My passion for gender equity has been borne out of a shift in my perspective around male privilege and a clear recognition of the ongoing challenges women and girls continue to face in our workplaces and broader community. I have been fortunate to experience life with some amazing women, my wife and daughter included, who have been willing to help me learn and educate myself, make mistakes but get better. The commitment to get it right in our workplace has to start with me, the behaviours I exhibit and the actions I take – it must be a place where everyone has an equal opportunity to be successful.

Put simply, it’s just the right thing to do.

I’m proud to be a member of CEOs for Gender Equity but as one individual the task of real change is too big - I can’t do it alone. We need the combined voice and actions of all CEOs to really change our work environments and practices to become as inclusive and equitable as possible such that it has an impact on all our people and our communities. We have to lead from the front, we have to set the aspiration, we must strive to change what needs to be changed, we have to have an impact - together.

An inclusive environment allows everyone to bring who they are to the workplace – when you create that workplace with diversity of thinking, perspectives, ideas it has a huge impact on our creativity, innovation and the solutions we come up with to help our businesses, our clients or customers and our communities solve some of the most complex problems.

Deloitte has done a really good job over many years to drive an equitable and inclusive environment through our Inspiring Women Program, Deloitte Dads, All in Allies, Making work work for Families just to name a few initiatives. My first step was to review and assess how these were being implemented locally for our team here in Perth – was there anything I needed to change/tailor to have the maximum impact. I reviewed my leadership teams with a strong focus on diversity of skills, experience, thinking – that meant some adjustments to bring more gender balance into those teams.

We are proud to be only 1 of 2 organisations in Australia to have held the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGES) citation for 22 years and we have now achieved a better balance on our Board and Executive leadership team with 40% and 42% respectively, represented by women.

We’ve seen 22 years of our flagship Inspiring Women program with 67% of those who completed the program in 2022 promoted within 12 months.

We’ve introduced new dashboards and Business Unit health checks to provide greater visibility and deep dive into issues and aspects that may be holding us back from achieving greater equity including gender pay equity.
We are currently looking at the diversity of partners and team members we have serving our key clients – traditionally these roles have been dominated by men. We have seen that when we get this balance to a similar number of men and women we deliver better results – not just for the clients but for our business also. The teams bring a much broader perspective to the challenges that have to be addressed which often results in risks being mitigated that weren’t even identified previously.

Our business is complex but ultimately focussed on two key things – developing people and serving clients – my focus is to ensure that each person’s contribution is considered and that the team, group or initiative has the appropriate balance to achieve the best possible outcomes.