Women in Leadership – dropping the bias and working towards equality at CPP

Yesterday marked International Women’s Day, this is a global day where we celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. We also recognise this day as a call for action to accelerate gender parity.

This year’s theme is each for equal, as an equal world is an enabled world. At CPP we want to grow our people to grow our business regardless of your gender, race, age, disability, religion or how you identify yourselves. It’s about enabling our people to be at their best.

One of the main drivers behind gender inequality is the lack of women in leadership roles. According to catalyst.org it’s estimated that globally, 38% of manager roles are held by women, for senior management roles this drops to 29%. Sometimes perceived or real, people can feel pressure to conform to the male leadership role as that’s what’s visible, but by doing this it means you can sacrifice your own sources of strength and power.

We spent time with some of our female leaders to understand what barriers they felt they were facing in their development for leadership roles. From this we’ve created a new initiative called Women in Leadership. The purpose of this is to provide a variety of support and development resources for our current and aspiring leaders, focusing on:

• Celebrating International Women’s Day across all our country markets
• Providing a networking platform where colleagues can share blogs about their journey, experiences and what they’ve learnt along the way
• Explore work/life balance and how people can find a balance between the two that works for them
• Engage our CSR agenda and explore how we can support future generations into seeing beyond career stereotypes
• Explore the Imposter Syndrome and how people can limit the feeling of not being good enough and that their success is deserved

While we call this activity Women in Leadership, as we strive for diversity and inclusion we have built this space for all our colleagues. We can all experience the feeling of being an imposter at times or feel challenged with balancing our work and home life, this isn’t solely determined by our gender.

Everyone has a part in play in building a better world, the future is exciting and we are inviting all our colleagues at CPP to join us in achieving this.