Happy International Women’s Day! Take a look at how we celebrated at Switch.
Happy International Women’s Day!
International Women’s Day is held on the 8th March every year and is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.
IWD is an official holiday in many countries and the tradition sees men honoring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with recognition, flowers and small gifts. In some countries, IWD has the equivalent status of Mother's Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.
It may surprise you to know that over the last 14 years, Australia has fallen from a ranking of 15th to 44th out of 153 countries in working towards gender parity. A recent research report by Per Capita puts this down to the fact that there hasn’t been any national targets set for gender equality or to measure the progress towards these goals. So there is still a lot to do and a long way to go!
This year’s theme is Choose to Challenge, highlighting the fact that a challenged world is an alert world. So, we can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality.
For the women of Switch this year we were fortunate enough to be able to celebrate this day face to face at the Palace Tea Room in QVB. The day was filled with conversation about gender equality, steps that can be taken to achieve this, trivia and games around the history of IWD and of course an all female playlist dedicated to all the amazing and talented artists!
Switch has always championed an inclusive workplace, supporting the ever changing lifestyle and responsibilities faced by all employees. The freedom and flexibility in our office has always been a popular initiative at Switch, one where all our employees feel truly listened to and can thrive.
I joined Switch four months ago and I felt at home even though I work in a different time zone and country, being a religious muslim woman with some limitation on the types of projects I can work on, I’m often faced with a lot of challenges, however the leadership team at Switch showed me a lot of respect and compassion and were very accommodating
Dua’a is also the co-founder of the Women of Sitecore Group, Switch’s implementation partner, and says the aim of the group is to encourage more women to be a part of the Sitecore community, and to increase the number of female Sitecore developers while providing support to other women in the Sitecore community.
Looking ahead, Switch recognises that there is still a long road ahead for women in tech, a few initiatives that are in the pipeline include further promoting inclusivity in the hiring process, opening up dialogue within the Women in tech community and fostering a women led support network. Because at Switch, we believe in making a difference.
To learn more about IWD and the Choose to Challenge theme you can visit their site here.
If you’d like to find out more about the work we do at Switch, check out the rest of our blog or get in touch today.
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