Gender and diversity

There is a delicate balance in everything. Gender and diversity is the same. Within many organizations there have been significant historic challenges in rebalancing the numbers of men and women, and treating everyone more fairly. Research clearly demonstrates that gender balance improves organizational performance and profitability, so change is in the wind. What I and my colleagues have learned about making this happen was to have a lot of balls in the air  and to revisit something when the time is right.

Most large corporations and development organizations are like the Queen Mary — large, turns slow. But if we plant an idea or two on gender and diversity and then come back later, often the turning process has started and things are moving even though we initially may not feel the shift. Probably my best example of that was our work on flextime, where we were not making much progress.

—blogs.adb.org/blog