Hi everyone and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.

This is another episode in our special series to celebrate champion and support International Women's Day.

Maybe let's hope at some point there's not a day and it's just life in general, the norm.

But we did think that actually this was a really good opportunity to try out a new format.

So a daily podcast where we've got some incredible guests, real experts in their field,

talking about some of the challenges, problems and particularly the solutions and actions

because we always want to be really action-focused on a podcast around both what you can do

as a woman at work, but also for all

of our men listening, what you can also do to kind of support women so that we all just enjoy

what we do more. And perhaps this is not a podcast series that we need to do in a couple of years

time. So just to give a little bit of context before I kind of introduced today's guests in

terms of where we are around parity, because sometimes I think, oh, maybe we think this is sorted, do we still need to be

talking about this? It's interesting that we have now made some progress in terms of if you look

at things like Futsi 100 boards, one in three of the director positions on boards are now

held by women. Slightly more depressingly, there's only six women who are Futsi 100 CEOs.

There are more men called Steve.

We still obviously have a gender pay gap in the UK.

It's kind of around 17%.

And McKinsey have done a lot of work.

So if you're listening and thinking, where do I find a business case for all the things

that we're talking about this week?

I would say start with McKinsey. They did a really good report called The Power of Parity, which talks about gender equality, not only being kind of a moral and social issue,

...