As a newly appointed CEO who comes from a long-standing family business background, I feel I have the opportunity to drive change through my business and through professional services as a whole, particularly in the accounting industry. Being in the infancy of my journey as a CEO, I felt the need to be aligned with experienced CEO’s who share a common interest in driving purposeful change and as a result I elected to join your organisation.

I feel it is important for CEOs to drive this change as we are in an ever-evolving journey through business and being adaptive is critical to survival. I believe that the development of business that is not adaptive to change will rapidly escalate the redundancy of the business (or us as CEO’s).
As a business, we have an equal 50/50 split of males and females, and this is not something we have ever explicitly set out to achieve. I believe a CEO should not ‘drive’ to create gender equality, it should be an outcome of providing all employees and prospective candidates an equal opportunity. Our business has a practice in Wangara that is a 100% female workforce, from the administrative role to the principal. Again, this is not something we set out to ‘establish’ or ‘drive’ it was purely the outcome of giving our employees a fair opportunity, regardless of their gender.

We have recently undertaken an internal survey to better understand the perspective of our people on Gender Equality and I am proud in providing the following insightful statistics:

1. 90% of our staff feel their immediate manager genuinely support gender equality.
2. 88% of our staff believe gender-based harassment is not tolerated.
3. 88% of our staff believe women and men have equal access to training and development.
4. 80% of our staff feel women and men have the same change for promotion.

It is evident that our business culture promotes equal opportunity and I’m proud to be leading such an adaptive organisation. Our business will continue to strive to provide equal opportunity and provide a flexible working environment to accommodate the succession of our people.
As a CEO who is driven by purpose, I am a strong believer in driving change from the top. I have developed the following ideas on how I intend to continue driving gender equity now and into the future:

1. Embrace the use of podcasts and other forms of social media platforms that are targeted towards women in business and the promotion of women to establish businesses.

2. Adopt ‘best in practice’ policies that drive gender equality and aspire to create a business that is ‘promoted’ for gender equality.

3. Aid our people by incentivising annual professional development to associations that promote women in business.

4. Continue to maintain a 50/50 split of males and females.

Notwithstanding the organisation’s efforts to date, I recognise that I need to further develop my learning in gender equality and have made a considered investment by joining CEOs for Gender Equity. As a CEO, I am making the commitment to drive change that I wish to see in this world.