WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT GENDER EQUALITY IN YOUR OWN CIRCLE? It’s two o’clock and it’s time to present my monthly report at yet another management meeting. As usual, I explain that we have done this and that; I share our Key Performance Indicators (KPI) -good but not great; I note that we should celebrate this and, of course, I highlight that we need to improve on that. Then it’s time to go into the next agenda item and another colleague takes over. Next month we’ll do the same, and we’ll continue on and on… Perhaps because it’s my first meeting after several weeks of leave (thanks again to my supervisor!) I started pondering how can we improve these meetings. Since the eye looks outwards instead of inwards, I -of course- started to consider how others could improve until it dawned on me that it was I the one who had to get his act together first and do better. I noticed, with concern, that I’ve been reporting basically the same thing over and over again, with only marginal improvements. There were very many good ‘explanations’ but they all sounded like excuses. I was particularly shocked about the little improvements we’ve made in terms of gender equality.
After almost 30 meetings since I came to Abuja, despite a real commitment from everyone sitting at those management meetings and a team in People Management of which I couldn’t be prouder, we continue to have a glaring gender gap (61% to 39%) and we continue to recruit more men than women. Why? I don’t know. What can we do different to achieve better results? I don’t know either, but we have to do something and we have to do it quickly.
Why is this important to everyone and not only to my office? Well, because it so happens that -globally- we are doing very poorly in terms of gender equality. Yes, we have made strides on the basics: women have the same legal rights in most places; it is undisputed that gender equality is a win-win proposition in every country and yet the world is quite unlikely to meet gender equality by 2030. Even worst, if we continue with the current trend it would take 257 years to close the gender gap in economic opportunity (GSNI | Human Development Reports (undp.org).
This means that unless you and I do something different, my youngest daughter, now 13, and yours, will enter the labour market with an unfair handicap solely because of her gender. That is unfair and, to be blunt, shameful.
As I went through the UNDP report -which you should definitely read- I noticed that the greatest challenge we face derives from our own prejudices and biases, some of which we are not even aware. Therefore I am hereby inviting you, encouraging you, begging you to do three simple things:
- Read this report GSNI | Human Development Reports (undp.org). Dedicate 10 minutes a day, that’s all, and by next week you’d have finished it.
- Share it with your friends, family and networks, and talk about it. Think about what can you do differently to get things better.
- Change ONE thing in your daily routine that would help you look in the eyes of the young girls in your family and feel proud about improving the status quo for real.
Change starts with each one of us and there is no doubt that we have to change!
Have a wonderful week!