Get on with it!

The theme of this year’s IWD is ‘Accelerate Action’.

They are calling on everyone, every gender, corporation or individual, to do their bit to accelerate the pace of change.

I am trying to be positive, I really am. But what frightens me is the apparent speed with which organisations have judged the new mood in the US and leapt to cancel their DEI programmes.

The pros and cons of these are another debate. What alarms me is the ease with which they were discarded. Does this not suggest that they were only ever PR-friendly initiatives designed to ride the wave of the perceived public opinion?

This is the same total change of heart that saw BP announce a ‘fundamental reset’ of their policy to reduce oil and gas output to one aligned to ‘Drill, baby drill’. An impressive piece of accelerated action.

It seems to me to be quite staggering how quickly we can take action when we want to or perceive it to be in our interest to do so. It is also interesting how if you have the power, you can impose your will and, in this context, how equality would appear to be no more than a gift on the end of a piece of string - it can be tugged away just as easily as it’s dangled.

So then, why is it still forecast to be 2158, five generations of women away, before the World Economic Forum expects the Gender Pay Gap to be closed. Take that in, 5 generations of women before our great, great, great granddaughters can expect to be paid the same as their male counterparts.

Happy IWD.