And now it's time to introduce our second guest, Dr. Caroline McGrory. Caroline is also a chartered accountant. She is the assistant professor of accounting at the Dublin City University, and also currently a Fulbright scholar at Boston College. She was selected by the Irish Institute of Chartered Accountants as a chartered YoungStar last year, and she's also one of my favourite things to be, which is one year old
ambassador. She spent eight years lecturing at the princess Nora University in Saudi Arabia, where she's actually lived, as I understand for a majority of the time as well, and spends her time really working on women's education and empowerment of women in Saudi Arabia. Princess Nora is actually the biggest university of females only in the world. So really impressive and exciting to have you here, Caroline. I think it goes without saying that your work is really, really inspirational.
And it's not an easy thing to integrate all these different facets of your life. So I'm going to hand over to you to kick us off and explain how you've managed to really do that. Thank you so much, Mandy. And I just like to start by saying thank you to Chartered Accountants worldwide for inviting me to be part of this panel discussion today. I think the topic of diversity equality and inclusion is so so
important. And it's great to see the attention that it is getting not only from a business perspective in recent years, but also in our own personal lives as well. And when you hear and the discussion that Vinson has just had with Mandy, I just think it's incredible to see the amazing work that's being done in the field. So just to, I suppose, draw on some of my own experiences of off diversity, equality and inclusion. And as you mentioned, they'll start off by my experiences in Saudi
Arabia. So I have had the privilege of working in Saudi Arabia for eight years. And my role was primarily centred around the education of Saudi women. And I suppose what I got to experience firsthand is the value of education and the vehicle that it actually gives women not only from a perspective of entering the workplace, but much more so than that as well from a perspective of social inclusion. And many of you may be aware that Saudi Arabia is a country that is ranked very low in the gender
equality rankings. So it is currently stands at 140 756 countries, and it equally has very low labour force participation rates for women are currently stands at around 33%. Now, when you compare that to other high income countries, those numbers are quite low. So again, to be in a role, where you're actually involved in education in Saudi women where you can really make a difference here, it really was such a
privilege. But I deeply like to highlight the fact that since 2016, the Saudi government have actually introduced a number of government backed initiatives, which are all centred around the environment and the inclusion of Saudi women. And again, when you have government backed initiatives like that, you really start to see the opportunities open up for to be there at a time. And both before these initiatives come in and after you really see the changes
that can take place. So bringing it back to education again, and looking at our role there as a, as a university and educating people in the third level sector. Really, what we were trying to do was not only ensure that all our graduates were leaving our programmes having both the technical and the soft skills that they needed to be effective in the workplace, but it was equally to ensure that they develop the life skills
that they need. Because again, if you look at the history of the country, education of women, this is all very, very new. And as I said, labour force participation is all very new. So there's a host of skills that really needed to be developed. And we ran many different initiatives alongside again, our main programmes, and one that got a lot of attention over the last number of years was one centred around the financial
literacy and development. And again, it was really about trying to develop life skills that will be useful to our students. The feedback was absolutely phenomenal. And many of our students come back and said, you know, it wasn't only really beneficial to have developed these skills from a professional perspective, but equally for their personal
lives. And historically, they said, if we've really been a conversation that they would have been having in their own homes about financial decision making, but they felt much more empowered to be able to do so because of the skills that they had developed as part of our programmes. So I think you know, when you look at the overall diversity and inclusion agenda, initiatives like that can really, really help drive
forward change. If I bring that back then to an example much closer to home and over the last academic year, and you've just saw the video of an initiative that was run in collaboration with the Irish funders task force that was all centred around, ensuring that our masters of accounting students had exposure to these really important topics. And one of the workshops was completely centred around diversity and inclusion.
And in this particular workshop, and we designed it in such a way whereby we had a guest speaker come in really, really inspirational person Torres called me is her name, who is the founder of the together Academy. And this particular organisation was set up to help adults with Down syndrome develop the skills that they need in order to enter the workplace. That particular session that was followed by an interactive workflow and interactive workshop by the
offenders and Task Force. And really what the interactive workforce did then was it allowed the students to, I suppose, get exposure to how diversity and inclusion plays
out in a work setting. Again, the feedback from this from the students was absolutely phenomenal them coming, saying that, you know, it really wasn't something that they had necessarily considered from a perspective of their career as an accountant, some of them saying that they, they got so much from the session that they actually are now doing their thesis research on the topic of
diversity and inclusion. For me, the significance of this is, as an educator, we are involved in the education of the next generation of accountants and business leaders, and to be able to expose them to topics like diversity and inclusion, and to see how they engage with that. I think that that is just so positive for the profession, and for business going forward and for for people individually. And I think that education is such
an important role to play. Then other points that I just want to make, and it relates to the accountancy profession, I think we are incredibly lucky to be part of a profession that really has diversity, equality and inclusion at the heart of its strategic priorities. And if it just looked at my own professional body, Chartered Accountants, Ireland, and again, focusing in on gender diversity, they recently released statistics and outlining that 42% of members are female, and
47% of students are female. And I think for a profession that has historically been male dominated, if you look at the the progress over time, that is a real inspiration to other professions and other sectors as well. And then just to link in just on my last point about the work I'm currently doing, as Mandy mentioned, I'm currently a Fulbright scholar at Boston College, where I'm looking at the role of the accountant in cybersecurity, and cybersecurity is a male dominated sector at
the minute. Globally, women only hold 25% of the roles in cybersecurity. So this particular sector is not only calling for more women to get involved, but it's equally column for diversity of skills. And as a result as an accountant I ever place on that cybersecurity master's
programme. So again, I suppose, overall my experiences and again pulling in the experiences from Saudi Arabia, in my role as an educator here in Ireland, and equally my most recent role as a Fulbright scholar in Boston College, the value of embedding diversity, equality and inclusion across all different sectors and all of the different, I suppose things that as a counter that we get involved in, or for anybody with any background, I think there, there is huge value and its
employees, huge dividends. Thanks so much Caroline. And that was all very, very interesting and meaningful perspective that you've given. So I think my next question actually touches on something that you that you raised in the in the statistics towards the end, where, you know, you've spoken about how there's so much more diversity in the profession, which is really great. And I think, across the board, people really are starting to see the value of
diversity. But inclusion often feels like that one step further, or at least true inclusion. So I guess my question to you today is, what could business do to really support women and ensure that they are truly included in the workplace and that they are remunerated on the on the value and merit that they add? Because I think that's often still a missing piece? And then how are women supported as well through the lifespan of a career?
Because I think we see a lot of women unfortunately, leaving the workplace when they when they enter phase, I think becoming a parent. So what do you think business can do better to kind of keep them in at that stage? Absolutely, Mandy, I think it's a really important conversation. And it's this piece around inclusion, there's been a lot of focus on diversity, but inclusion, while a related concept is it is separate, and it is something that it does
need to get attention. So for me, I suppose some very practical steps around this, and it's something that is getting a lot of attention is gender pay gap reporting. And I think the accounting profession do really well in this area and a lot of the reporting in this area is led by the Big Four accountancy firms. But I would say for organisations that are not currently engaging in gender pay reporting, that this is something that is coming down the line from a perspective of
mandatory reporting. And I think if you really want women to feel rewarded and included in an organisation, and you mentioned their remuneration is something that's really important and there's been a lot of exposure There's over the last number of years. For organisations, as I said, that are not reporting on this, they should even do So internally. So that if there are any gaps that they can identify them and take corrective action
if necessary. The other point that I think and again, it's a very practical point is fostering a culture of inclusion within organisations. And I think this absolutely can be led from the top. There are many practical ways to do this. But my experience of it is, is that you have to talk to the people in your organisation and as getting direct feedback from people to see where the issues
are. Because without that feedback, and again, it can come in many different forms that can be true and surveys that can be through one on one conversations with people, but it's really trying to get to the heart of where the issues are in
organisations. And I saw a very interesting link on the Chartered Accountants Ireland website recently, we're about whereby they highlighted that some of the challenges for employers around putting I suppose include there's a lot of talk about inclusion, but actually putting that into action is, and some of the challenges they highlighted are that it's not considered a
business priority. And another issue is that there are inadequate resources, and that can be financially but equally the expertise that are within organisations to properly to properly deal with this concept. So I think, again, these particular you know, and they're just two points that I think are really important. Coming to your second point around, you know, the lifespan of somebody's career, and particularly see, women maybe leave and their
careers at different points. And maybe it is to have a family or, or there could be multiple different reasons why people may leave their career. But again, there's a lot that can be done here. And interestingly, just in the last couple of days, I read an Irish Times article. And again, it's applicable across jurisdictions. And some of the points that were made there, the first one being fostering or
supporting flexible working. And while this has become a big topic of conversation, since the onset of the pandemic, challenge, the challenges of balancing work and home life existed long before the pandemic, and flexible work, and now has really shown that you know, where that is in place, and where employers can facilitate that, that it can really go a long way to to help people stay and help women in particular see within their
jobs. A second point is where if they believe their end jobs were under can be for a host of different reasons, that if they decide to come back, that, that there isn't any, suppose barriers to their career progression. And in order for that to happen, they need to be supported, both personally and professionally. And again, it's about having those individual conversations with people to see
where support can be given. And the last point I would make on this and I find this really, really interesting, as regards the research on this is the importance of a sense of belonging within an organisation. And again, it came up in this Irish Times article, but I equally have seen Deloitte and write reports about this.
And in the Deloitte Report, they serve a number of organisations and I'd like the 79% of organisations realise that assess belonging is absolutely critical to the success of an organisation and equally to retaining talent. However, only 17% of organisations have the proper structures in place. And equally, what came out of that, and was that some of the issues were around again, if you're trying to attract talent into an organisation, and some issues were around using inclusive
language. And some of the job advertisements would have used more male orientated language. And again, it's not that it's going to put all women off applying for certain roles, but it may put some off. And again, there's a there's a huge body of research. And again, if anybody wants to look into it further, it's all about gender coding.
But as I said, what came out of that for me is that a lot of the time job advertisements, it's your first point of contact with people and you want to attract the best talent into an organisation. And especially for women, if they're thinking about and changing careers, or if they want to progress careers, that can be something that organisations may need to look at. Thanks so much, Caroline. I think that was a
really in depth answer. And I'm surprised that we don't see a lot of hashtags and sharing of that because really practical tips that I think people can implement in their companies or take back to their leaders to discuss so thank you so much.