International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day and the 2023 theme is Embrace Equity. But what does that mean, and why is it relevant to our workplace today?

We have made a lot of progress, and today is a day to acknowledge and recognize the many Women who have created pathways to rights and opportunities for Women. But the data shows that we still have work to do. For example

• Women continue to be under-represented in leadership roles, especially racialized Women.
• The gender pay gap persists – women make 89 cents for every dollar men make for similar roles. This gap is even larger for women who are racialized or who have disabilities.
• Women continue to take primary responsibility for unpaid home-based labour, childcare, and other forms of caregiving, which impacts opportunities for career advancement in current structures.
• Women are over-represented in health care and social service industries, and under-represented in others.
• Close to 70% of women experience biases at work that make it harder to get hired, promoted, and negatively impacts their day-today work.

Certainly, in our own DEIJ assessment, we heard about how many of these trends play out in our own community and organization, and about actions we can take to support Women to fully participate.

Some of the ways organizations are attracting and keeping Women in their workplaces are:

• Flexibility in the workplace, in recognition of the caregiving and other care duties women often are taking part in
• Offering flexible benefits
• Transparency in succession planning
• Valuing breadth of skills and ways of working
• Transparency and accountability

We know that organizations that are inclusive and actively promote diversity are actually stronger and outperform less diverse organizations in performance. Employees in organizations that take tangible actions to promote diversity report stronger sense of belonging, are less likely to leave, and are more creative.

On Internatioanl Women's Day, I honour the work so far, and look forward to working together to forge new paths for all Women in the workplace.