For women to rise, gender norms must be dismantled

Meanwhile, around 10 per cent reported experiencing incidents of gender discrimination at work such as being excluded or having someone else take credit for their ideas, with that figure rising for women in ethnic minority groups.

Too often, women are led to believe overcoming these challenges is their own individual responsibility. It’s not.

We don’t need to fix women; we need to fix the system.

To do that, we need to address the collection of “gender norms” that underpin society’s expectations of women and coerce individuals into acting in ways expected of their gender. Abolishing these norms benefits more than just people – it also benefits the economy.

Research from Deloitte Access Economics shows demolishing these gender norms would grow Australia’s economy by at least $128 billion each year, on average, from 2022 to 2071, through increased labour force participation and productivity.

That’s more than $12,000 per year for every household.

Dismantling these norms is an all-of-society effort, but employers have a special responsibility to proactively rectify workplace gender inequity.

This has been an important priority at Deloitte, where female leaders and allies in every part of our business strongly influence decision-making.

Women now make up 50 per cent of our workforce, 42 per cent of our executive leadership team, and one-third of all partners.

But as a Workplace Gender Equality Agency employer of choice for gender equality for 21 years, our commitment to breaking norms goes deeper than headline figures.

Over the last three years, we have gone out of our way to listen to our people and learn what they want from us as an employer. These lessons have resulted in policies that are rather radical departures from traditional workplace practice – but breaking norms requires outside-the-box thinking.

In 2019, we abolished gender-based practices around family leave to offer the same support for all parents. And after being told by our new parents that they needed more time and money to balance work and family life, we updated our parental leave policy so that people returning from 18 weeks of paid parental leave are paid for five days when they work four.

The consequence of these initiatives has been a reversal of gender norms. More than half of the people who take parental leave firm-wide are now men, meaning their partners have the freedom to continue working and earning while sharing childcare duties.

In a clear effort to reduce the “say-do” gap, we’ve launched a new quarterly “gender health check” for each of our business areas to deep dive into progress against targets and drive increased accountability for action.

Our targets are reinforced by succession planning, sponsorship, recruitment, and development, to ensure we are elevating our most talented and diverse women and empowering them to navigate the unique challenges women face in the workplace.

We’ve also taken steps to become more transparent with key information such as disclosing incidents of workplace misconduct by publishing official complaint statistics internally and externally, and reporting on the gender pay gap.

By putting data in the hands of our people and leaders, we’re helping close the gap and improve equitable outcomes for all.

As today is International Women’s Day, we should all take the time to reflect on the steps we can take to help dismantle gender norms, fix the system, and advance gender equity.

It is not something that will come about passively, and it is not something women should have to fight for alone.

Pip Dexter is chief people and purpose officer at Deloitte.