Our CEO's message for International Women's Day

Marg Mayne, CEO of Mytime Active, has this to say about equal opportunities in the workplace:

I am a great believer in giving women the best chance possible to achieve their professional ambitions at work. That includes basic equities: equal opportunity for promotion, equal pay for equal work, and not succumbing to stereotypes and prejudices about what women can and can’t achieve. It’s a simple case of sound moral values. 

As well as the moral case, I am a big advocate of the business case. As the CEO of Mytime Active, I want us to recruit, retain and promote the best people in our sector. It makes good business sense to actively seek female candidates as well as male, so we are fishing from the biggest pool of talent possible. In addition, research shows that diverse teams get better results than non-diverse teams.

To truly get the best of the widest talent pool, we need to change how we think - maybe changing some traditional practices, and not letting restrictive job conditions or negative assumptions about gender (or race or disability for that matter) get in the way. 

Before I joined Mytime Active four years ago, there were no female Directors and just one woman on our Board of Trustees. This was not unusual in the Leisure sector. I am so pleased that over the past few years we have achieved balance.

The ratio of men to women on the Trustee Board is 50/50, my Directors' team consists of two women and one man, and the current split in our senior management team is six women and four men. The change has come about entirely through appointments on merit; none of us are interested in tokenism. 

Having a diverse team makes for different discussions and a different work culture.