This year, for International Women’s Day, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team set up a fundraising campaign for our charity partners, Refuge to support the work they do in support of women and children faced with domestic violence.
We saw a sea of pink outfits in our firm offices around the world in support of our “Wear Pink for Refuge” fundraiser; even more striking given we are still in the colder, greyer period of the year!
International Women’s Day Panel Discussion
One of the highlights of the day, however, was the panel discussion hosted by the firm’s CSR committee and moderated by Beth Lewis.
During the event, we heard from three fantastic and accomplished women about their backgrounds, their experiences in their chosen professions, what the International Women’s Day 2022 theme of ‘Breaking the Bias’ means to them, and what advice they might give to women experiencing bias in their career journeys.
Special thanks go to our panelists:
- Lisa Lunt: A highly experienced litigator, the head of the Medical Product Liability Department and a Partner at the firm.
- Morayo Fagborun-Bennett: A Barrister of 15 years at Gatehouse Chambers (formerly Hardwicke Chambers) specialising in landlord and tenant law and real property. She is also a Deputy District Judge and the Chair of the Valuation Tribunal.
- Mishal Malik: Assistant Vice President for Business Development at the Apex Group; a global corporation providing innovative fund, financial and corporate solutions to a range of asset managers and family offices.
#BeaktheBias
Our panelists covered, within their own experiences, a range of biases professional women tend to face in the workplace as well as those biases women may experience as a result of attributes such as religion, where they are from, and whether they have young children and caring responsibilities within the home.
A few of the key takeaways and encouragements for women (and men) on how to break the biases women face in the workplace, identified by our panelists, were:
- Hold on to who you are – you can be yourself and succeed and it is important for other women coming after you to see this.
- Don’t be too self-critical. As women, we can be harsher on ourselves than others are.
- Male colleagues and allies have a key role to play.
If you are a male ally, support the efforts of women around you to #BreaktheBias, and the glass ceiling! It is important to give credit to the women around you where it is due to them.
We look forward to working with more inspirational women in the future and continuing to educate ourselves towards a future with less bias.
