An essay in the New York Times, by Ellen Pao, who in 2012 sued her employer — a Silicon Valley venture capital firm — for bias and gender discrimination, suggests many companies still pay only lip service to diversity and inclusion.
The solution, she says, is for “CEOs to hold themselves and their teams accountable for true diversity and inclusion.” It also means “measuring progress, holding people accountable for results by setting goals and basing their compensation on hitting those goals.”
She also encourages individual employees to focus efforts on change as well. This advice coincides with observations from participants in the 2017 AWESOME Symposium who expressed a desire to take action in their own companies and to align with others who are willing to work with them. These and other insights from the 2017 Symposium are compiled in https://www.awesomeleaders.org/collective-wisdom/reality-check/. AWESOME’s collective wisdom on women’s supply chain leadership, which will be available here for download beginning Friday, September 29. First printed copies will be distributed at CSCMP Edge Conference – AWESOME events.