Having a diverse workforce is ethically and morally the right thing to do. Morals and ethics and business, however, can sadly be uncomfortable bedfellows.
Having a diverse workforce is economically the right thing to do, though, because more diverse teams solve problems more effectively. Check out Scott Page’s The Difference for a more detailed examination of that.
Whilst it’s not a uniform trend, there are CIOs out there today who are pushing hard on an agenda to get better diversity in their own workforces, and that trend I think is bound to continue as organisations come under increasing pressure to disclose and explain discrepancies in areas like gender pay gaps. If nothing else, in many organisations the technology group will be one of the better paid so a heavily male-biased IT department will risk skewing overall company results in the same way that heavily male-biased boardrooms do.
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I’ve recently launched Stamp London’s first physical product – a set of playing cards called CIO Priorities. You can find out more about them here, and order a set for yourself here (or simply download the PDF and print them out).
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