CampbellReith had another great celebration of International Women’s Day. All our offices got together for a ‘Lunch and Learn’ session and to raise money for ActionAid, an international charity that works with women and girls living in poverty.
During the session we celebrated the huge progress we’ve made in closing the gap in opportunities available to men and women. Colleagues from the UK and overseas reflected on their experiences and changes they’d seen through their careers.
Our own personal experiences and the progress we’d seen (thanks Jacqui, Maroua and Isabel) chimed with the news last week that the proportion of women on the boards of the FTSE 350 listed companies topped 40% for the first time, up from just 12.5% 10 years ago. CampbellReith is proud to say that female representation on our Management Committee is up by 50% and overall by more than 100% at management level, compared to 3 years ago.
We took time to celebrate influential and inspiring women. Names put forward ranged from Billie Eilish to Beth Mead and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, showing just how many women are currently shaping the world we live in.
But we also reflected on the fact that, around the world, women and girls are being denied the opportunities available to men; in education, the workplace and the home and have less social, economic and political power.
One of our colleagues (thanks Maritta) reported how different things are in some parts of her home country, Lebanon, where there is no minimum age for girls to be married and women are not afforded many protections under the law that we take for granted in the UK.
And we heard that even with the advances we’ve made here, women tend to be in lower waged, less secure jobs. Median pay in the UK is still less for women than men. The TUC marks Women’s Pay Day – the day when the average woman starts getting paid compared to the average man. We were shocked to learn that this year, that wasn’t until 25 February!
There was a great debate about retaining working mothers in the workforce and we’re happy to say that our policies and maternity benefits are in line with the larger engineering consultancies. We discussed that staff at inclusive, gender balanced firms report increased motivation, performance and commitment to the organisation and undertook to articulate the benefits of a balanced workforce and advocate for equity.
Finally, we looked at the impact of schooling on women and girl’s futures, noting that it improves their outcomes by giving them more agency over their lives and the tools to earn their own income. That’s why CampbellReith has chosen to support ActionAid for IWD 2023.
Here’s link to some of the work they do:
https://www.actionaid.org.uk/our-work/womens-rights/girls-education
You can join us in supporting their fantastic work! We’ve set up a JustGiving page to make it simple!
https://www.justgiving.com/page/campbellreith-actionaid-1678203393037?utm_source=copyLink&utm_medium=one_page&utm_content=page/campbellreith-actionaid-1678203393037&utm_campaign=pfp-share&utm_term=169db146f64647bd9b8aaa46663b652d