of late. In some areas, it has regressed. InnovationAus.com’s James Riley captured this reality in a headline earlier this year – The grim reality of women in tech.

However, I left yesterday’s forum feeling upbeat and energised. And here’s why… 

Our first guest speaker – MindModelling’s Nesan Naidoo – shared his expertise in the field of gender intelligence. His personal story of growing up witnessing grave disparity in apartheid era South Africa, which led to his personal #PledgeForParity at a young age, was sobering. Nesan’s years of experience working with organisations such as the Gender Intelligence Group allowed him to provide us with the steps we should be taking in the corporate world to address disparity. These included going beyond quotas coupled with meritocracy – the importance of inclusive leadership, collective responsibility and how building a gender intelligent company is not a function solely for HR, but for the collective executive team.

Following Nesan we heard from Fabian Dattner, founding partner of Dattner Grant. A leadership expert who drives parity in practice, Fabian outlined the deep complexity she sees in the gender debate today. We learned that women and men must share the mission of change and that women’s contributions must be celebrated. Leaders must possess a genuine intention to change – without this, the true commercial outcomes that a diverse and inclusive workforce brings will never be realised.

I’m privileged to be part of an executive team focused on diversity. A team that strives for SAP to attract the best talent in the industry: women and men. To have the best team engaged to lead innovation with our customers, to drive economic growth. We are challenging unconscious bias in our leadership training and recruitment processes, and we look for talent outside of those with traditional IT qualifications to bring increased levels of innovation to our customers.

In 2015, 100 per cent of our Industry Value Engineering team and 45 per cent of our Sales Academy team recruited in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) were women.

Our programs are designed to remove barriers for the equal participation of women in our business and, more importantly, to put resources behind them to ensure we retain our talent. The results we see from this commitment are without question.

In November 2015, SAP Australia was awarded Employer of Choice for Gender Equality citation status. I also accepted a role as a pay equity ambassador for the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.

A recent health check analysis on pay parity here at SAP ANZ delivered encouraging results. However, it also identified some outliers where gender pay gaps must be eliminated. We knew we had to do better, and we are taking action today.

I’m committed to continued evaluation and resource to support our diversity and inclusion programs at SAP ANZ, as we strive to attract and retain the very best talent.

This is my #PledgeForParity on International Women’s Day.