As the General Manager of PTG Consulting, it’s important to me to create a work environment that is inclusive. I want to be supportive of, and benefit from, diversity of thought. Diversity takes many forms, and for an engineering and scientific consultancy, gender diversity is high on the priority list because our industry is historically predominantly male. The research shows that we can be more successful and impactful as a company and as an industry if we can address this disparity. In focusing on gender equity, I believe that we will by extension make our workplace more inclusive for people from diverse backgrounds as well.

Gender equity is a societal issue. While we don’t have control over all the variables that contribute to the issue, business and government leaders do have a lot of weight and influence to make change. And, we set the tone from the top. By forming a united front, we can re-set expectations and shape the future that we want to see. CEOs for Gender Equity is a great way to share ideas, inspiration, and innovation and above all put in place tangible actions around this challenge.

Our first step was to identify that this was an area where we wanted to do better. We are a small business, so we don’t have the deep pockets of some other organisations, which initially felt like a limiting factor in terms of the benefits we could offer. However, we were determined that this would not prevent us from creating a workplace where people of all genders feel welcome, supported, and valued. We realised that it was our culture, as well as our benefits, that would be the defining characteristic.

In the last year we have made great progress in the gender equity space. This includes the development and implementation of a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Policy, Flexibility Policy (Flex38) and Parental Leave Policy, as well as lodging our first annual public report with WGEA, and increasing the diversity of our executive leadership team.

PTG Consulting is on a path of strategic growth; a key enabler of our success will be the maintenance of our culture of inclusion. It is with this in mind that we will continue to focus on increasing the percentage of women in our business; but even more importantly, to implement initiatives that will encourage gender equity both within our business and more broadly in our society. Specifically, we are strongly promoting and encouraging the uptake of our new Flex38 policy.

We have reviewed our WGEA reports and have objectives in place against a number of the Gender Equality Indicators to enable us to make improvements year on year, and we are investigating the possibility of extending our parental leave policy to include secondary carers leave and then over time, enabling shared care. We have recently reviewed our job adverts to ensure we use inclusive language and are also in discussions about how we can limit bias during the selection process through the anonymisation of resumes.