Another Successful Diversity Lab

Adding value to those business leaders who had made the journey to be with us at the PWN Global Gender Balanced Leadership Awards, we ran a 'morning after the celebrations' Diversity Lab on 12th October 2019, hosted in the beautiful offices of PWN Dublin partner, William Fry. An opportunity for PWN corporate partners and sponsors to roll their sleeves up and engage with their business counterparts across industries.

Facilitated by our Co-Presidents Carina Furlong and Sheila Gemin, the topic on the table was 'Thriving in the Digital Era - Digital as an Accelerator of gender Balanced Leaderhip'. The session opened with a presentation that shared information on:

• Business Impact of Digital
• Gender Equality in the field of Technology
• Strategies to create an equal level playing field

After which, delegates were invited to share their respective experiences and journeys. 

The conversation was rich and everybody in the session was able to contribute useful insights around how digital transformation is playing a role in their own organisations. Delegates discussed both challenges and opportunities, and there was one major consensus in the room, that there was a genuine lack of understanding in business regarding how fast the digital world is moving.

During the session we covered the definition of digital and digital transformation, the role women play in that area, and what the gender pay gap is. We paint a picture to illustrate why we need to be aware of AI and ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) and how the industry is investing in it.

The core of our story is the need for women in the design and development to be included in the innovation and creation of new technological solutions, or, we risk having biases perpetuated in every day products, like Siri and Alexa.

As always with our exclusive Diversity Lab sessions, we have already recieved a lot of positive feeback from many of our delegates around what true value is created when hearing from a broad range of indutries and sectors and their specific insights on digitisation. 

Senior leaders at the session from finance and business services sectors gave well considered views on where buisness is on this topic. PWN Global coprorate partner, INSEAD contributed a solid academic aspect to the discussion, and PWN Global corporate partner, Mercer was able to share some startling information from their ongoing research on 'When Women Thrive, Businesses Thrive'. Delegates from Mercer also invited others at the Diversity Lab to take part in their latest collection of data to complement what they have found already. You can join in the research before 1st November - read the article here to find out more. 

What is clear from everything that we have delivered during our long weekend in Dublin, is that there is a clear global appetite to keep the conversation going  on the topic of how the digital era is going to level the playing field for gender balanced leadership to thrive.

PWN Global created the Diversity Lab concept in 2016 as a way to connect our Coprorate Partners with other companies from different industries, in a safe space, to share the similar challenges they are facing. Through these exclusive, invite only sessions, delegates leverage great ideas and innovations in gender balance leadership to reinforce their  workforce of the future. We aim for delegates to leave the session with new insights, new solutions and new connections that will support them in engaging male colleagues and harnessing the digital era to advance gender balanced leadership in their organisations.  

Watch out for dates in 2020 that we will be publishing shortly.

Created by: Rebecca Fountain, Head of Marketing and Communications, PWN Global

Date: October 2019