WHO IS IT FOR?

Senior leaders and HR professionals, diversity and inclusion leaders and talent practitioners looking for innovative responses to the enduring challenges around diversity and inclusion.

WHY ATTEND?

A Google Scholar search of ‘diversity and inclusion’ reveals that nearly 9,000 new scholarly works have been published since 2018 alone. Dozens of conferences address the topic and awards, initiatives, and social media campaigns abound. And yet, despite D&I remaining near the top of many organisations’ agendas, we have barely moved the dial in the last decade.  

Our 2020 update aims to raise the discussion several notches, by exploring emerging themes and focusing on what HR can really do to meet its goals. We will focus on four key themes shaping the future of D&I:

• Diversifying diversity. Organisations are still working to achieve gender diversity, and yet building a workforce that is diverse across multiple dimensions is critical to meeting today’s challenges. What are organisations doing in other areas, racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and other types of diversity? What business outcomes are truly diverse organisations seeing?
• Technology’s impact on diversity. AI and automation are poised to revolutionise work, but algorithms that drive AI can simply make bias and exclusion more efficient and automation often disproportionately impacts women. How can organisations embrace these technologies while being mindful of the potential risks? 
• Inclusion and employee voice. How are organisations responding to this requirement, and how are they joining up employee voice with the broader inclusion agenda?
• Enduring challenges. Problems such as gender pay gap, parity of leadership and inclusive cultures still exist. At the same time, some question whether we’ve ‘overcorrected’, while others argue that really nothing has changed. What is the reality?