Welcome back to Season Two of Equality Talks! We’ve got 10, inspiring amazing exciting ambitious women, joining us for this season and I’m so happy you’re joining us!
In the first episode, I’m talking to Naomi Simson of Red Balloon and Shark Tank fame. She had amazing thoughts to share with us on people using this COVID-19 lock down period to really reflect on what’s important to them.
Naomi talks more about the importance of building community, both when you have a team that’s working fully remotely like right now and when you’re in person. And creating connection through shared experience. Naomi’s passionate about helping people find their purpose and her book, Live What You Love (We are actually doing a giveaway for her book this season), has practical exercises on finding your passion, being positive, building your persistence and really working towards your purpose.
Fiona Vines, Head of Inclusion & Diversity and Workforce Transition at BHP joined us. BHP have an ambitious goal to have a fully gender balanced workforce by 2025 in an industry with around 17% women. Fiona shares with us some really interesting research around why women, leave the workforce in higher numbers than men, and why they progress more slowly to leadership levels.
She talks about the importance of having a leader who deeply understands the benefits of a more diverse and inclusive workforce and also the role that men play in creating space for women. This is a really fascinating and exciting conversation, pushing for gender diversity.
In the third episode of this season, our CEO and co-founder Gemma Lloyd spoke with entrepreneur and Partner at Threshold Ventures Heidi Roizen. Heidi shared a fascinating story about a Harvard Business School case study called Howard vs Heidi, where Heidi herself was the subject. Her CV and information about her were presented to research subjects under those two different names – Heidi and Howard – and research subjects were asked to rate competence and likability. As you might predict, the rated competence highly for both characters, but they rated Howard higher for likeability than Heidi. This study is actually been used really broadly to highlight the gender bias that we have against ambitious women.
Heidi also shares that if you’re a career woman and you want to have a successful career, that it’s okay to get help. I really liked how she gave people permission to get that support in their home.
That’s not all that we’ve got coming this season!
We talked to Anastasia Volkova, who founded Flurosat and has an incredibly impressive CV.
Shivani Gopal from The Remarkable Woman is really changing the world through connecting women and providing them with mentors. She had some fascinating commentary on bias, advancing women, and how we can help ourselves.
Diane Smith-gander is a past president of Chief Executive women and is a career board member. She has had a really rich diverse career and shared advice on building a network, getting mentors, deliberately choosing the direction that you want your career to take, and was really just warm and generous with what she had to share. I really love this recording this episode.
Carol Schwatrz is another Order of Australia who we speak to this season, along with Sam Payne from Pink Elephant, Camille Wilson from Think Learn Grow. Julie Moss from TransGrid and Somoud El Masri from Jacobs.
It’s a really exciting season coming up for season two, and we can’t wait for you to join us on the journey.
Haven’t listened to Season One yet? You can start here with Season One, Episode One!
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