|3/4| To celebrate International Women’s Day we’re releasing new blogs every week this month from Kasmin Cooney (OBE) Righttrack Consultancy founder, sharing her decades of experience in equality and diversity training in the business world.
At Surrey Business School we’re passionate about advancing female candidates with the MBA Women in Business Scholarship, covering between 10 – 50% of the total tuition fee awarded on a rolling basis.
In an ideal world, there would be no need for diversity quotas but sadly, we still live in a society that requires them. That’s not to say progress isn’t being made. We are living in the most progressive society there has ever been where women and those of an ethnic background have never before held such strong positions in many areas of society.
Organisations across the world are placing more emphasis on making their workforce more equal and diverse than ever before. However, in terms of gender, the pay gap between men and women currently stands at around 18% in the UK and Deloitte have revealed that the Gender Pay Gap won’t be closed until 2069. The UK also fell to 9th place last year in terms of female board representation percentages in Europe.
Furthermore, despite 11% of Britain’s 30 million workforce now being from an ethnic minority (that figure rising from 4% from 20 years ago), research has suggested that there is a 23% hourly pay gap between BAME graduates and their white counterparts.
There is still a huge disparity in pay from both a gender and an ethnicity perspective and in order to overcome these imbalances and quicken the attainment of true equality, quotas are a necessity.
Kasmin Cooney (OBE) Righttrack Consultancy founder
