the journey from gender equality to gender equity

When I first launched my consultancy, although I had a clear concept of what gender equity was, I wasn’t using the same language to articulate it in daily business.

At first, I used gender equality because it was a more widely used phrase but the more work I did, the more important it became to practice what I preach around the specificity of language.

Gender equality is predominantly focused on men and women having parity, but for me, gender equity is looking at the intersection of gender equality and racial equity. In order to get to gender equality, we have to flatten the hierarchy amongst women.

Just taking the Gender Pay Gap as an example, the focus is on closing the gap at one level, not on all levels. The work I do is focused on uplifting the women at the bottom of the hierarchy, which will then have the effect of uplifting all women.

Most businesses have been building their sustainability goals around gender equality first and then adding in race further down the line, a strategy that further perpetuates the problems we are seeing in the workplace now.

Gender equity is almost a gender equality plus approach. It broadens the lens we look through in order to include Black women in the existing strategies. It doesn’t leave them behind a postscript but incorporates them from the beginning.

Having a gender equity lens pushes the boundaries on challenging how we have sought to help women so far and what we can do to accelerate positive outcomes that have been slow to materialise.

This year so far, I have attended conferences such as the Women in Food & Agriculture, where it was very clear that while most of the women who are on the frontlines in the agri space are Black women and women of colour, the conversations did very little to address the real impact on the women doing the hard work.

Without gender equity, it becomes easy to think in the context of top tier problems which affect the minority rather than the majority in this case and this is my motivation.

Just by organisations prioritising gender and leaving race until later, leaves a huge swathe of women behind in the process and this is what should not longer happen.