Marking International Women's Day with pay transparency and hiring equality

For more than a century, the International Women's Day movement has worked to raise awareness of the unique challenges of women, promote equity and drive advancement across industries, countries and sectors. 

While some may question the need for such a movement after 115 years, there is still so much room for improvement and so much more opportunity to shine a light on issues faced by women around the globe. In some places, we are even seeing regression rather than progress. 

Working in the tech industry, I've seen firsthand some of these challenges; as an industry, the tech sector hasn't always been known for its commitment to diversity and equality. It has long had a reputation for being male-dominated. The rights gained along the way have been because of the work of pioneering women and as a female executive working in this industry, this remains a cause near and dear to my heart. 

Building a strong culture 

Growing up, I felt the pressure to choose marriage and family over a career, but I wanted more than that. And now, as the chief people officer at Omada, I am proud to work for a company that is dedicated to helping support women's career trajectories. 

Around 43% of our executives are women, and though there is room to grow, this is a strong start. Not all companies can boast this, and I am proud of the work we've done to get here so far. Overall, our current workforce is split about 75% to 25% male to female, and 38% of our new hires last year were women. We are also promoting women from within, building the next generation of leadership along the way. 

However, it's not just about numbers or making things 50/50 for the sake of being able to do so.

We have put a lot of focus on diversity when hiring. It's not just about gender, but also about looking to hire people from different backgrounds and generations, from different countries and disciplines. Diversity in the workforce – and this goes beyond gender – is important to the health of a business and to its ability to really and truly serve all its customers in the best way possible. Our customers are all different; so should be the people who serve them.

Supporting our employees

At Omada, we are strong supporters of the European Union Pay Transparency Directive, which goes into effect this year. This directive aims to combat pay discrimination and begin closing the gender pay gap in the EU by requiring EU-headquartered companies to share information on salaries and take action if their gender pay gap exceeds 5%. A lack of pay transparency is one of the key obstacles to closing the gender pay gap, and according to the latest stats, women earn on average 12% less than men per hour.

We applaud these efforts and for us, this is a directive we truly embrace. We have dedicated time and energy to analyzing our salary data to ensure we do not perpetuate a gender gap. Looking at job structure and hierarchy is another key internal initiative we're working on as part of these efforts. 

Another element of this is listing salary ranges in job requirements, which is something we've already been doing in some countries and will now make this a more widespread practice. Women should not be paid less than men for the same job, full stop, and we will continue working hard to make sure this doesn't happen at our organization.

Additionally, a key priority this year is building clearer and more transparent career progression paths. We've introduced structured promotion reviews to reduce bias in advancement decisions and are refining how we define performance, potential, and readiness for progression, so advancement is based on objective criteria, not subjective perception.

Training for the future 

All of these efforts take a village and change needs to be made with transparency and conscious decision. We don't want to just quietly change our job listings behind the scenes; we want our employees, customers and prospective employees to understand why we believe such changes are important. 

We believe strongly in training all of our employees in what we call cultural intelligence. We know the word diversity itself can sometimes carry different connotations, so we strive to ensure our employees really understand our corporate values beyond the buzzwords. We strive to help our managers understand how to avoid bias, and this is something we continue to drive forward.

Looking ahead

It's 2026, and we still see huge disparity around the world and in the workplace when it comes to how men and women are treated, compensated and acknowledged. A movement like International Women's Day remains more relevant than ever.