Jamila Rizvi on how to make work “work” for women

Jamila Rizvi:

A lot of us need to look inwards, not just on gender, but on other questions as well and say, “Am I always proud of the behaviour I show at work? Not just what I do, but what I don't do and what I am willing to discard and what I am willing to continue doing because it's my job and what I am going to overlook because that person's senior or important? Um, I think the more men who are willing to call out sexism, to intervene in processes, um, to even be the person that says in the room, Hey, we haven't considered woman X for that particular promotion, should we really just be making an assumption about what she wants to do? Sometimes it can be as simple as that. It's about using the power that you have to advocate for people who have less power than you.

Damon:

The world of work right now is not a fair one.

Frameworks, economic policies, societal expectations and the distribution of labour, paid and unpaid, have been impacting women’s experience in the workplace for a long time and continue to this day. We do, however, have the ability to change that and my guest, Jamila Rizvi, has some ideas on the role you can play in making work, actually work for women.

Jamila is Deputy Managing Director of Future Women, where she supports governments and employer organisations working towards gender equality. She is also a best-selling author for adults and children, columnist, media commentator and fellow podcast host.

Today, she’s talking straight to us, for an extended interview that covers everything from the way language in performance reviews negatively impacts women’s chances of promotion to the scary ways AI is being coded with inbuilt biases. It’s important to note that while we will confront all the harsh realities of the modern workplace, this is still a conversation that is full of optimism.

Jamila and I hope that this episode will leave you feeling confident that a path to fairness exists, and arm you with the facts and research to support yourself and your coworkers as we all move towards a better world of work for women.

Let’s break down some of the main topics that Jamila and I cover.

We start with Jamila taking us on a history lesson about just how we got here, you’ll hear a story about a woman named Mina and how the rational decisions within the context of her very typical domestic relationship resulted in devastating economic and social consequences for her, but not her male partner, and there will also be a message for you to send to your CEO if you, like me, want to make work, actually work, for women.

Listeners of this show will know that I do my best to bring my lived experience and my vulnerability to every episode. I will acknowledge that I’m a straight white cis-gender male, so my lived experience is not directly related to a lot of the topics covered in this episode. What you will hear me mention though, is that the story of Mina hit really close to home for me. My mum spent three decades raising four boys. The youngest of my brothers only just recently graduated from High School. She spent half of that time as a single parent, who returned to the workplace and did everything she could to help all of us grow into the men that we are today.

I want to thank Jamila for this episode, and I’d also like to also recognize all of the Mina’s out there who’s story, just like my mums, is the reality for a lot of people. I do believe that we can all play a part in changing that reality.

All right, let’s head over to my conversation with Jamila Rizvi.

Damon:

Today on the Culture First podcast, I'm joined by Jamila Rizvi. Jamila is the Deputy Managing Director of Future Women, where she supports governments and employer organizations working towards gender equality. Jamila, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Jamila:

Oh, thanks for having me, Damon. And I want to start by acknowledging I'm coming to you today from Aboriginal land. I'm on Wurundjeri country, part of the Kulin Nation here in Ngaam or Melbourne. And want to pay respects to Elders past and present.

Damon:

Thank you so much. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Our listeners hopefully are familiar with your work and maybe they've caught your session at our Culture First virtual events where you spoke about this topic about how do we make work for women. And my aim for this conversation is to continue that topic. Let's talk about some of the research that you mentioned. We can look at the role that organizations and leaders are playing and hopefully leave the audience inspired about what they can do to create a better world of work. So how does that sound with you?

Jamila:

That sounds great. My favorite topics.

Damon:

All right, let's get into it. So I have a tradition on this show where the first question that I ask is one that I hope helps the audience learn more about you. But it also makes us rethink how we talk about ourselves in relation to our work. And sometimes this question can catch people off guard. But I actually know that you've thought a lot about this question because you wrote an article about it. So the question is that I typically ask is how do you describe your work to a curious 10 year old? But I know that you actually wrote an article about describing your work to your then seven-year-old son, so maybe you could share with the audience how that conversation went.

Jamila:

Yeah, look, it is a really complex one, right? Like my husband is a lawyer and I feel like that the complexities of that work are enormous. But at least talking to a small kid, his view is he knows daddy's work is about making sure doctors don't do the wrong thing and gets them in trouble if they do. You know, there's a, there's a simplistic version of it, but when you have more of a portfolio career like I do, it is really hard to explain to your kids what, what you do. And I think for a long time, my son thought I, you know, was upstairs in the office shouting into my computer and didn't really know much more about what I did than that. And now that he's a little bit older and as you say, to go to more of a 10 or 11 year old rather than a, than a seven year old. I do think he's starting to understand a little bit more about inequalities and a little bit more about gender. And that's a conversation that I've been trying to have with him for a really long time. I've been having it in really simple ways since he was born, I suppose. And certainly since he could speak and understand what I was saying. And it's a conversation that keeps going. And I think when it comes to the work that I do and conversations about gender equality, the main thing that I like to tell people, which is that this is not a conversation you have once. The number of younger women I meet who say, Oh, no, I've talked to my, you know, in this particular case, a male partner, and we've already decided we're going to do everything 50-50. And you're like, I mean, that's great. But how that figures out in practice, that's not a conversation you have once and you set and forget for the rest of your life. It's a conversation you have every day of your life, sometimes multiple times, because things keep shifting. So If I was sitting with a 10 or 11 year old today, I would say that I do a whole lot of different things that relate to storytelling and using storytelling to help people understand how gender shapes their lives and particularly how gender unfairly shapes their working lives. And as a result, the kind of life they're allowed to live outside of work, because work is how we earn an income.

Damon:

I feel like the 10 year old can at least grasp why that's an important thing to be thinking about even if the nuances of it might be a little bit over their head. But I think your point about making this an ongoing conversation is also probably pretty true in the workplace as well that this is not just a once a year webinar. This isn't a once a year performance conversation where we talk about how are these things working for a particular person and hope that these things are just going to. miraculously change because we've had a conversation. It's an ongoing conversation about everyday behaviors that are impacting women in the workplace. So before I get really into the weeds with some of this research about what we're seeing in the industry, one more maybe context question for the audience. And I'm not sure if I've mentioned this to you when we've hung out in person, but one thing we do share in common is that we both grew up in Canberra. And...

Jamila:

No, I think you have told me that before.

Damon:

Yeah, and it is a bit of an interesting place. So for those

Jamila:

Yeah.

Damon:

people listening in other parts of the world, you can, Canberra is the capital of Australia, which more often than not can sometimes confuse people who think it is Sydney, but maybe, um, I think it's a useful point to maybe discuss how to growing up in Canberra, shape you as a person and how you think about the world and the world of work.

Jamila:

Yeah, well, Canberra is a government town. When I was growing up there, it was about 300,000 odd people. So it's a small, very much a small city. And it is dominated by the fact that it is the home of the nation's parliament. And it's the home of all of the public servants that support the work of the nation's government. And what that means in practical terms is that every adult you meet, either works for the government, or works to support the people who work for the government. So they're either making the people who work for the government their coffee or fixing their cars or building their houses or whatever it might be. But everyone has that interaction and it's a town that very much I think is a middle class, generally well off but not uber wealthy place. It's a, I think a beautiful place to raise a family. Canberra is a really spread out city so there's a lot of bushland everywhere. wonderful schools and I think particularly outstanding public schools. It's a place that's really invested in public education which is something to be very proud of but it is a place where you do not escape politics and policy making. For me both my parents were public servants in that my mum was a teacher and my dad worked for various federal government departments through his life and I grew up seeing government as the primary way to make change. And that is not necessarily true, can be true, but it's not necessarily true. But in my household, they were the conversations that we had around the dinner table. They were conversations about decisions of ministers, of directions of elections, of how the public service would be implementing particular plans. And so I was really raised to see politics and government as the avenue to make things change or shift for the better. And I think that has been really beneficial for me in some ways because it's meant that I have always had a real respect for democracy and a respect for the parliament and what can be achieved and a real sense of possibility. But at the same time, I think for a lot of my early adult life, it meant that I didn't see the power of other institutions to create change. And that includes, you know, businesses and employer organizations who making enormous change that has a much bigger impact perhaps on an individual's day-to-day life but on less people as a whole. And certainly I think now having had more interaction with the not-for-profit space, with the higher education sector, with corporate Australia, I see all the different ways that we can make good change in the gender space. But I think, yeah, growing up in Canberra, you never go too far away from what's happening in the House of Reps.

Damon:

Yeah, yeah, it was my Dad worked for Telecom before it became Telstra and my Mum worked for ABARE. So it was very similar, kind of you're very connected to like different industries and yeah, it's I think from my perspective as well, I think a lot about structural change and the role that large institutions, whether it's public

Jamila:

Yeah.

Damon:

policy, government, or even, you know, corporate corporations can have. So we'll certainly discuss it at the end, the role that some of those institutions can play. And then Maybe my final sort of context setting question, we're gonna really talk about at a holistic level, women's experience in the workplace. Maybe for the audience, it might be interesting to kind of maybe share, maybe like. workplace that you've worked out where you thought this is actually really hard for me to perform well and feel like I can rise through the ranks and do good work and maybe an organization that you think really supported you and had an intentional culture and maybe some of the nuances and the differences between some of those experiences that you've had in your career today.

Jamila:

Yeah, I mean, I really want to like go back right to the beginning and tell you about being a 14 year old at Baker's Delight selling bacon and egg rolls, but

Damon:

Hehehe

Jamila:

I won't start there. My first full time job was working in politics and hence the Canberra factor. I went and worked for Kevin Rudd when he was Prime Minister starting in 2008. When I was still at university, I hadn't finished my degree, but this incredible opportunity came up and I... don't think it ever occurred to me that you wouldn't say yes. So I had a really tough time in that workplace, not because the work wasn't meaningful and important, but because I think I was still a kid who was still studying and trying to manage that while working incredible hours under enormous pressure. And one of... the hard things about that environment more broadly, not specifically about Rudd's Prime Minister's office, but about working in Parliament House at that time, was that it was a real blokey kind of culture. And women dominated roles that had the word assistant in the title, and also some media roles. And men dominated policy decision making positions, chiefs of staff, and of course, the members of parliament and ministers themselves. While there were some incredible women who were senior in that government, Julia Gillard, Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek, Nicola Roxon, there were these incredible women to look to, but at the same time, I think when you're 22 and you're just getting started, you don't put yourself in their league. They're sort of something that's happening and existing a long way away from where you are. And certainly, I think I experienced a degree of... sexism in that in that workplace, I certainly experienced sexual harassment in that workplace, but at the time I would not have called it that because it wouldn't have occurred to me that it was something that was not okay. It was something I didn't like but I don't think it occurred to me that there were rules that meant that it shouldn't be happening and there was no way to go. Like literally there was no way to go. There was no HR in Parliament House. There was no one you could go to make a complaint or express a concern other than your boss or your boss's boss. And often that was particularly fraught for a lot of the women I worked with. So that was a pretty stark introduction, I suppose, to full-time work. And I am assured by people who work there now that it's improved, but it's certainly not perfect, is it? I think we've all come to know over recent years here in Australia, for your international listeners, there's been very much a reckoning around sexual harassment and conduct in the workplace and sexual assault over the past few years after an alleged rape in Parliament House. So that was a rubbish example in terms of a better workplace. I mean, I can't really go past where I am now at Future Women. Future Women is an extraordinary place to work. It's been built by a woman and by a team of women to be a place where women and gender diverse people and a handful of men really flourish. And the benefits of being able to work flexibly, the benefits of being able to not have to make excuses or feel like you're letting people down because you have responsibilities outside of your paid work. a culture that supports women's connection to the workforce while they're on parental leave, that supports men to take parental leave, that very much invests in the careers of young people and talks to them about where they're going and their trajectory, as well as of course I think just the purpose of the work that we're doing because it's very much in the space. We are not only walking the talk but we're talking about this every day, literally every day, and recognising that we have, like everyone, still have a way to go because you don't do gender equality and say, oh, we fixed that this year, that's it. To the ongoing conversation point, it's something you have to keep being rigorous about.

Damon:

I'm a big fan of the organization and what it stands for and everyone I've met from the organization has always impressed me and it was amazing recently to be watching the Ashes a few weeks ago and seeing ads for future women

Jamila:

Yeah.

Damon:

on Channel 9 here in Australia so it's great to see that it's getting sort of that main stage presence as well in terms of that greater awareness. Probably for, I guess, the listeners, I wanted to maybe go all the way back to GDP and how that was created and what it left out in terms of how we think about value. And then I wanted to maybe, as a more recent example, talk about the impact that COVID had on women in the workplace in terms of, when we look at this as like the economics of women in the workplace. So I know you've got a story that maybe a lot of people aren't familiar with when it comes to the creation of GDP and what was... on the table that could have been included, but was discarded really unfortunately. So shall we start there?

Jamila:

Yeah, of course. So the concept, I suppose, of gross domestic product is a measurement, a way to measure national income and a way to add up all the value of the goods and services that are bought and sold in any given year in an economy was come up with about 80 years ago now. It was come up with by two male British economists. And they had a whole team working with them though on the idea and the history shows that there was one woman on the team, her name was Phyllis Dean, and she was a research assistant, so very junior on the team. And when they were coming up with the way that they would create this measurement, she said that if we were measuring gross domestic product, all of the productivity and the things that were produced, goods and services in an economy, in any one year, then we had to include things that were produced but weren't paid for. in cash, I suppose, we had to include unpaid labor. We had to include the work, often and mostly done by women in economies that doesn't necessarily attract a wage, but that if that woman did not do that work, someone would be paid a wage to do it because it was essential work. So at the time she pointed to a lot of developing nations. For example, she was looking at a number of African countries where she'd spent time. And she talked about the work of collecting firewood or hauling clean water, enormous distances. Now that is unquestionably labor. That is unquestionably labor that is necessary to keep that country functioning and working. It's labor that if that woman didn't do it, someone else would have to do it. And she argued, well, we have to count that when it comes to gross domestic product. The problem is that the two senior economists on the team had was that even though that work sounded important and relevant to them, they argued, well, how could we possibly measure it? How can you measure the work of looking after children that are your own children? How can you measure the work of labour that is not being tracked and not being calculated and doesn't have a balance sheet for us to point to because it's been paid? And how do we say what's that worth, what that is worth in the first place? Like, what economic value do we Do we put on that when the market isn't putting an economic value on that? And so they didn't, they just didn't count it. And you know, with the stroke of a pen, they created this, this new measurement, gross domestic product, which is, you know, now used everywhere by policymakers, by economists, by politicians to, to judge the health of an economy. We, we look to GDP growth so often. And by doing so we essentially eliminated from view. the work that is mostly done by women, that is this unpaid work. And we said that it wasn't relevant to the health of an economy when obviously it's not just relevant, relevant. It's absolutely fundamental. Unpaid work underpins everything that we do.

Damon:

And then I guess the reason that I wanted to bring that up in terms of the 80 plus years of how that'simpacted, how we think about value and the work that's required. If we then look at what COVID did in terms of where some of that work, caregiving, supporting people, you know, looking after children while still trying to do jobs and things like that. I guess the story didn't get much brighter over the last few years in terms of how that played out for women.

Jamila:

No, and in fact, there was a, if you look at COVID, I think you have this incredible microcosm, not to speak well of the pandemic and the lockdowns in any way, but you do have this incredible microcosm of how much women's unpaid work was holding up economies. Because when, if you lived in a city where the schools were closed and your work was something that then had to be done at home and childcare perhaps wasn't available. You suddenly had people all over the world who were trying to work and educate and care and clean from home. And all of this work that for some people who were financially well off could have been outsourced when it came to the care of children who were school age. Previously, they would have been out of the house for six hours, at least a day. Um, all of that fell in a very gendered way. And I think a lot of us like to think that we, um, have come an enormous long way in the 80 years since we came up with GDP and we have, right? Women have entered workplaces in historic numbers. We've done an enormously good job of getting women into paid work. what we've done an incredibly bad job of is getting men out of paid work. And I don't mean that in a sack the men kind of way. I mean that 76% of Australia's part-time workforce are women. Um, because women do the part-time work cause they're also doing the unpaid work. They're doing part-time paid work and part-time unpaid work. And even the women who are doing full-time paid work are doing part-time unpaid work, right? Uh, but we're not seeing men take that up in the same proportions. And I think the challenge from a sort of social equality perspective that will then have a flow through effect for economic equality is this question of, okay, my parents, for example, in the 80s, they could look after a family comfortably on one person's income. On a good salary, not an impressive crazy salary or anything like that, but a good public servant salary, they could raise a family on that money. Now, it's almost impossible to raise a family on a single income, unless you have a very high single income. So we're put in a position where for most families, if there's two parents in the household, they're both working in some degree. But what's happened is we haven't seen that same shift in men's non-participation. Because if men were able to do less paid work and spend more time in unpaid work - that would reduce the burden on women and would mean that we were all still doing the same amount of work that was getting done except we were sharing the pay for that work a little bit more fairly because we were recognizing work that previously perhaps we'd undervalued.

Damon:

You shared a story that I think really brings why we need to do something about this now to light at an in-person event that we were both at where you shared a story of Josh and Mina. And basically, if some of these things don't change, some of these structural things don't change, if we don't think about both the unpaid and paid distribution of labor for women, there's examples of stories where if you play it out over 20, 30, 40 years, the divide between a man's experience and a woman's experience in the workplace is just so stark. And when you shared this story, you know, for those at the event, you'll remember, you could basically hear a pin drop. I saw tears. I got quite emotional because it was very much tied to my mum's story and what has happened in her life. So I'll provide a link to everyone to sort of hear the full story because it really is powerful. But you are an incredible storyteller. And I think. Can you share maybe how you came up with that story and sort of the ramifications of stories like that and why it's so important to get people to sort of really feel that so we can make that change?

Jamila:

So there's an Australian writer and researcher called Jane Gilmore who originally did some work looking at income averages that show you how a woman and a man who perhaps grow up in very similar economic circumstances and conditions with similar prospects can end up in retirement in a totally different position. And you know, we all flip coins in our lives and we choose A or B and we continue to move through. And I think so often we assume that the reason that woman has ended up living off the aged pension and that man has ended up with a good amount of superannuation that will look after him for the rest of his life is because of the choices that they happen to make. And if we were talking just about two individuals, you could just say, okay, sure, they just made some choices and she made some bad ones and he made some good ones, right? But when that happens again and again and again, and it is systematically the case. to the point that we know that the fastest growing group of people who are homeless in this country are single women aged over 65, then there's something more going on. It's not about individual choices, it's about the system that is shaping those choices. So what I tried to do with this particular story was to build on some of that thinking and that work by Jane Gilmore and bring it to life in more of a more of a storytelling way so you could feel like you knew these people. And I talked about a young couple called Josh and Mina and talked about them going into a stereotypically university educated feminized profession and a stereotypically university educated masculinized profession and their progress through life as they make very average expected in inverted commas decisions about what to do with work and income as they have children. what happens while one keeps getting promoted because they're still in the workforce and one starts to stagnate because they're not. The implications of being part-time in the workforce in 2023, that mean that there are assumptions about your commitment, your priorities, how much work is what matters to you most, or if you have other things that are on your mind and therefore there's less investment in your training, in your advancement, less promotional opportunities offered. I follow the two of them through making and having conversations that Um, heterosexual Australian couples have every single day and they make logical decisions, like genuinely logical decisions in their minds about who should go back to work and who shouldn't and who stays home with kids and who does what because someone earns a little bit more than the other one. But over time, that gap between someone earning a little bit more than the other one grows and grows and grows. And. The outcome is that by the time that you get to a point of retirement, there is a real disparity between this originally very equal couples earning capacity, their income and what they've put away for their retirement. Now you add on top of that, the fact that a third of Australian couples get divorced and most of those couples are not going to end up in a court where assets are divided according to the law and the case law. you're going to have a more of an informal arrangement. And a lot of the times in those cases, women feel like it's not right for them to have access to as much as their partner has, because they didn't do the work. When really they were working the whole time, they were just doing this work that, according to the unwritten contract of marriage, this work that was unpaid, but was still a contribution. So. I think what I tried to do with that story is help people to understand it and see it in the eyes of people they know or themselves. See it through the lens as I know you did, Damon, through your mum's lens or through the lens of an auntie, a sister, a friend or through their own lens and go, this happens, this is not unusual, this is not happening at the margins. We are sending Australian women into poverty later in life really systematically and really quite deliberately. I think a lot of those women get there and think they did something wrong. And that's not the case.

Damon:

Yeah, it's even just like reflecting back on it. And there's so many, like my mom's one example but I'm sure everyone knows of someone who's sort of been in a similar situation where it's like when you look at how far the divide is between them and their partner, especially through divorce and you're like, there is no way that like that is representative of the life that they were trying to build together and the roles that they were playing in order to raise a family or if they didn't have kids the way that their paths played out and. I'm hoping for the rest of this conversation, we can focus on like the role that workplaces and managers and leaders can do to kind of make work, really work for women so we can make sure that it's not just that we can minimize how many of these stories are happening. And like you said, you know, get more women into leadership positions, into full-time high paying jobs where they're really, you know, economically being valued for the work that they do.

Jamila:

Yeah.

Damon:

Because even- My mum's example is like, she's permanent part-time. Her super is very diminished. You know, I'm the eldest of four boys. She's still working in an aged care facility, one of the hardest professions to kind of work in. And she, you know, I don't want to share too, I try to thread the needle between sharing too much about myself on this show, but it's hard. It's really hard. She's very much at breaking point, but she knows that she can't kind of not work and she doesn't know where else to find value, where she can kind of work and feel valued and do all the other things. So this is really real. And there's a lot of work that organizations need to do as well as individuals. And we'll definitely talk on the role of men a little bit later on. I wanted to maybe focus on two aspects of the workplace in terms of where there's these moments in time. And I wanna talk about I guess, performance reviews and then recruitment. So for recruitment to work really well, we need to make sure that women wanna be applying for these incredible roles that they've written in a way where it encourages them that then there's so many pieces of research out there that men apply for jobs that they think they've got the skills for and women will only apply for jobs if they feel like they're overqualified for them. And then the other side is the performance review process. So maybe if we look at the entry point for women into certain workplaces and then how performance impacts their world.

Jamila:

Yeah.

Damon:

Maybe if we start with recruitment, I guess, how do you see the recruitment process currently not serving, making work for women in the workplace?

Jamila:

Yeah, so I want to start by saying, I'm not trying to point fingers with this exercise. Like, culturally, we've all been brought up in a world that thinks about work as something that men do and that the structures that exist in and around work are developed from when it was only men being involved in the paid workforce. And So a lot of those biases still remain in the structures that exist. And a lot of those biases still remain in all of our heads. And so even with the best of intentions, each of us has biases that play out. And so the recruitment process, I mean, unless you're literally getting people to run a race and picking the one that came first and cross the finish line first, recruitment is not objective. You're it's deeply subjective and the nature of a recruitment process and the nature of what people are being asked to do and the nature of who is making the decision is going to impact that process. So the challenge to de-gender recruitment is going to look different in different organizations. But I think the first place that you need to start is just a recognition that we are all biased, not in ah you horrible person, how dare you be biased, Damon, but we are all biased. So how are we going to actively prevent that bias from affecting our decision making so that we make the best decisions for this organization and for the candidates that are applying. So I think one really good example in recruitment is language. A lot of the time the language in job advertisements, in selection criteria and even language that's used when you're chatting to someone in an interview setting will be unintentionally gender coded. So for example, there's a lot of research that shows male dominated industries, when they write a job advertisement, they're more likely to describe the candidate that they want as decisive or confident or we're looking for a strong leader or someone who can succeed in a competitive space, that kind of language. Now that doesn't necessarily sound masculine to the average person, but the research shows us that women are less likely to apply for those roles. because their unconscious mind reads those kinds of words as, oh, that's not a job for me. They might not be able to tell you why it's not a job for them or why they don't think they'd be right, but those words are setting off these messages that say, oh, that's not who you are, that's not what you're supposed to be. So small changes to the language that we use in job advertisements can make a really big difference. For example, I had a great conversation with... a man who went through one of the programs we run at Future Women, who is very senior in the defense department in Canberra, and he had some problems attracting women candidates for roles. And there was one particular role where they changed the word expert as a descriptor for a particular skill set and replaced it with specialist. Not: we're looking for an expert in XYZ, but we're looking for a specialist in XYZ. dramatic improvement in the number of women applicants. And it's the sort of thing where you sit there and you go, that's a bit silly, right? That's not like not solving sexism with some words. But if you're sitting, if you're putting a job advertisement out and you're getting 40 male applicants, you change one word and suddenly you're getting 30 male applicants and 10 women. That's a greater outcome. You've made a huge difference. You've significantly increased the chance that you're gonna make sure that a woman gets through that process and that's gonna shift the gender split in your organization. We know that when it comes to the interview stage, women are, if they do apply, are less likely to get to the interview stage than equally qualified men. Sometimes that can be because of artificial intelligence. AI is increasingly being used to screen applications in really big organizations, especially. AI is gender biased. If you ever used that app that was cool a few months ago, I think it was called Lensa. where you like, you put a few of your photos into it and it shot out all fake images of you. I tried to get my husband to do it, but he was like, I'm not putting my photos in that. So I did it with another one of my male friends. And the photos of me were all sort of sexy fairy vibes. And the photos of him were all like typical strong man. Like he was an astronaut and he was a fighter. And he was like, it's like, so if AI is doing that with imagery, it's doing that when it reads resumes. So- AI is reading those resumes in a gendered way, even when you think it's not. So I think the challenge here is about asking questions about your process and asking questions about your results. So if those results are consistently giving you outcomes that mean that you are only hiring men, you need to really interrogate the process and go, is the problem here the process? Is the problem the pipeline of graduates? Is the problem that we're not promoting from within? is the problem where we're advertising, how we're advertising, the language we're using in our advertising. I think we have to act a little bit like gender detectives and start to unravel what we're doing.

Damon:

And like you said, like it might sound like can one word really make a difference? But if it does change where it's like 25%, you know, difference in terms of how many women were applying for a role versus not actually thinking about how many multi-billion dollar programs have been created in order to change some of these things where it can sometimes be language, like look at the language that you're using. And I think, you know, because my... brain is part marketing, part HR, part storyteller. I'm always like, language is everything. Like how we talk about these things impacts how we feel and respond to it. And I think the other side of that is in the performance process, where if our performance process is incredibly not well-documented, there's no kind of consistent software used. If there is no consistency in the types of conversations that are being had, and people are getting different types of feedback, that can lead to, obviously, disengagement, people not understanding where they should... fit inside of the organization, do they see a future? But then, specifically for women, the types of feedback that they're getting in performance review processes can have a huge impact on whether they feel like they know what to do in order to kind of make those next steps. So when it comes to language, what advice do you have for leaders when it comes to creating fairer performance processes?

Jamila:

Yeah, I think the first one is have a process. You know, especially for smaller organizations and I'm sympathetic to that. I'm someone who's worked in a lot of startups and when you're there at the beginning and there's six of you, the performance process doesn't end to be a process. It's just sort of like, I just had to chat to my boss who's sitting next to me a lot of the time and things get haphazard when you're going from five to 25 to 125 quite quickly. Um, but I think to the extent that it is possible and feasible, the sooner that you can have an objective. clear process for performance review and giving staff that sense of, you know, to the extent that you can create salary bands that are made public to the extent that you can have an outlined process for roles rather than tapping someone on the shoulder internally, that there is always a process of advertising internally first, for example, so that even if you think you know the person who's right, you are still opening your eyes to the fact that there might be someone else that you haven't thought about. And then the single big one that we do see consistently again and again, coming through in research is that men in performance review processes tend to be given more action oriented feedback, which is that men tend to be told, Damon, you're doing a great job, love A, B and C, you've really impressed us with the last six months. What you would need to do to get to that next level mate is to change X. And so Damon walks out of his interview going, great, I know exactly what I have to do. to nail the next performance review and where I need to be and what I need to achieve in order to get my next job. I go into the same performance review for the same job and they say, oh, Jamila you're doing a really good job. We're really happy. You know, I think we could work on being a bit more confident and that would be good working on confidence. I just feel like there's a vibe, there's an aura where you're not really being as confident as we like but you're working really hard, we're really happy. But I am not on track for that next promotion. I haven't been given any specifics of what I need to do. Be more confident is the most unhelpful piece of advice ever. If I'm not doing something right, tell me what it is. If it is, hey, Jemilla, when you're presenting at the annual board meeting, the nerves get in the way, the nerves in your performance get in the way of what you're saying. Can we work on that to make sure that you're a better public presenter? That's useful. Like that is something I can walk out of that room and go, okay, I'm going to enrol in a course or talk to people in my life who are better at that. I'm going to practice in front of the mirror, whatever it is. I can do something with that. But I think often women are given very wooly and vague advice. And certainly the data says that that's true, that we tend to be given platitudes rather than action items. Um, so I think specifically focusing with all employees on actual things they can do. Um, I always keep that, that phrase in mind. Unclear is unkind and unclear niceness is still unkind because I want to be better at my job next time I come for a performance review. I don't want to be muddling along doing the same thing. I want that performance review to make me better and the only way you can be kind to your employee is to have that real clarity of what they need to do to improve.

Damon:

I think that's a very, very clear action for every manager listening to this when they're thinking about their conversations. And obviously, Coltramp has a whole bunch of research and products around this space with performance. But yeah, the language matters and telling someone to be confident and then working on their posture for six months versus telling someone they need to present at a meeting and they presented it is going to have a very different outcome. So it's about making sure that we are being very clear and making sure that there is equity in that process as well. you know, men aren't getting really actionable feedback over here and women, something else. So I wanted to maybe pull in at a certain moment in a career that I think is a bit of an inflection point. So sort of women who are mid career and in terms of the listeners of this show, I think this is really relevant because so this show, Culture First, most of our listeners are either in the US, the UK or Australia. It is 85% women. and it is 24 to 44. So you're talking people who've maybe studied or have had a few years of their career experience under their belt that maybe thinking about having a child or starting a family or like you said, all those examples when those little decisions end up having sort of big impacts about how they think about their career. What advice do you have for mid-career women? within that sort of bracket about the development opportunities they should be going after, how to think about their career and any advice you have in terms of navigating some of those changes in order 20 to 30 years later, having that same level of prosperity and success that we see that the men just don't have to even think about.

Jamila:

Yeah. That's a big one. I might focus first because the experiences are so different on women who have had or want to have children because the data is extremely different for women who choose not to have children. So starting with those who either want to or do have kids, your employer has a really important role to play navigating your departure from the workforce for a period of time around children. Now that period of time might be six weeks. That period of time might be six years or anything in between. But regardless, I think often we don't think about the role of our employer till we're ready to come back to work. And then we have a conversation and we go, I'm ready to come back to work. And women often hit a whole lot of obstacles at that point and come up against a lot of discrimination. So I would say to both employers and to women who are in that position, think about it early. this is the time to get your plan on. So from the moment you are comfortable telling your employer that you're pregnant, ask them to help you create a plan. If that's not something they do already, talk about how you're going to prepare the organization for your departure for a period of time. Talk about how your career is going to be impacted while you're away. Talk about how you can combat any potential risks during that period. negotiate what your period out of work is going to look like in terms of keeping in touch with the organization. And I'm not saying like work for free while you're on parental leave, please don't do that. I'm talking about negotiating, let's say, four half days paid a year for the year that you're away, where you come back to work, not to do a whole bunch of work, but maybe you come back for the company retreat day, or you come back for a big planning meeting, or a marketing discussion about brand language. That's a really big picture kind of moment. You know, future women, we just had our fifth birthday celebrations. And you, if you're on maternity leave, you have to, you have to come, we don't have to, but we like it, we like you to come. And I think that means that someone who's away, there isn't that sense of the workplace is over there changing and evolving, and I'm not part of it anymore. And for the workplace, there's not that out of sight, out of mind problem. I think that staying in touch connectivity is really important and you have to negotiate that in advance because once you've got a baby, you're gonna get really distracted because you’ve got so much other stuff going on. So we're not talking about a huge amount of work. We're not talking about a huge amount of time or hours, but just look at flexible ways that you can stay connected to that workplace. And then when you're talking about the actual return point, make sure you're having that conversation early. So... If you're aiming to return around 12 months, start having the conversation in earnest about what that's going to look like at nine months so that you can start to scope what it will be like to understand any changes to the nature of the work that you used to do that mean it'll be significantly different. Talk about what you need and what you, how your needs perhaps may have may have changed as you return. And then finally, despite all my advice about planning. I think the other thing you have to do is to plan to unplan, which is know that when you're moving in and out of the workforce around having children, what you want isn't always what you thought you were going to want. I have friends who had booked in two years maternity leave and came back six weeks going, that's not what I want to do. I'm coming back. And I've had friends who've done the opposite. So give yourself some grace and make sure your employer is ready to give you that same grace that you don't quite know yet what you're going to want. and what's going to be right for you. Um, I think it's important to know that you are entitled to that time and you're entitled to, um, have that job to return to. I think having good knowledge of your, what your rights are legally and not feeling like you have to be grateful that your employer is abiding by the law is really important.

Damon:

Thanks for watching!

Jamila:

So understand what's in your contract, understand what's required. under legislation so that you know what you're entitled to. And don't be afraid to make the ask for more and make the case for it, because you have made a contribution to that workplace. You will make a future contribution to that workplace. And I think the important thing for you to do is to just keep that consistently, keep that employer accountable, because while some are, some also can be a bit lax in that space. As a more general piece of advice, regardless of your movement in and out of the workforce around child rearing, and I should note that it is mostly women who move in and out of the workforce around any kind of caring, more likely to be out of the workforce caring for elderly parents, sibling with a disability, partner who's unwell, for example. So there are certainly other reasons that people move in and out of the workforce for periods of time. I don't want to, I don't think people should set themselves up to expect discrimination and disadvantage because I think that makes you angry, makes you frustrated, makes you scared and all of those emotions aren't going to be helpful for any kind of process. But one of the hardest things about absence from the workforce of any kind is silence breeds everyone being a little bit unsure about what's going on. And when we're unsure, we fill the silence and the space with all kinds of ideas about what people are thinking and doing. You can avoid that. that problem of employers assuming what the employee wants, an employee is assuming what the employer is doing or thinking by asking and by communicating. That communication during that period of time is so absolutely fundamental. So if you're not getting the proactive communication from your boss around any departure from the workforce, you have to insist on it. And I think if you're someone who is in a place of work and you're unsure what your trajectory is and you're unsure what the opportunities are for you and where you're going, That's another time to communicate. It was another time to ask questions. There are employers who maybe won't take that as well as we'd like them to. Well, I think that should weigh into your decision about whether you want to be with that employer, to be honest.

Damon:

I couldn't agree more like having those check-in points, making it part of the plan, like making it a conversation that you want to be part of. Yeah, you know, you want to hold the, like at a minimum, there's the legal aspect, but you also want to understand what type of an organization is this that you want to be part of and can you see that future and by having those conversations along the way, it might be, yeah, you might, might be like, you know what, this is not a place I would want to have a second or third child.

Jamila:

Yeah.

Damon:

and I want to go find a different type of employer as I navigate the rest of my career and think about those things. Was there anything in particular for people who I guess all career advice that you have for those mid career professionals that isn't tied to re-entering or leaving the workplace that you think has really stood out from your work?

Jamila:

Hmm. Um, I think there's a few things. Um, the first one I'm going to say is around the flexibility of being able to be out of the office. I'm always wary of giving advice in this space because it's so very much in flux at the moment. Um, I don't think we've sort of hit a bit of a new norm yet. Um, I do worry that being able to have more time out of the office while it's increased flexibility, that has been a real win for a lot of women. Um, I worry that if it's only women taking up that flexibility, that you lose that FaceTime in the office and that often that incidental FaceTime with your boss or your boss's boss or other people in senior management can become a disadvantage. So in the same way that I would give someone on parental leave the advice of keeping in touch, if you are someone who is no longer going into the office every day, I would try to make that possible now and then within your your, the confines of what's expected of you, even if you're only getting into the office once a fortnight, I think a little bit of FaceTime is going to be of assistance during that period. We run a whole lot of programs at Future Women that have sort of shown us a consistency of challenges that women face around that mid-career period and separate to the moving in the workforce around kids, the two things that come up again and again are confidence and perfectionism. Both of those are gendered too. Women are not inherently less confident than men. Women are made to feel less confident in workplaces. But that confidence question has a massive impact. So I think doing and taking steps to remind yourself of how good you are, before you're having key conversations with employers is really critical. For a lot of women, this sort of stuff manifests in ways you might not even think about it. Women are more likely to do... additional training after say TAFOL University that they might have done straight out of school, more likely to do a masters, more likely to do a micro-credential because it is an effort to get something on paper that says you're better because inherently you're worried you're maybe not. So I think that confidence work and taking the time to really feel comfortable with what you've achieved and what you can achieve in your career and that you are entitled to a pathway for achievement if you're performing for that organization. And that's very personal work, but I think that's worth doing. And I think one of the things I have noticed and certainly that managers and employers tell me a lot is that there can be some chronic perfectionism amongst that group, that in the efforts to deliver your best, you spend too much time trying to make it the best it can be. and you lose pace and you lose effectiveness in favor of achieving the most outstanding piece of work. But you know, 20 pieces of work that are extremely good versus one that is outstanding in the same period of time, most employers are going to pick the 20. So I think being able to balance some of those questions in your head again is important. And that may not sound like it's related to sexism, but it is because again, it's about those expectations that not only the world places on us, but the expectations that exist in your head. which tell you I have to do this, I have to behave like that. I have to do this in order to be liked, I have to do this in order to be well behaved. I have to do this in order to be nice because that's what's expected of me at work. I think being able to find a place where you can be comfortable and confident in the clarity and the importance of what you're doing and that it is good work. I think trying to make space for that, whether that's by talking to colleagues. Whether that's by having a personal board of your own of the people that you go to when you're having a low day or a day where you need advice or a day where you need a pep talk, knowing who the people are to go to for that. Um, having a reminder, a set of reminders for yourself of what you're good at. One thing I tell all women to do is do not go in asking for that pay rise or that promotion on the day that you felt frustrated and sad and you go in and you start saying, I want a promotion cause I feel like I should just get one and I should get paid more because I'm. want to be. Make sure you've got a folder on your desktop where every time you get a piece of praise or you have a big win, you just drop it in. You drop in the doc, you drop in the email and one day you're going to open that and go, it's quite a, it's quite a case to be made here, isn't there for a promotion?

Damon:

That's one of my favorite examples. A colleague of mine actually has been doing that. And she said that it's just a Google Doc. And every time she got praise from a customer when she was in customer facing meetings or really good feedback. And luckily now Coldroom has built tools to collect some of these things. But she was just doing it in a Google Doc for

Jamila:

Yeah, I love that.

Damon:

yeah, just a reminder. But also when it came to those things around feeling like, you know, that you can back yourself in those conversations. It's not just, I'm angry and I feel like I want more and I'm frustrated because like, I want more development, all of this. It's like coming from a place of, here's everything I've done, here's everything I'm doing, here's where I wanna kind of be, here's all the evidence. Like, can we have this conversation? Which is a much easier conversation to have with managers and leaders, so. We've been speaking broadly about, I guess. people who identify as women and their experience in the workplace. And I wanted to have a moment to discuss intersectionality and why it's so important for when we're thinking about how to make work for women. And because I guess I wanted to share a quote that I heard from you, if that's okay for me to read in your voice. I know that can be a weird thing to listen to. But your quote was, we always need to be looking for ways to identify the person, the group, the intersection, it was not being included and demand change because If you have that sense of inclusion, if you have that sense of possibility and joy and fun and being supported in that room, that means you've got some kind of power. And in my experience, when it comes to the type of culture where that inclusion can exist, unfortunately it's the people who are advocating, they're advocating for people who aren't typically included. So it's a woman advocating for a woman, it's a person of color advocating for a person of color. falls upon the people who want to be part of that change and see some of that benefit. Has that been your experience as well when you think about how some of these programs and experiences are playing out in terms of the intersectional experience of women in the workplace?

Jamila:

Yeah, absolutely. And I suspect that would be true for most people who work in this space. I do think it's a fine balance, right? Because there is a balance between allowing the voices of people with lived experience to come to the fore so that you don't have a whole bunch of white people advocating for what First Nations people need in a workplace. That's not where we want to get to. But what we really want. is a whole lot of white people with an organization supporting the advocacy of First Nations people and backing it in as best they can. And I think in this space, a lot of the time people just get scared that they may have the best of intentions, but they're not quite sure how, what they're supposed to do with those intentions. One example that comes up again and again is men and International Women's Day. The number of men who say, what am I supposed to do on International Women's Day? Like, should I go to the lunch thing that we have at work? And if I go, do I ask a question or do I just shut up? Like, what am I supposed to do? And they get so wrapped up in knots that they do absolutely nothing. And then you've got all these women having conversations in rooms of women saying, I wish there was a man in this room and then we could have some real change. Right.

Damon:

And they're all sitting at their desks frozen in this fear because of like, they're not sure what they’re supposed to do and they don't want to do the wrong thing.

Jamila:

So I genuinely empathize with that, that intention of wanting to do the right thing, but not wanting to, to do it in the wrong way, let's say. Um, so I think there's a few things that need to happen here. One is that, um, those of us who experience some kind of marginalization or, or live with an intersectional, intersectional challenge need to be willing and open to take the support, um, and the backing and the comradery of those who. don't have that lived experience, but want to understand and want to help. I think that's important. Um, but at the same time, I think that if you have interactions at work where you see consistently that an individual or a group of people do not have access in the same way, and you have the power or the possibility or the opportunity to advocate, even if that's not what's happened to you. use it like oh my gosh I cannot tell you how many rooms I've spent my life in being the one who goes oh god I'm the one that has to put up my hand and explain why this is sexist now I would love it if someone else did it I'd love it if one of the blokes put up their hands and said hey no um and you can start in really small ways I think if you're someone who feels uncomfortable doing that publicly you can do it quietly so if Damon and I have walked out of a room and I've just made a series of points about My experience as a woman who lives with disabilities, for example, if all you do is come up afterwards and say, that was really well said, thank you for saying that. I mean, even that is a reminder of that was powerful. You're doing the right thing. People are noticing people are going to try and make change. I think we can do things in small ways as well as big ones. In terms of that idea of belonging, there's a Russian now Russian American. author, they no longer can live in Russia called Masha Gessen. And, um, I heard them say at an event once that when they're at a party, and if they're in one of those rooms where you get that fuzzy, happy, buzzy feeling of like, I belong, these are my people. This is like one of those nights I'm with my people. They always pause and go, who doesn't get to feel like that in this room? Who's not here and who would not feel comfortable here? Um, and that's something I think a lot of us. we're not trying to do the wrong thing. We just didn't think about it. We just didn't occur to us because it's not something that is a challenge for us or difficult for us or hard for us or a threat to us. And I think if we, I think that is a practice and I think that's something you get better at. And the more you force your brain to go to the possibilities of, well, what would this experience be like for that person? And what would this experience be like for this other person? And if you can use people in your own life as your proxy, I think people who you were already invested in and who you really care about, that's going to help you care about however many nameless faceless people who have had a similar experience to them.

Damon:

I love that as a really real, like visceral example of like, think about the people in your life and all the different ways that make them who they are and what would it look like for the world of work to be incredible for them?

Jamila:

Yeah, absolutely

Damon:

You know, what needs to be true, whether it's, you know, like my father's in a wheelchair and has a disability and like, I think so much more about inclusion from that lens because of that experience. And that's something that I can bring up in every room, every meeting. And if we all think about the ways that the entire world is intersectional, then it makes for a more inclusive conversation. And like you said, whether it's starting with acknowledgement all the way down to being the voice and being that advocate. And then I kind of want to tie it into this, I guess, subject that I think men are trying to, I guess, dodge because of some of the things that are happening right now. And it's the role that men need to kind of play in terms of being better advocates for women. I... I saw Tarana Burke speak at who's one of the sort of founders of the Me Too movement at South by Southwest earlier this year. As you mentioned, especially in Australian politics, we're seeing sort of the public cases of sexual assault in the workplace and far too many examples of workplaces where it's frankly not safe for women. Men do need to play a role in both changing that from I guess the ways that the workplace isn't working. They also need to be like mentoring and supporting women and taking them on a journey. to help show them what is possible and open those doors and have those conversations. And I know I've heard you say that if men don't mentor women because of fear of cancel culture or the conversations that are happening, then when you look at the current makeup of even in Australia, the amount of senior leaders who are men, if those men stop mentoring women, we're in a huge problem. So if someone is listening to this and they want to send it to a man in their life or if you are a man who's listening is like, I want to play a better role in some of those things around that fear is holding me back. Do you have advice or stories that you could share?

Jamila:

Yeah. I mean, firstly, this cannot be the job of women. Like it can't, it can't be. You can't, we can't leave it to women only to fix a problem that is about how power is held and how power is executed. Um, I, I feel like there is a conversation that has to happen where men are invited to be part of this change and where. women can trust that men are increasingly going to take up that invitation and do something with it. It can't be taken up by men, I think, to put themselves at the forefront or to make themselves the spokesperson or make themselves the point of a conversation about gender. I think it has to be about focus. But for me... If we start from the position that gender inequality is bad for everyone and benefits no one, it just harms people in different ways. So for men, that harm doesn't come in the workplace. In fact, in the workplace, there's an advantage that comes from gender inequality. But I do think that harm comes in other places. I do think that harm comes with mental health and well-being. I do think that harm comes with breadwinner, extraordinary breadwinner pressure. and provider pressure. I think it comes with a lack of time and space being allowed to spend that with particularly children, but with anyone that you're caring for. I think we all have men in our lives who are in their 70s or 80s who talk about the fact that they are spending more time with their grandchildren than they ever did with their own children. And That is an absolute tragedy to me. Um, and I think we can't have these two conversations separately. We need to be able to talk about the fact that for women to advance and for women to flourish and for women to claim their fair share of leadership positions in this country, then that comes at a cost of men in leadership positions, that there is a cost to men in leadership positions because power is finite, but that cost also is an advantage and an opportunity at home because it means stronger relationships with the people you love. It means more time with people who deserve that face time. It means more time to provide unpaid care for people that matter to you and it means a life that has greater balance and greater happiness within it. I don't think there are many people who at their funerals someone stands up and goes, oh my god, Damon, he worked all the time, like so hard and we loved him because he was so good at his work. Like, you know, the people who love me, like they're proud of me, they're good, glad you're doing good work, but they don't, they would love me anyway, I think, if I was doing something else or nothing at all. Um, uh, our relationships are bigger than who we are in a working context. So in terms of that's a very, that's me on my soapbox, but in terms of practical things that we can do, um, as organizations, we can make it possible. and not just possible, but we can encourage men to take parental leave. We can encourage and normalize men taking carers leave. And we can be very cautious about how that starts to shift our view of the commitment of those men to their work and their promotability and their ambition. The fact that I mentioned before, I live with disabilities, the fact that my husband takes well more than his extent of carers leave every year because of needing to support me and support our family. says nothing about his commitment to work. His commitment to work is enormous, but his work's commitment to him is to him as a whole person who has other responsibilities. So I think we need to create conditions that support men to be carers. I think as you mentioned earlier, we need to be absolutely vigilant about the idea that advice, mentorship, sponsorship and support of women should only come from other women. That is absolutely not the case. All organizations should be looking at ways that they can support. greater gender equality in that organization. That is everyone's responsibility, to an absolute degree. And certainly, I think for men is calling out bad behavior. You know, the behavior that you walk past, the standard of the behavior you walk past is the standard that you accept. And I think for too long, we have pointed fingers at perpetrators and not at bystanders. And I think a lot of us need to look inwards, not just on gender, but on other questions as well and say, Am I always proud of the behavior I show at work? Not just what I do, but what I don't do and what I am willing to discard and what I am willing to continue doing because it's my job and what I am going to overlook because that person's senior or important. Um, I think the more men who are willing to call out sexism, to intervene in processes, um, to even be the person that says in the room, Hey, we haven't considered woman X for that particular promotion, should we really just be making an assumption about what she wants to do? Sometimes it can be as simple as that. It's about using the power that you have to advocate for people who have less power than you do.

Damon:

It's very powerful. I'm very conscious of time that we've only got up to the final minute that we've booked here. I've just got the one final question about rounding this out about, but I just wanted to make sure that you're okay if we...

Damon:

Okay. Awesome. Okay. As we bring this conversation to a close, I guess one of the ways that we can change the world of work and make the world of work better for women is by, like you said, sharing these examples, these actionable tips. If someone's listening to this and they want to send this episode to their CEO saying, we want change. We want to create, you know, we want them to make work for women. and you Jamila get to write a little memo that's attached to this email that goes off to the CEO, what would you like that message to be?

Jamila:

Oh my gosh, um, what am I going to, I mean, how long's my memo? Is it a big piece of paper that I get to work with. And I would, I would, and always would start with safety first. Um, and I would say that every organisation, including this hypothetical one needs to stop thinking about sexual harassment and in the workplace as a HR issue. and start thinking about sexual harassment as an occupational health and safety issue. If your employees are not safe at work, that is not about interpersonal relationships and that person's experience of being your employee, that is about them being safe at work. And if you think about the extraordinary amount of money that is spent in this country by building and construction companies, mining companies, for example, on making sure their employees are safe while doing risky work. Imagine if we took that same lens and that same urgency and adamancy around safety to ensuring that women were free of sexual harassment and discrimination and victimisation in workplaces. So my first point would be, think about how you're keeping people safe from sexual harassment. Make training mandatory for staff, make sure there is a confidential, clear complaints mechanism for people to follow. Explore the provision of paid and domestic violence, paid domestic and family violence leave, and provide training for frontline responders to sexual harassment in workplaces because often it is not HR who hears it first. It is an ordinary line manager who does not know what to do. I would be looking at addressing your pay gaps. Don't tell me you don't have one because the chances are you do. It is illegal to pay different people different amounts of money for the same work because of their gender. start there, start with your audit and rectify unequal pay. I'd then be looking at broader company-wide pay gaps. Why is it that the pay gap exists in your organization and most organizations have them? The WUGIA data shows us that different industries have different degrees of a pay gap, but all industries experience them. I talked a little bit earlier about transparency, transparency of pay gap data, transparency of salary bands. and a review of discretionary payments. Often pay gaps increase because of discretionary payments, bonuses, superannuation, gifts, that kind of thing. I'd be looking at how you can be more explicitly fair about that. We've talked a little bit about gender and language in promotion and recruitment. So I won't go into that further, but I would make sure you're prioritizing that. And then finally, I would be looking at work-life balance and... the idea of how that is modeled, how that is prioritized and how that is accepted. How do you create an acceptance of the very diverse and individual lives your employees lead? And I'm not talking about the diversity of just those employees. And I'm not talking about diversity meaning that you've diversified your marketing department to make sure the glossy brochure looks diverse. I'm talking about recruiting, retaining and promoting diverse employees and then supporting them to be able to attain work life balance in a way that is meaningful and real. And that means senior leaders in the organization demonstrating and modeling that balance, creating informal opportunities to have conversations with women and with various minorities and people who face disadvantage at work, especially those who don't work full time in the physical office. Avoid promoting presenteeism. Try to make sure that your office culture is inclusive at home as well as at work. And when you give feedback, ask for feedback about how you give it. I think so often we always think we're giving great, helpful, useful feedback. And too often, employees, particularly women who face some kind of barrier or disadvantage, don't have the opportunity to say, this doesn't work for me. This isn't, this isn't helping me. Happy to go on with my memo, but that feels like a good start.

Damon:

I think it's a very powerful call to action and we might need to type it up and add it into the show notes on our podcast webpage and we can say here's Jamila's email that you should be sending to your CEO about how to make work for women. So I just want to thank you for your time, for your storytelling, you're one of the most I think powerful storytellers in terms of the way that I've seen the way you use data, real human experiences, but also like... direct to the point actions about what can get done and balancing all those things to make people feel something, to make people understand where this is coming from and also what's possible and what we need to do to change. I think it's an incredibly powerful model. Seeing you tell these stories has always been, I've learned so much from you from that perspective, let alone what I want to do in terms of creating a better world of work. for the women I know and the women that I work with. So I just want to say thank you so much for everything that you've done and for sharing your story and your time and expertise on the Culture First podcast today.

Jamila:

Oh, thanks so much, Damon. Um, and that's an incredibly generous thing to say. And it's always a pleasure working with people and organizations who share a commitment on this stuff and to anyone who's listening, um, good luck. Good luck with sending the, the email. Good luck with sending the memo and good luck with supporting the people around you.

Damon:

Thank you to Jamila for joining me for what was an incredible episode of the Culture First Podcast.

If you wanted actionable takeaways to make work work for women, then Jamila delivered.

I left this conversation full of energy and enthusiasm to make real change.

So what was the aha moment for you? Here a few that stood out to me:

• The power of tracking your wins
• How to structure maternity leave programs and why communicating before, during and after your time away from the workplace is critical
• Why men need to and should want to take on more unpaid labor
• To the history lesson on the creation of the policies that are still used everyday that have real consequences on the economic makeup of societies.

At the end of each episode I provide an actionable takeaway for listeners who want to create a better world of work. More recently I’ve been trying to make them behaviour focused to help you as an individual. Today, I’m suggesting a new path.

Jamila talked about the way men can use the power they have to advocate for people who have less power than they do. Here’s one way you can do that, starting today.

If you identify as a male and you’re listening to this episode, I want you to send this episode link and the memo from Jamila to five of your colleagues. I also want you to start a conversation about what you heard in this episode. And when you do, I want you to think about a young woman who hasn’t entered the workplace yet.

Maybe it’s your daughter. Your niece. Your friend's child. Think about the world of work you want them to experience. The actions you take today can help to create more culture first workplaces for them to join in the future.

For anyone else who’s listening who wants to take action on the ideas in this episode, then I have a couple of more ideas.

One suggestion that I have would be to utilize your ERGs, employee resource groups, and use this episode as a topic of discussion at an upcoming meeting. If you want to learn more about the importance of ERGs and how to start one, search Culture Amp ERG into google and you’ll find a blog post to learn more.

If you don’t have ERGs then you could use cross functional leadership teams, I suggest this as they have both the power as well as the context for how decisions are made within an organization. Share this episode with those leaders and ask them what stood out to them and do they have ideas on how to take action within their teams.

One thing that Culture Amp, Jamila and myself love is feedback. So we want to know how the memo landed at your organization.

This is your invitation to reach out to Jamila and myself on LinkedIn or Instagram and tell us about the conversations that took place.

I’ve been your host Damon Klotz and the Culture First Podcast is brought to you by the team here at Culture Amp, the worlds leading employee experience platform. Learn more about Culture Amp by heading to www.cultureamp.com

We believe in creating a better world of work, If that’s important to you too, please subscribe and leave us a review to make sure you don’t miss an episode as we build a community together where we share stories to inspire us all to create a better world of work.