How Many Of These 9 Mistakes Is Your Business Making?

11 Mar

❓ Focusing on extended maternity leave, without improving paternity leave.

❓ Being unaware that a new generation of men want to ‘have it all’ - to be a great dad, without sacrificing a great career.

❓ Trying to solve gender equality by focusing just on initiatives aimed at women.

❓ Making flexible working look like a ‘perk’ for mums or senior leaders.

❓ Assuming that dads don't have or want caring responsibilities.

❓ Not understanding that gender equality and opportunity at work, starts in the home.

❓ Concentrating on extending leave without considering cultural environment for parents.

❓ Leaving line managers to muddle along, trying to support new parents as best they can.

❓ Not offering new dads the emotional support they need to process the upheaval of parental transition.

Building a diverse and inclusive workplace is not a challenge that can be easily solved by only creating initiatives aimed solely at women. An additional focus on men has the benefit of re-framing the conversation away from the prevailing binary gender stereotypes connected to carer and breadwinner roles.

Focusing on new dads at work

✅ Improves mental health and well-being for all new parents.

✅ Supports retention of high performing individuals facing the parental transition.

✅ Creates diverse working cultures where dads have a genuine choice about how to organise their working life.

✅ Narrows the gender pay gap by creating new role models for what successful masculinity looks like at work.

✅ Retains female staff by changing the assumptions about gender in the workplace.

Frances Cushway and I run regular, free, interactive webinars throughout the year, covering important topics and peer discussion around

✅ The key issues women face as they navigate the transition to motherhood.
✅ What organisations can do to support individuals as they transition to and from parental leave.
✅ How to enable mums to thrive in their career as working mothers.
✅ The societal pressures that men face as parents.
✅ How to support men who want to take an active role in parenthood.
✅ Gender equality benefits at work and home.

We call it: