More emails please

Now don’t get me wrong, I get a lot of emails. Sometimes keeping up with them feels like drinking from a fire hose.

And yet, I don’t get enough. Or what I should say is that I don’t get enough emails of a certain kind at this time of year. We have just said goodbye to March and INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY, and after all the events put on by so many organizations to mark the day and show their commitment to driving gender equality, people like me should now be inundated with requests to do the follow-up work. And yes we have those requests from the most enlightened companies, yet inundated we are not.

Speaker events are a brilliant way to get an organization engaged in and motivated by the equality issue and opportunity, but they are only the very start of the journey towards making it happen. If the journey stops with the event, we can’t expect to see progress. The inequality issue is highly complex and all the invisible, unconscious forces that work against equality are so powerful, we can’t expect things to fix themselves by osmosis - we need to roll up ,our sleeves and do the hard work to put in place the interventions that will be robust enough to overpower the self-fulfilling prophecies that rule us and our decisions in the workplace. The analysis. The strategy work. The action plan for each moment where gender inequality arises. The workshops. The reviews. Without this work, nothing will change. And it may seem daunting, but it really isn’t. If you really believe in and want gender equality, there are a few key interventions that experts like me can help you to make that will get you there (and if you don’t, we need to talk).

We gender equality experts are very, very popular every year in March. If we were as popular in April and the whole year, it would be a very different - and better - workplace and world.