- Time: 2-4 hours
- Participants: 5-20
- Difficulty: Medium
- Facilitators: 1
Objectives
- Drive inclusive, effective, and engaging collaboration around gender parity.
- Enable an open and honest conversation that gives a voice to those with lived experience of the problem and the greatest insights into what needs to change.
- Define and prioritise ideas that ensure the retention and development of female talent through the ‘pinched middle’ phase of their career to build a sustainable pipeline of future female leaders.
- Explore the context, generate themes, create ideas, prioritize them and identify next steps to address the key question of the workshop: Given the impact of COVID-19 on the workplace, how can we enable women to achieve their full potential?
When should this session be delivered?
The Gender Parity template, part of the Axis Inclusion & Diversity (I&D) series, provides a proven framework to catalyze progress on workplace gender parity. It enables organizations to have an honest and action-orientated conversation on this crucial issue.
Progress on gender equality is slow – the latest World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report now estimates a staggering 257 years to close the gap on economic participation for women. And COVID could make things significantly worse: the latest McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2020 report states that, ‘More than one in four women are contemplating what many would have considered unthinkable just six months ago: downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely. This is an emergency.’ Now is the time to act.
Achieving gender parity requires organisations to individually take a hard look at their culture, policies, procedures and ways of working. Sources of gender bias are pernicious and everywhere. To catalyse change will involve an open and honest conversation, that gives a voice to those with lived experience of the problem and the greatest insights into what needs to change.
To ensure that these much needed conversations can be transformed into actionable outputs, Axis has teamed up with Unida, a leading diversity consultancy, to create a workshop template specifically designed to drive inclusive, effective and engaging collaboration around gender parity.
The template has been created by leveraging Unida’s research on women’s career progression in the professional service industry. The template, combined with Axis’ proven step-by-step facilitation method and easy to use smartphone interface enable a collaboration process where every voice is heard, ideas are collectively prioritised and actions are captured and owned.
Who can facilitate it?
The template has been designed to provide everyone, even inexperienced facilitators, with the opportunity and proven framework to catalyse progress on workplace gender parity. No particular skills or background are necessary in order to run this template and facilitate the session.
Check out the template details including step-by-step plan with instructions, timings and printable schedule.
About the authors
Sandra is Co-Founder and Director at Unida Consulting. Sandra supports professional services firms retain, develop, and attract female talent with experience across research, coaching, and D&I strategy development.
Nathalie is Co-Founder and Director at Unida Consulting. Nathalie helps firms ensure that they achieve gender parity in the workplace with experience across programme management, D&I change implementation, and data analytics.
Giulia is Product Manager at Axis. Giulia helps cross-functional teams in building and delivering digital products, and is the lead of the Inclusion & Diversity project at Axis.
About the companies
Axis is a web-based application which makes it simple and easy to facilitate meetings and workshops where every voice is heard, innovation is fostered and great decisions are made. Workshops can be designed in minutes, using a set of proven design thinking techniques. Axis’ step-by-step journey and smart-phone based participant interface captures every input ready for export and sharing.
Unida is a D&I consulting firm that develops deep workforce insights; creates diversity strategies, and offers tailored solutions. They have extensive experience of interviewing, researching, and analysing data to provide practical steps that help organisations achieve gender parity in the workplace. Unida has managed, mentored, and assisted in the development of the careers of many women and work closely with leadership teams to help them implement their D&I strategies.
