Business in Heels CEO Lisa Sweeney initiated the Recalibrate Gender Equity Awards with one purpose in mind: to highlight the good work being done by organisations and individuals to promote gender equity in business and the workplace. She speaks with Matt Hewson.
Geelong businesswoman Lisa Sweeney believes that by shining a light on the practical and effective actions of businesses and their employees the awards will inform and inspire more people to be a force for change.
“A big part of the purpose of the awards is to find out what good looks like and get people talking about what they’re doing that is making a difference,” Ms Sweeney said.
“Women supporting women can only go so far. Gender equality is a community and society issue, so we’ve got to have road maps for everyone.
“Lots of organisations are doing really good things, so we thought these awards would be a great way to find out what they’re doing.”
Having spent a long time working in corporate buying, Ms Sweeney has extensive experience with working in large organisations, often overseas.
She said those experiences had helped form an awareness of the difficulties that many women face in the workplace.
“Probably the most pivotal moment for me was when I was in China and I learnt about the one child policy and how it impacted parents there,” she said.
“Parents were willingly abandoning girl children because they didn’t believe girls could earn enough to keep them in their retirement. It had never occurred to me before that women couldn’t earn as much.
“So after that I became much more aware of the problem, and by the time I was ready to leave corporate I knew I wanted to work on making sure women were more empowered.”
The Recalibrate awards, which will be held in Melbourne at Crown on Wednesday, November 16, will feature eight different awards, four each for organisations and individuals, which Sweeney believes is important to broaden people’s ideas on who can make a difference.
“The individual awards allow us to look at the problem through a different lens,” she said.
“Often you hear, what’s the CEO doing? But we’re also interested in what an employee can do, what middle or senior management can do.
“We’re discovering some really fabulous stories, it’s really exciting to be getting them out there.”
Ms Sweeney said that many people, especially men, often weren’t sure how to be proactive in the workplace or how to respond when faced with obvious gender inequality.
“I know at the moment some men feel uncomfortable about even having conversations around this because they don’t know what the right line is to take,” she said.
“People need a road map. What does good look like, what does great behaviour look like?
“A lot of organisations now are doing training around bystander intervention, so if you witness bad behaviour you’re armed with how to say something. Often when something happens everyone’s just too shocked to know how to react.
“If people have training they know they can say, hey, that’s not in line with our values, you should reframe or retract that. It’s about not making the victim the only person responsible for calling out bad behaviour.”
Ms Sweeney said the barriers women face in business and the workplace were detrimental not only to them, but to society and the economy in general.
“There’s proof at all levels that having more women in the workforce, more women involved in decision-making, better representation, that companies make better decisions and are more profitable,” she said.
“If you talk to any employer around Australia, they’re crying out to get more employees, but they just can’t seem to find qualified ones.”
“At the moment in Victoria there is something like 27,000 women that would like to be employed, but for reasons like childcare it’s cheaper for them to stay at home and mind the children.”
Ms Sweeney said removing such barriers to employment would allow Australian employers to access the rich resource of highly educated, highly skilled women that was currently being under-utilised, and the Recalibrate awards were helping Business in Heels uncover organisations that are doing just that.
“Cotton On in Geelong have just launched a crèche for their head office, which is a very cool way for them to enable their team members to feel more comfortable working longer hours,” she said.
“Coulter Legal has also got one of the first part-time female partners, which has been a real no-go zone for the legal industry.
“And we’ve got companies like GMHBA that are encouraging job share even at the executive level, which is a really great way to get more women back into the workforce.”
Ms Sweeney said her work was a constant source of satisfaction, but there was still a long way to go in the fight for gender equality.
“We work with women every day to help them get the confidence to go for pay rises or push for promotion and get into the careers they want to have,” she said.
“We help businesses scale up and become more profitable. So we all love the work we do on that side.
“There are a lot of organisations geared up for this, but unless we address this as a community it’s going to be very hard.
“We’re not about women’s equality at the expense of me, we’re just about everyone being equal, people being equal and having a level playing field.”
Nominations for the Recalibrate Gender Equity Awards are open until Thursday, September 1.
