Accenture and CyberCX early adopters of new tech diversity & inclusion standards

The Tech Council of Australia has endorsed a new set of diversity & inclusion standards to address the industry’s ongoing gender imbalance, with Accenture and CyberCX among founding partners.

Dubbed the T-EDI standards, the framework was developed by social impact advisory Project F in collaboration with the council and covers workplace policies in areas such as recruitment, parental leave, pay transparency, and flexible working.

The aim is to not only improve the industry’s persistent gender imbalance, with women accounting for barely a quarter of the workforce, but to address its chronic skills shortage in the hope of attracting 600,000 new workers over the next five years.

“There is a monumental gap between the number of tech jobs and the number of qualified candidates available to fill them,” said Project F founder Emma Jones. “So there is a national imperative to address the structural issues that have become ingrained in the culture of tech workplaces over decades and get more women into jobs, which are some of the most flexible.”

The T-EDI certification program requires participating organisations to assess their adoption and compliance progress as to ten key equity, diversity and inclusion measures which serve to address underrepresentation, performed via an online bench-marking platform through which they can also access customised action plans and a range of other support tools and resources.

“The T-EDI standards promote systemic change and take the guesswork out of creating an inclusive workplace,” stated tech council chief Damian Kassabgi, who took over the peak industry body’s top job earlier this year from former McKinsey and Accenture senior leader Kate Pounder. “Improving diversity and inclusion in tech will better position Australia to address its social challenges.”

Accenture, together with fellow tech consultancy CyberCX, are among those to to have already adopted the standards, alongside the Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, and Atlassian among others. Both have an established history of pursuing greater inclusiveness, Accenture for example as a ‘family-friendly workplace’ and CyberCX via an ‘All-Women’ cohort within its academy.

“At CyberCX our mission is to secure the communities in which we live and work,” said CEO John Paitaridis. “To do this successfully we need a diverse workforce that reflects our communities. The cybersecurity industry still faces significant challenges with diversity, and the launch of T-EDI gives industry a benchmark for measuring the success of our efforts to ensure we continue to improve.”