What we're doing to #BreakTheBias

International Women’s Day (IWD) on Tuesday 8 March will turn the spotlight on women's achievements, raise awareness about women's equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity and fundraise for female-focused charities.

To mark the event, we’ll be running a series of panels and discussion sessions throughout the month to help raise awareness, educate, provoke thought and encourage discussion among our colleagues to help #BreakTheBias - the theme of this year’s IWD.

• Our ‘Celebrating Women in Leadership’ session will showcase some of our finest female leaders talking openly about their experiences as women in technology.
• We’ll explore the dangers of gender bias in design in a ‘Women & Design’ workshop hosted by our Product Design team. This will highlight gender bias in a world designed for men by taking a look at examples of designs across different sectors and industries.
• Menopause and our experiences as colleagues, people leaders and team members will be under the spotlight in ‘What’s menopause got to do with me?’ hosted by communications expert Mel Kettle.
• And we’ll be hosting a series of ‘Tell us what you think’ discussion sessions to hear everyone’s perspectives on gender equality in the workplace. We’ll also be sharing examples of how our colleagues are using the benefits and initiatives on offer at Iress, like our parental and starting school leave, flexible working policies and the recently introduced long weekends.

Committed to achieving gender diversity by 2030

Our People Partner, Claudette Llapitan, had this to say: 'Driven by a passion for breaking down barriers and the pursuit of inclusive diversity, our people have come together across functions and regions to deliver activities that celebrate women in leadership, diversity of thought and lived experience; empowering us all to talk about real issues that affect us and the people around us. There is much to do to #BreakTheBias but Iress continues to take action by introducing employee benefits that make our workplace more accessible to all our people and by committing to measurable objectives to attract, nurture and retain diverse talent.'

Those measurable objectives include actively targeting 40% female candidate representation for leadership roles, 50% female candidate representation for new graduate and apprentice roles and providing payment of retirement contributions on full salary for the duration of both paid and unpaid parental leave for up to 12 months. Additionally, Iress has joined other leading ASX-listed companies by publicly committing to the 40:40 Vision to achieve gender diversity by 2030.