Making HerStory at Dalberg

Challenge

Dalberg is a woman-led business with 40% female leadership. Women and men at the same level get the same compensation, a recent gender audit showed there is no discrepancy in speed of promotion, and our Global Managing Partner Yana Kakar was elected as a pregnant woman. We are proud of being a gender inclusive firm, but believe there is more we can and should do. How do we go from good to great, and accidental to deliberate, to walk the talk on our aspiration of creating a gender equal world? How can we improve women’s lived experience, reducing implicit or explicit bias in our policies and processes? How can we best engage our Dalberg men in the pursuit of a gender equal Dalberg and world? How do we ensure a gender lens is deliberately applied across all our projects to ensure the needs, behaviours and preferences of all genders are fully accounted for?

Actions

To answer these questions, our staff designed and launched Making HerStory, an initiative to apply a gender lens internally and externally to help us walk the talk on our aspiration to create a gender equal world. This was based around 4 pillars: (i) Enshrining equity through policy and governance; (ii) Creating a space for ‘womentorship’ with support networks; (iii) Inspiring male allyship and providing trainings and tools; (iv) Being deliberate with our client work.

Outcomes

To date, Making HerStory has made an impact through (i) Policies & governance. Carried out a gender audit of our recruiting, promotion cycles and attrition to better understand how we de-bias our policies and processes; (ii) Shifted our external engagement. Designed and released a toolkit to embed a gender-lens across all our work; (iii) Allyship. Co-designed a conscious inclusion session based on real-life Dalberg scenarios to equip our colleagues to take collective action against bias that has been rolled out across global management, and 20 + offices worldwide; (iv) Mentorship. Established and nurtured regional mentoring programs.

Contact

Afua Sarkodie

Quote

As a values-led strategy consultancy with staff that represent over 50 nationalities and speak over 90 languages, diversity is core to our DNA at Dalberg. In fact, the Dalberg difference is our diversity and inclusivity, as we bring that lens to even the most traditional market entry, business growth, or investment strategy work we do with our clients. It is also why we will never stop pushing ourselves to improve internally, evolving our own organization to reflect the kind of change we wish to see in the world.

Yana Kakar
CEO & Global Managing Partner
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