ISLAMABAD: The first international chapter of an Australian initiative that works with influential leaders to take action against gender equality, Male Champions of Change (MCC) Pakistan held a meeting on Monday.

With Pakistan’s alarmingly low ranking on the Gender Gap Index, the initiative in Pakistan has brought together heads of leading private sector companies who are determined to improve their own and national numbers.

The MCC Pakistan Insights Meeting looked at the progress the project has made so far in gathering information and identifying key thematic areas that MCC companies need to focus on to achieve gender parity.

High Commissioner of Australia Margaret Adamson said at the meeting: “There is this commitment at high levels of the private sector to the principles of what the MCC are all about. I am not aware of any other platform that does quite what MCC does and as I said, I actually see this not only as a catalyst and promoter of achieving a level playing field for women through the private sector, but also sending a signal more broadly for a level playing field for women across our societies.

“Because of the nature of the companies coming together, the private sector is an incredibly important pillar of our societies. It’s vibrant, it’s diverse and when it gets behind an idea it really can move our societies. We have here MCCs who have counterparts in Australia.”

“This meeting will draw on the insights from the work this group has done over the past three months. MCC Australia launched their 2018 impact report, which is the first consolidated review and insights into the 230 organisations that are part of MCC Australia and calculated the tangible results that have been achieved. MCC is a disruptive strategy to accelerate the advancement of women in leadership and achieve gender equality,” MCC Pakistan Convener Fiza Farhan explained.

A brief video by Elizabeth Broderick, the founder of MCC Australia, was also aired at the meeting. It compiled messages from some male champions of change in Australia to their counterparts in Pakistan highlighting that they were committed to equity, whether it be in the form of affirmative action in sports where there has been unequal investment over decades or equal pay and flexible work conditions.

Amina Khalid from MCC Pakistan shared a brief presentation outlining MCC Insights-Phase II, elaborating on the work done so far.

She explained the phases the work of MCC follows beginning with leadership shadow, focus groups, data collection, insights and action plans.

In quantifiable data it was clear that women are poorly represented in many tiers close to or less than 10pc. The emerging themes from the focus groups were bold and inclusive leadership, social and cultural norms, everyday sexism and stereotyping, flexibility, expanding the talent pipeline and accountability and transparency and each MCC member organisation would be able to select two core thematic areas on which it would focus on for the upcoming year.

Furqan Ahmed Syed from PepsiCo Pakistan, said: “For us there is a lot of great content – clearly leadership is always something you need more of, and building the talent pipeline is also very important.

“I want to raise a broader question. We have our individual priorities as companies but is there a broader objective. For instance, the issues around social and cultural norms are more extrinsic than intrinsic. Even if today everything was fair and you had a robust talent acquisition process which allowed for the biases to be excluded, the reality is you would still end up getting 80pc resumes and that is a core problem. You have to improve your odds of success and I want to see if as a group we can improve our odds of success by working on things that improve the social and cultural norms.”

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2019