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Here are today’s HR and workplace news headlines from Workology Go Podcast. I’m Jessica Miller-Merrell. The Workology Go Podcast is sponsored by Workology.
Ep 51 – Accenture Sets Goal to Achieve Gender Balanced Workforce by 2025
In 2017, Accenture’s late CEO Pierre Nanterme announced that it will achieve a gender-balanced workforce, with 50 percent women and 50 percent men, by 2025. This bold statement was later backed up by the current Global CEO, Julie Sweet. She led the publishing of their U.S. demographics in 2015, making Accenture the first among its peers to release data of this kind.
Today’s featured article comes from The Accenture Newsroom and is titled, “Accenture Sets Goal to Achieve Gender Balanced Workforce by 2025”
The article states the milestones they’ve set over the past several years to gender equality. From their initiatives to commitment for transparency. To name a few examples:
– They’ve promoted its largest percentage of women to the managing director level in 2016 at 30 percent.
– They’ve launched initiatives that provide women with in-demand skills. For example, the company’s Women in Technology program helps fast-track the careers of high-performing women toward the position of Technical Architect, a high-demand and short-supply role.
– Collaboration across business and government to further gender equality in the workplace, with commitments that include the White House Equal Pay Pledge, Paradigm for Parity, and Catalyst CEO Champions for Change.
A member of our team sat down with Tamara Fields, Austin Office Managing Director of Accenture she discussed the reasoning behind Accenture’s transparency.
When this declaration was put out there, it’s pretty bold statement for a company to make. To publicly make it a declaration is a big deal. I think the reason Accenture did that is that they wanted to be more than talk. You heard me say earlier, I think everyone acknowledges that the conversation is out there. We’ve had a lot of conversation on inclusion, diversity. What we’re not seeing is change. Our HR lead Ellyn Shook, who’s in the phenomenal woman, very early on got out there and really focused on equal pay and something as she made an initiative for our company to make sure we were out there with equal pay.
It was very shocking that people think, what? What do you mean, what does that mean? I think in order for you to enact real change, you have to have real courage and you have to take risks. You have to put it out there and you have to be accountable. And that’s why she started publishing our metrics. People were like, what are you doing? Our competitors, author, some of our other tech firms, like, what? What are you doing? But that’s the challenge. And somebody has to lead the pack. I think we have led that pack and being, one of the first tech consulting firms to publish our numbers like that. And now to put this declaration out there. But what it says is, is we have a large number of women graduating from college, but we’re not seeing the same representation in the workforce and definitely in STEM fields and tech fields. And so by us putting that out there that says we recognize that there is parity in in in terms of population. So why wouldn’t there be parity in the workforce?
Gender balance and inequality has always been an issue that brought lots of conversations but lacked real action. Accenture is one of the companies leading the way by striving for gender parity.
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Featured Story
Accenture Sets Goal to Achieve Gender Balanced Workforce by 2025
More Great Resource
Uncovering the Gender Wage Gap
Connect with Tamara Fields here.
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