The Financial Women's Association of Singapore (FWAS) held its Senior Executive's Lunch for the fourth consecutive year on 17 October 2014, kindly sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in their premise at One George Street. It was a cozy and warm setup with guests mingling and networking with one another during lunch before the talk started. 

Peter Akwaboah, Managing Director & COO of APAC RBS, kicked off the event by speaking about the Bank's commitment in delivering diversity& inclusion programmes. He also shared challenges that happened in his career and how resilience is key to moving ahead in life and career. Low Chin Loo, the president of FWAS, followed by welcoming everyone to the event and highlighted that 40 organisations were represented in the event, with many new faces, a fabulous thing to engage senior members of the financial services community (both men and women) to understand, learn and bring back to their workplaces the importance of diversity & inclusion and a forward-thinking environment for women to excel and be happy working in. She also introduced our keynote speaker, James Eyring, COO of Organisation Solutions. He was addressing the concerns that although businesses in Asia focus their diversity efforts on moving women onto increasingly high levels of management positions, does it yield results and what areas should organisations concentrate on? The topic of the day was aptly named "Women on Top: Investing in the Right Initiatives."

James started his presentation by acknowledging that companies have made great strides in moving women into management and top management roles, showing some data on this from companies in Asia. In spite of this, a lot more needs to be done for women to reach parity with men in the corporate world. By research estimates, it may take up to 450 years for women to be at parity to men in senior executive roles! 

James highlighted that there are ways in which we can decrease the time taken to bridge the inequality. He presented a set of initiatives that have been found from decades of academic research to be effective in advancing women at work. Among the most effective are having a D&I committee, having dedicated D&I staff, and targeted recruitment efforts for women. What was also interesting is that formal mentoring and having women in top management positions do very little to help women advance at work. According to academic research, informal mentoring has been found to be very effective in helping women develop and advance. However, formal mentoring efforts often fail to achieve desired results because of poor execution of programmes.

In the last part of his presentation, James showed data from years of research across studies on the predictors of career success. Top of the list are political knowledge and skills, education level, work experience, training & sill development opportunities, hours worked, having a strong network within the organisation, and the number of years of experience within the organisation. 

Attendees were then broken into small groups for a discussion on what their companies are doing to promote diversity and inclusion. The room was buzzing with energy as everyone shared practices in their organisations and what worked best. James ended the event by recommending the use of better metrics and evidence-based practices, as well as developing women through development programmes, helping them understand the skills they need to be successful, and participation in action learning projects.

The lunch event has sparked more conversation on sharing best practices, suggestions and ideas to improving diversity & inclusion in workplaces. The FWAS strives to remain the platform for sharing and partnering with our members towards this end.