2
GENDER BALANCE LISTENING EVENTS | BDO
SUMMARY
Our Be Yourself strategy forms a key pillar of the U in our BUILD strategy. As part of Be Yourself, we’ve been working on our BE INSPIRED plan for a number of years: setting out specific ways through which we address and support female career development. Female partner ratios have started to increase and gender pay gaps started to decrease. But our data tells us that our female representation still drops after manager level – where it is at 50% - upwards. Our Leadership Team wanted to explore why. At the start of 2021, Paul Eagland and Wendy Walton held a series of listening events with female colleagues from each part of our business, from senior manager to director, to listen. Not listening to reply, but listening to really understand. Over eight Listening Events, we heard from 160 of our BDO women. Each personal story and experience was different. It was clear: if we want to help each person succeed, we need to first understand what success means to them.
Four common areas emerged in determining the success of an individual’s progression:
The support of your people manager and your team
Your ability to access professional development – particularly coaching, learning opportunities and mentoring
The support structures around you in your work/life set up
Your own desire for progression at a given time.
Made with FlippingBook HTML5