We stand with women: #ChooseToChallenge this IWD

This year’s International Women’s Day is a little different.

The events of 2020 have turned the world upside down and in 2021, women are facing historic challenges driven by the pandemic where gender equality progress has been threatened by COVID-19, which disproportionately impacts women.

The pandemic has highlighted that pre-existing gender inequalities have led to women being more economically vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19 on the workplace. Research released by UN Women suggests the pandemic could put gender equality back by 25 years, as a result of women doing more domestic chores and family care.

Sadly, there is still an urgent need for the day: the gender pay gap still exists, female leaders are lacking, violence against women and girls persists on a global scale, and women fall behind men in terms of education and healthcare.

A recent PWC report stated that, in the UK, only 5% of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women, and women of colour across all industries hold only 3% of C-Suite positions.

#ChooseToChallenge: some of the Future Platforms team

At Future Platforms, we’re committed to ending gender imbalance in the workplace. But we don’t want to be one of those businesses who just talk about change; we want to make change happen:

• In the last 6 months, we’ve hired 21 new staff members of which 43% are female-identifying.
• 63% of our Project Management team and two-thirds of our Experience team are women.

But there is still a lot of work to do...

This International Women’s Day, we #ChooseToChallenge because from challenge comes change. We’re committed to calling out gender bias and inequality when we see it and we want to strongly reaffirm the steps we have taken to improve equality and diversity in our business and the wider technology landscape, including:

1. Implementing improved diversity-focused hiring policies and processes to ensure representation from a broad candidate base, while also continuing to remove unconscious bias from any decision-making processes.
2. Developing a best-in-class progression framework to advance women and minorities through the company at every level.
3. Finding new ways to support local schemes that promote women and minorities within the technology industry.
4. Furthering the diversity education of employees through diversity workshops, research, resources, and training.

Our commitment to equality and inclusion is embedded into the core of our values. As well as the steps outlined above, we offer staff mentoring, flexible working, and unconscious bias training to ensure every person is welcomed, supported, and able to succeed at Future Platforms.

We know we have more to do but we are committed to long-term change. We will continue to raise the standard for equality in the strategy, engineering, and experience industry.