Significant Industry Initiatives Announced in Week One of the Festival of Sourcing

I am so proud that we are discussing all these issues, mental health, supplier diversity and gender inequality in the sourcing industry in order to drive change. 

We as an industry association are going to continue to champion mental health and promoting strategies to improve companies’ employee engagement as I believe that although they are two very different things, they are interlinked. A mental health crisis is coming if we don’t act now!

Did your company publish their gender pay level information this year? After years of working towards gender equality the pandemic has pushed us back massively! It’s clear that we need to do a lot more as this year the government introduced an exception to firms publishing their gender pay gap information during the pandemic. Only 50% of companies still published their gender pay levels! 50%! Change needs to happen now! I want to create a pay gap report analysing firms across the industry and their levels of inequality in the workforce. Companies need to do a lot more and take responsibility! 

Through the interaction with women at our event, the issue of menopause in the workforce was highlighted. There’s so much being done for women during the childbirth stage, that more needs to be done at a menopausal stage of life. This was unanimously agreed. As a result, the GSA is going to look at an industry support initiative that will ensure more attention and support for women juggling their careers whilst going through the menopause. 

Last week, we also celebrated the launch of the Council Supplier Diversity UK (SDUK), a group of professionals wanting to create change in the supplier diversity space and create best practice for the industry. Collaboratively we are working to create benchmark data and define Supplier Diversity. 

The founding members of the SDUK council are Sunita Hirani, Senior Contracts Manager at the BBC, Sara Ahmad, Associate Director & Lead, Strategic Sourcing & Procurement UKI at BMS, Farida Gibbs, CEO of Gibbs Hybrid and myself amongst other members such as the Cabinet office, Facebook, Accenture and John Lewis.

I am truly inspired to push changes across industries. I want to say a huge thank you to all our speakers!

You can expect to see a lot more from myself and the GSA driving these initiatives forward along with many more! We do need some community support so please get in touch with me if you are interested!

If you missed any of our webinars, you can view them on our website here.