By Sarah McAdden, HR Lead at Ploughshare

“It is absolutely critical that we continue the conversation on equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), as the work is never done. EDI not only supports staff wellbeing and engagement on an individual level, but it is fundamental in delivering business success, so it simply a no brainer.

Lord Patrick Vallance said this week that ‘diversity must be looked at as a central growth strategy, not a nice to have’, and I couldn’t agree with him more – it must always be a non-negotiable.

Real, lasting change cannot happen without effective action, and it takes collaboration, genuine understanding and deliberate action to see this really accelerate and come to fruition.”

– Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, CEO, Ploughshare

Since our CEO, Hetti, joined Ploughshare five years ago, Ploughshare has transformed and grown significantly in size – and gender diversity has equally grown at every level of the business. The inclusion of a wider range of perspectives, ideas, and experiences has provided impactful, positive change around driving greater innovation and pace, more strategic risk taking, and new partnerships.

Although recruitment is a vital piece of the puzzle, the long-term policies and opportunities in place for staff are just as important to ensure equality and equity are upheld and progressed, and that team members of all backgrounds and identities are retained over time with their wellbeing and happiness at work protected.

We aim to make Ploughshare a positive place to work for our team, with the values of EDI upheld. With the theme of ‘accelerated action’ for this year’s International Women’s Day, I wanted to delve into one of the key actions we take to make a positive difference to gender equality for our team, and the commitments we are making moving forwards to ensure we continue taking strides in the right directions.

Parental leave: giving employees more choice

Balancing work and parenting is a challenge for many. It’s not an issue unique to women of course, but it does still impact women disproportionately – much like the gender pay gap, which is rooted in the same problem of household and gender inequality.

Now, household equality has changed dramatically since my 80s childhood, when my mum’s teaching career was considered a luxury alongside carrying the bulk of domestic responsibilities and raising children. While we still have a long way to go, we have seen real progress since then in expanding choices for women as well as a huge increase in dads’ involvement in the home.

The last 10 years especially have brought some societal highlights in the workplace. The game changing work of Pregnant then Screwed, Mother Pukka’s Anna Whitehouse, and The Fatherhood Institute have highlighted that there must be another way. So many in the working world feel desperate for the magic bullets of flexibility, understanding, and the license to stand up and say: ‘my name’s Sarah, I have two kids, and I’ll be there at 9:30 because I’ve got two school drops and a dentist appointment’.

This April will mark 10 years of parents being able to take shared parental leave, but the uptake is still very low. As an HR bod, I hadn’t handled a single case in 10 years until I reached Ploughshare. It’s no surprise – only 1% of mothers and 5% of fathers were utilising this government scheme in 2023.

The shared parental leave scheme was supposed to be a great moderniser: giving parents more flexibility over childcare, increasing opportunity for fathers to spend more time parenting, promoting household equality, providing more options for women returning to work,  and reducing the gender pay gap in employment. While it won’t be the right fit for every new parent or couple starting a family, giving people meaningful choice is key.

At Ploughshare, we have been championing the scheme, supporting employees with logistics and admin, and encouraging people to consider whether it is the right fit for them. We want our team to be completely informed of the options they have, and how we can support them in whichever route they feel is best for them.

Due to our rate of successful maternity returners, we also offer alternative working patterns, support systems, and are working up the launch of our gender-blind parental leave returner scheme. We want to pre-empt, support, and nurture the return to work after having children for all parents. And why wouldn’t we support that with every resource we have?

If these actions are worth doing, they’re worth measuring. We have internal employee surveys and an employee’s voice forum within Ploughshare to support feedback and hold discussions so we can continue the conversation, improve our offerings, and make tangible impactful changes where we can be better. Why not raise the bar so that parents can parent AND have a fruitful, rewarding career?

Our commitments to positive change

Of course, this work does not end with supporting parents. We recently engaged the Ploughshare team in a conversation around how we can commit to better gender equality more broadly. Below are three commitments we are making for this coming year:

• Engage with our spin-out companies on diversity and support EDI initiatives and recruitment. According to Spotlight on Spinouts 2024, most active spin-outs have founder or director teams comprised entirely of men, so we must do our part and work together to improve the gender balance.
• Be mindful of diversity in our engagement with the broader innovation ecosystem. This includes stepping back from opportunities or offering alternatives when we are invited to speak on panels that are not diverse, and taking a collaborative approach to the groups we work with, such as the North West Regional Defence and Security Cluster, to uplift work around EDI.
• Open conversations around EDI with our partners and work together to find solutions and opportunities for improved diversity and gender balance across our organisations.

Looking ahead

To see widespread change, the commitment to EDI needs to be driven by action, not just words. While we’re proud of the progress we’ve made at Ploughshare, we know there is so much more to do. We’re focused on continuous improvement, and our efforts around parental leave, commitments for the year ahead, and gender diversity at all levels of our business are just the beginning of what we want to accomplish.