6 GENDER BALANCE LISTENING EVENTS | BDO
BACKGROUND TO EVENTS
At BDO, we’ve been working on gender balance and our efforts to improve gender diversity throughout our organisation for a number of years. Our BE INSPIRED plan sets our specific and targeted ways that we aim to address and support female career development.
When we signed the Women in Finance charter in 2018, we committed to a target of 20% female Partners by July 2021. Whilst we have made progress towards this – we’re now at 18% - and our future pipeline looks strong, the C-19 promotion freeze in 2020 meant we had to extend our target deadline to 2022. Our demographic data helps us understand where we next need to focus our efforts. It shows us that our female representation drops after manager level, where it is 50%, upwards.
We’re not alone in this challenge: it’s seen across the industry and something that, despite firms focusing on female progression for a number of years, continues to be a challenge. There are many well‑researched and documented reasons for this. Indeed, our recent listening events reminded us that every women has their own unique circumstance and experience.
2020 and the global pandemic have in particular highlighted the additional pressures faced by women. McKinsey research shows that women have been disproportionally impacted due to existing societal inequalities. Their research confirmed that women were naturally taking on more of the childcare responsibilities and housework. It also revealed that, in some sectors, women held roles that were less secure and therefore more likely to have been made redundant. Whilst these issues have become particularly acute during the past 12 months, many women would recognise that these are additional pressures that they have always faced.
As we move through 2021 and switch to a hybrid way of working between office, client and home working environments, this is something we must keep front of mind. We need to continue to understand barriers to female progression and be aware of unconscious bias. Greater agility in working patterns can have hugely positive effects for everyone. But – if women choose to remain working more flexibly for a greater portion of their working time - we must not allow this to subsequently impact their working enjoyment or career progression, and must support them – and their managers and teams – in the right way. For all these reasons, the time was right for us to hold a series of listening events with our mid-level female colleagues.
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