Are You Taking Responsibility For Your Part?

Team, can we have some real talk? 

Organisations need to pay their employees fairly. Hiring managers are responsible to ensure that new people get the salary that they deserve, paying close attention to women and minorities, as these groups are famously underpaid. I don’t need to quote the abysmal statistics on this – especially when biases intersect; they are widely known. 

It’s also important that managers promote – and then compensate properly – the right people, not just the loudest ones (*cough… white men… cough*).

And whilst we are at it, let’s also remind them of the opportunity to increase part-time working options, parental leave increase, flexible work arrangements, generally stopping to glamourise F2F and instead focus more on output, etc, etc, etc. 

In other words:

The onus is firmly on employers to create environments that are inclusive, equitable and allow the best talent to both prosper and be rewarded for their great work.

Here’s the thing though. The responsibility on companies and managers does NOT totally absolve women / minorities from also taking action themselves. 

Is this fair? Absolutely not. 

In an ideal world, you being promoted and compensation fairly and generally set up for success in your career should be happening automatically if you do great work. But in the real world, with business being not as morally correct of as savvy as we’d all like it to be, this isn’t the case. Again: there are plenty of examples showing capitalism’s failings in this regard. 

So whether we like it or not, we NEED to take responsibility for the part that we can do to change our circumstances. We need to learn to advocate for ourselves. 

It’s the pragmatic, smart thing to do, and the only one that we can trust will move the needle in the right direction for ourselves, our sisters and our daughters.