written by Melanie Robinson

“When we embrace equity, we embrace diversity, and we embrace inclusion.” – International Women’s Day

The IN Group (TIG) is very proud to have made a number of positive changes in the last year as we strive for gender equality. We don’t just want to focus on equality but to ensure we are truly living, breathing and embracing equity. Our Gender Equality pillar, with support from the board, has been crucial to everything we’ve achieved.

We thought it would be an important and interesting exercise to share what we’ve been up to from late 2021 until now, particularly highlighting our most impressive gender equality step changes from 2022.

An overview of our 2022 objectives

In early 2022 we set ourselves an ambitious goal to ‘increase the representation of women in our business’ by the end of the year, and implemented various initiatives to achieve this. Now this was a pretty broad objective, but we can’t have diverse teams, leaders or board members if we don’t have the women in our business to start with!

We know the ratio of men to women in our industry is pretty poor. Typically males outweigh females in a business by 70/30 – and TIG fell right into that industry standard. We were committed to highlighting and changing that and can proudly say that after reviewing, amending and actioning a few recommendations (some big, some small), we have achieved a ratio of 60/40 in the business as of 3/1/2024. This is an amazing achievement within the first 12 months!

We continue to actively work on attracting women to our business and we have already hired 39 women so far in 2023, so we’re confident that our initiatives have not only shown an immediate impact in our gender ratios, but also demonstrate sustainable growth and career opportunities for women longer term.

How we achieved our goal

You might be wondering what exactly have we done that has made such a huge impact? Well…

1. We launched our Internal Mobility Programme – this is specifically targeted to make sure people are in the right jobs within TIG and we don’t lose good talent to competitors.
2. We hosted our first ever global focus groups which proved to be game changing in helping us understand our people better and resulted in…
3. Revamping our High Achievers reward scheme itinerary, location and communications.
4. We made significant policy changes with specific emphasis on our family friendly policies, particularly six months’ maternity pay, four weeks’ paternity pay and six months’ shared parental leave.
5. We improved our interview processes for new starters to ensure we are being as inclusive as possible and sharing all these amazing initiatives.
6. We introduced fertility support for our people, offering expert advice and a financial loan for couples going through fertility treatment.

The above doesn’t even include the amazing stuff we do on wellbeing (through our Wellbeing and Engagement committee), culture and wider ESG initiatives (through our People and Culture team) – all with the aim of ensuring equality and equity!

2023 and beyond

All the step changes above are here to stay. Hiring is significantly more inclusive and we have no intention of slowing down.

Bria Gaber, principal consultant for pharma and life sciences in our New York office, joined our Gender Equality subcommittee a year ago. As she explained, the committee has achieved so much in that time: “In my first year of joining the Gender Equality subcommittee, we made incredible strides towards gender equality across the business. We immediately improved our mat/pat leave policies in the UK and increased our female representation across the business – globally. For 2023, we are determined to help execute competitive plans for the US. We have some really big goals and initiatives!”

So, as Bria explains, it’s onto a bigger, more specific goal: “We won’t stop pushing our greatest goal for the year in the empowerment and progression of the women in our business – and I am really proud to be a part of this mission!”

You can find out more about the work we’re doing on DEI here. If you’d like to talk to us about what your company can do to be more inclusive, please contact our associate director for client success, Olivia Dodd.