Within this, International Women’s Day is a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.
This year’s theme is Inspire Inclusion, emphasising the importance of diversity and empowerment through all aspects of society.
This will result in a huge number and variety of female voices being raised and heard across the world, but this is not only a platform for women. In order to successfully accelerate this conversation and actions, all voices need to be raised – especially male voices – when it comes to harnessing the power of allyship.
What is allyship?
Allyship is being consciously inclusive. It helps colleagues to feel respected, involved and connected every day. It means:
- Embracing difference by seeking the views of people with different perspectives and experiences
- Empowering others to succeed and ensuring everyone’s voice is heard and their contributions equally valued
- Standing up and speaking out for what is right and holding others to account for their behaviours
- Opening up opportunities for progression and levelling the playing field for underrepresented groups
- Challenging your own understanding and learning about communities different to your own
In order to make a real difference, allyship needs to be active, not passive. It can be all too easy to pay lip service, but change-makers act to call things out and use their own platform to try and make a difference.
Being an ally to women means putting the mirror up to yourself, being aware of unconscious biases and remaining curious. We might not ever fully understand the journey, obstacles or prejudices women face, but this only emphasises how well we need to listen.
This isn’t always easy, and we constantly need to educate ourselves along the way. Here at Barclays, we are fortunate to have a great gender resource group called Win, which exists to encourage, inspire and support women in achieving their career goals and potential through a range of initiatives to increase the representation and decrease the turnover of women at every level of our business. Importantly, both men and women can join Win.
Such accelerator and development programmes help deliver different learning styles to meet individual requirements, and it’s crucial that all organisations provide the platform for women to receive targeted career and personal development opportunities.
It’s all about achieving equity and providing opportunities to ensure everybody has the same access, the same vision, and the same privileges. However, even though this is improving throughout our industry, this remains an ongoing battle we must all fight.
Going forward, it’s not about lowering the bar but widening the gate, and active allies can play a key role in prising all these gates open, rather than being limited to a select few.
