Diversity + Eternal Vigilance = Success

By Wendy Lurrie, Managing Director, gyro New York

It’s International Women’s Day 2018, and a good time for a look back at what we did in 2017 to advance the cause of women in our field.

We woke up last year to a world changed. Nations were reeling from the results of elections and governments, businesses struggled to adapt to changes, and societies across the globe were in massive flux. This was an unfamiliar world, where diversity was no longer considered an unalloyed good; where things we’d always taken for granted were now called into question; where norms were upended and unpredictability was injected into the global bloodstream.

2017 amplified the eternal challenges to diversity and inclusion, and here at gyro we rose to the challenge. There’s a lot more to do, but this is the ideal moment for a retrospective. So let’s celebrate what we accomplished in 2017.

· We hired and promoted more women and people of color than at any time in our history.

· Our successful mentoring program was launched. It was designed specifically to support an increasingly diverse workforce, and paired teams across departments and management levels to provide one-on-one support and coaching.

· gyro participated in International Women’s Day 2017, with a sea of red and a march that ended in Zucotti Park, right next door to gyro New York’s downtown office.

· We launched gyro:unbound, the book group that began as a way to bring the women of gyro together to discuss issues of gender, power, race and class.

· We supported our clients’ diversity initiatives by redoubling our efforts to hire women and people of color, in every department and at every level of seniority.

· We participated in the Dentsu Aegis Network’s Women’s Leadership Series, hosting a panel that showcased how three different women have managed their careers and families.

· We held programs for high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds to learn about the business and broaden their horizons.

But there’s so much more we need to do. While we’ve achieved greater gender participation, we need to fill the management pipeline in a far more inclusive way. While we worked to address pay equity, it’s still a work in progress. We need to actively recruit future stars by hiring more entry-level candidates who represent true diversity — gender, race and socio-economic backgrounds. And we need to measure and track what we’re doing so that we continuously improve our efforts to create the most inclusive and diverse workforce possible.

Eternal vigilance is the price of commitment to diversity — if it’s not something we focus on, train for and reward, we won’t continue to progress.