Inspiring Inclusion for #IWD2024 — Metta Blog Series (3/5)
The third in our 5 part #IWD24 blog series | Featuring Sarah Moneypenny
Here at Metta, equality of every kind is at the top of our company values and objectives — and in an industry which is predominantly male dominated, we are a women co-founded business with over 70% of our employees being women.
In order to celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, we sat down with five inspiring women in the industry to discuss what this year’s IWD theme of #InspireInclusion means to them. We also chatted about who inspires them, the barriers facing women in business today, and what they hope the future will look like in terms of gender diversity within the workplace.
The 8th March marks International Women’s Day, a globally recognised day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women all over the world.
For the third instalment of our 5 part series, we’re chatting to Sarah Moneypenny, a sustainability and strategy specialist with a passion for supporting businesses to understand and make the most from the transition to sustainability.
Connect with Sarah:
- SustainAbility Website
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Q: Hi Sarah! Tell us a little about yourself, and your background?
A: I’m a sustainability and strategy specialist with a passion for supporting businesses to understand and make the most from the transition to sustainability. I run my own consultancy — SustainAbility — and work in various Fractional Chief Sustainability Officer roles, previously I was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey in Washington DC and London. I live in South London with my husband and my cat and am persistently positive about the future!
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Q: International Women’s Day marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality, and this year’s theme is #inspireinclusion. How do you think we can aim to Inspire Inclusion in the workplace today?
A: Two sustainability x women themes come to mind when I think about this year’s IWD theme of #inspireinclusion —
The first is the essential concept of a “just transition” which lies at the heart of addressing the reality that the impacts of climate change will disproportionately affect those who are less economically advantaged, especially women. We’re already witnessing how women, particularly in developing countries, often bear the brunt of caregiving responsibilities for their families. Consequently, they’re profoundly impacted by increasing resource scarcity, physical climate risks like droughts, or the consequences of climate change-induced forced migration, all of which jeopardize their ability to create safe and nourishing homes. Moreover, women worldwide have less access to crucial resources like land, credit, and decision-making structures, all of which are indispensable for adapting to climate change. The idea of a “just transition” entails urging those contemplating and implementing climate change solutions to ensure they incorporate measures to address these disproportionate effects. For instance, ensuring that investment in new industries creates job opportunities specifically tailored for those who will be most affected, such as female farmers in regions experiencing droughts driven by climate change. Integrating these concepts into solutions will foster the inclusion of women in the fight against climate change.
Secondly, it’s worth noting that much of the groundwork for climate change efforts often falls on women, despite their chronic underrepresentation in decision-making committees (as evidenced by the recent proposed committee for the Azerbaijani COP29). Similar to the phenomenon of “office housework” — like organizing birthday celebrations or green initiatives — the responsibility for creating office green teams and implementing small-ye- essential changes in our day-to-day operations disproportionately falls on women. I’m enthusiastic about seeing the #inspireinclusion tag used to encourage more men to take on their fair share of climate change-related work and to ensure that decision-making committees become more inclusive moving forward.
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Q: What are the major barriers/issues you can see still prevalent today for women in the tech/business industry and workplace. Are there any barriers you’ve faced personally and how did you overcome them?
A: Whilst I didn’t agree with all of the messaging in Barbie I did LOVE America Ferrera’s monologue on the challenges of being a woman and feel affinity with much of what she said. Whilst we are generally past the out and out sexism of the past decades (although doesn’t every woman you know still have at least one story of an incident) the double standards expected of women both in and out of the workplace definitely make it very challenging to achieve all we are expected and deserve to achieve!
Navigating being a manager in particular was an inflection point for me, where I had to get comfortable with asserting myself and the fact that sometimes people wouldn’t like me for leading, even though it was my job (definitely made worse by the fact that I was often leading teams of older men). We’re trained from infancy to make sure that everyone around us is pleased with us, but in a business environment often that’s not always possible or even desirable — and it can be doubly hard if you don’t have a support structure that recognises that. I was lucky to see some women leaders around me who had passed through that ring of fire and were rightly reaping the rewards — and I strive to keep emulating them!
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Q: Based on your own experience, how can we encourage more women to pursue entrepreneurship or senior leadership roles in their career? What is the most important message you would want to give them?
A: I’d like to encourage all women who are even a little bit interested in a role, be it a senior leadership role or starting their own company to go for it — you will get the role much more often than you may think! And I have data to back it up — in a previous job I looked at the recruiting pipeline of a large company to determine why they were not recruiting women at the same rate as men and we found several very interesting results including —
- Women were much more likely to “self-select out” and not apply at all for the jobs that they wanted as they feel that they wouldn’t get the role — this resulted in a gender-skewed pipeline from the very beginning
- Men seemed to have a lower threshold for matching the job description than women and so were more likely to “have a go” at getting the role — when asked, men they said that as long as they had 50%+ of the “must haves” in a job description then they would apply, women were more likely to say 75–80%
- During the process women were more likely to retire due to perceived constraints such as location or salary, often without asking the recruiter whether these were negotiable — men were much more likely to ask for changes to a role before retiring from a process
Once the study was completed and we identified the above challenges (as well as many others) it was great to see that with some messaging changes we could encourage more women to apply in the first place. It would be great to see more women inspire others to inclusion by sharing these illuminating facts, going for those roles you may think are impossible and often being pleasantly surprised!
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Q: What do you hope the future will look like in terms of diversity within the workplace?
A: Diversity in the workplace is a very hard thing to get right (or even determine what “right” is)! Ultimate diversity would be a proportional representation of the “diversity of thought” that comes from each of our unique experiences — and comes together to be able to see, interact with and solve a challenge from all sides rather than one embedded way. The way we measure diversity therefore — by characteristics of people — will always be flawed as this is shorthand for diversity of thought.
As we cannot be perfect I think we can get as close as possible by making sure that —
- Workplaces that are representative of the communities they are in and the communities they serve
- they value outcomes vs uniformity in methods
- all characteristic-based discrimination is stamped out. A very tall order that will be a lifetime of work for many industries and businesses!
One additional thought I do have is that we must be VERY careful about bringing LLMs/other AI into the HR side of the business as these are very likely to embed historic biases as they are trained on old data — until a genius developer solves that problem for us I for one will be steering clear of firms recruiting using AI.
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Q: Give a shout out to an inspiring woman in your life/work/industry and tell us why we should go and look at their website/product/blog etc.
A: While I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting her in-person once at our previous workplace, I wanted to give a shoutout to Rachel Carrell of Koru Kids, who is inspiring in so many different ways — I aspire to be an entrepreneur like her in the future!
- Her business is tackling the challenges of childcare, and is going from strength to strength. It’s remarkable to see her success in the often male-heavy VC world.
- Rachel isn’t afraid to stand up for what’s right. A recent LinkedIn thread where she spoke up for female entrepreneurs facing double standards in expectations while not being allowed the same relaxed attire (like jeans and a hoodie) as many male entrepreneurs, demonstrates her unwavering commitment to calling out inequality when necessary.
- Her advocacy for and clear understanding of childcare policy is incredibly helpful and great to see. Rachel does an excellent job of explaining the implications of changes to childcare policy, such as the government’s vision for extra hours of childcare and its impact on nurseries. Her presence at political meetings gives me confidence that she’s advocating for sensible childcare policy change.
- Rachel’s dedication to her values in her work is evident and admirable. She frequently shares insights and stories from her company, demonstrating a deep understanding of what’s right while also remaining open to learning and growth.
Rachel’s approach to entrepreneurship, advocacy, and commitment to values serves as a beacon of inspiration for newer entrepreneurs like myself. I would recommend following her on LinkedIn if you don’t already!
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Read the other blogs in this series here -
Jia Afsar | Design and Strategic Advisor
My Morinder | Worldfavor
Magda Cheang | Jobs for Planet
Andrea Sommer | Hive Founders
For more information about Metta and the work we do, head to our website. Check out our podcast Metta Talks to hear the latest about startups, innovation, and sustainability. The team is also on LinkedIn — reach out to us!
#IWD2024 #InspireInclusion
