Inspiring conversations: food for thought on gender equality in November

Celebrating International Men’s Day generated a lot of discussion in Inspiring@GC (our group that looks to promote gender equality at GoCardless). In fact, most of us didn’t even realise there was an International Men’s Day - it’s a growing movement to address issues faced by men and boys and this year's events will take place on Thursday 19 November. 

That’s why we blocked out November in our diaries for ‘Inspiring Conversations’ - a takeover from Inspiring@GC - with events that address issues and challenges from all gender perspectives. We’ll be exploring four themes, the first of which is the diversity of gender experiences. What is it like to be a new dad? What is it like to go through menopause? What is it like to suffer from endometriosis? What is it like to be pregnant? 

Expanding our understanding of gender issues from all perspectives

Of course, you can never fully appreciate certain things if you haven’t lived through them yourself, but we believe you can expand your understanding of what other people are going through. One way is to listen to people share their experiences. We’ve set up a panel with some of our amazing colleagues at GoCardless to discuss these questions.

The second thing we’ll be doing is deep-diving into leadership. There are a ton of examples of leadership out there but we always tend to come back to the same typical examples. We want to challenge this and discuss what leadership at GoCardless can look like in all its guises. We’ll be working on this with a fantastic leadership coach Heeral Gudka. She’s going to help current and aspiring leaders at GoCardless to workshop all these questions.

The third week of November will be around allyship. And this goes both ways. It can be women being allies for men when they want to be more involved in caring responsibilities, as well as men being allies for women when they want to be more focussed on their careers, for example. We’ll be hearing from Nadia Nagamootoo on this topic. She's done really interesting pieces of research on men's working flexibility and the systemic impact on women, organisations and society.

The last week of November will be about enabling change. What can we do today that will move the dial? What can you do on an individual basis to make change happen? We’ll be bringing in Olga Koch, a hilarious comedian who’s going to not only offer us some laughs, but inspire us to act today.

We know that change takes time, but we also know that our peers at GoCardless are passionate, thoughtful, open and willing to learn, so we hope that ‘Inspiring Conversations’ will create the forum for discussion and sharing that will drive that change, one conversation at a time.