As the cost of living bites, there’s a real danger that more companies will cut DEI spending. Megan Dalla-Camina (right in lead image), founder and CEO of leadership training company Women Rising and Woman of the Year at the 2023 Women Leading Tech Awards, warns that the long-term downside could outweigh any short-term savings.
The numbers don’t lie, Dalla-Camina says: “35 per cent of women say they have changed jobs in the last 18 months. And 74 per cent of women say they will consider leaving their organisation if their career is not invested in and they don’t get career development”.
The consequences of this are huge, not just for individual companies but for the economy, Dalla-Camina explained.
“I think the question organisations and leaders need to ask themselves is what’s the implication of this? We’re seeing women leaving their organisations and turning their backs on their careers. We found that one in five women of non-retirement age are considering leaving the workforce altogether”.
With long-term economic viability at stake, Dalla-Camina says leaders must also adopt a long-term lens when it comes to equality in work.
“Organisations need to not look at the short-term of how can we take this budget and make some savings, they need to be strategically looking at the implication of removing investment from some of the most marginalized groups inside of their organisations”.
Despite the progress in gender equality, it is important to remember the very real challenges women face in the workplace.
“You only need to look at the gaps in the data to see how slow any incremental changes for women in work are, how much bias still exists for women at work – whether it’s microaggressions or sexual discrimination in the workforce. These things are incredibly gendered”.
Organisations that are aware of this are actively investing in tackling biases in both their women and their men, Dalla-Camina said.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work on our male allies program, you’ve got to hit it on all fronts,” she says.
“We get so many white men coming to us saying ‘I want to be part of the solution. I’m worried, I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I don’t know what to do to help’. Then we’ve got organisations saying ‘help us help our men’. So that’s the work that we’re doing”.
You can get your Final Tickets for the Women Leading Tech Awards, taking place on Thursday HERE!
