We Won’t Have Workplace Equality For Another 217 Years — Unless This Happens

According to the World Economic Forum, at our current pace it will take 217 years for women to achieve parity in the workplace.

Across America, corporate executives and diversity leaders spend billions of corporate dollars on programs, training, and initiatives to drive gender diversity. Seemingly, the first and most prominent practice that companies engage is building and funding women’s employee resource groups (ERG’s).

These groups range dramatically in their effectiveness and their ability to drive change. Some boast membership in the tens of thousands, with executive sponsorship, full-time leaders, and and extensive governance structures. Some are ad hoc, run by volunteers that meet infrequently. Some have helped make changes to parental leave policies and promotion structures. And some end up inevitably reduced to cocktail mixers, leading the groups to be taken less seriously.

And yet, the one seemingly universal truth about these groups is that they operate in a silo. Consistently, I’m surprised to learn that there is almost no conversation or collaboration of these groups across companies and across industries to share learnings and best practices. Every single one of these groups is reinventing the wheel, every day. There is room for improvement to make every one of these groups more effective, and the lack of coordination between them is a serious impediment to these groups’ success. No wonder we are on a 200-year trajectory to achieve gender equality in the workplace.

Fairygodboss is founded on the premise that, through sharing information, women can help each other increase the pace though which we can achieve equality in the workplace. Similarly, GALVANIZE: Making Women’s Resource Groups Powerful is designed to bring leaders and key stakeholders in these enterprise resource groups together in a single room where we can share findings and information and collaborate so that we can reduce this outrageous 200-year timeframe to something much more reasonable.

The outcome: Better treatment of human beings, and better corporate performance. What could be better than that?

Join us at our second annual GALVANIZE: Making Women’s Resource Groups Powerful event in New York City on October 15-16. At the event, diversity leaders, executives, and ERG team leads will have a chance to meet each other, form lasting connections, and share best practices, thereby transforming previously siloed efforts into a powerful alliance. And we’ll be hearing from some incredible luminaries and thought leaders, including:

• Carla Harris, Vice Chair of Wealth Management, Morgan Stanley

• Cindy Robbins, President and Chief People Officer, Salesforce

• Andrea Smith, Chief Administrative Officer, Bank of America

• Nicole Anasenes, CFO & COO, SquareSpace

• Tiffany Dufu, Founder & CEO, The Cru

• Leanne Pittsford, Founder & CEO, Lesbians Who Tech

• Brian O’Kelley, Co-Founder & CEO, AppNexus

• Herb Johnson, Chief Diversity Officer, Michelin

• Valerie Kay, Chief Capital Officer, Lending Club

• Amy Philbrook, Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Fidelity Investments

• Stephen Orban, General Manager, AWS Marketplace, Amazon

• Tammy Yee, Vice President of Benefits and Mobility, American Express

• Monica Diaz, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, Campbell Soup Company

• Laura Zelenko, Senior Executive Editor for Diversity, Talent, Standards, and Training, Bloomberg News

• Amber Grewal, SVP Global Talent Acquisition, IBM

• What I Wish My ERG Knew — hear from female executives about what they would really like their ERG to do for them

• How To Drive Retention Through Best-In-Class Benefits and Work/Life Balance Programs

• Unity in Diversity: Inclusion and Intersectionality

• Changing Minds and Eliminating Bias

This year’s GALVANIZE event will also differentiate from others in the gender diversity space by including a “Male Allies” panel, during which we’ll hear from engaged men about how we can best enlist their partnership. These kinds of conversations, of course, have become all the important in order to create understanding across genders in the wake of this year’s #MeToo movement.

Over 200 corporate professionals are scheduled to attend, representing companies from diverse industries including: ADP, Amazon, BlackRock, Blackstone, Bloomberg, Boston Consulting Group, Boston Scientific, Campbell Soup, Capital One, CDW, Charles Schwab, Cognizant, Dentsu Aegis Network, Dell, EY, Gartner, GoDaddy, Goldman Sachs, Grubhub, HPE, Honeywell, John Deere, LiveNation, Magellan Health, Palantir, RBC, Shopify, Southern California Edison, Stryker, SubZero, T-Mobile, Unilever, Visa, and many more.

GALVANIZE: Making Women’s Resource Groups Powerful — hosted by Fairygodboss

October 15-16 in New York City