Orient - The Official Magazine of the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore - Issue 67 July 2018 - Page 32 IN FOCUS: Karen Loon, Partner and Asia Pacific and Singapore Diversity Lead, PwC Where does your passion for diversity and inclusion come from?
My family has been in Australia for three generations, so I always considered myself as Australian rather than focusing on my family’s Chinese heritage. I found it interesting when I first came to Singapore, as people’s values really draw from their childhood. In Western countries, as a child your nationality takes centre stage and the ethnicity can become secondary, whereas here ethnicity is much more focused. After returning to Australia for a few years in my career, it was an eye-opener as I was considered a minority both for my nationality and my ethnicity, and it was clear that people of some backgrounds were struggling to reach the top levels of management in major companies.
In that period in Australia, there were no female partners in the business, thankfully time has moved things along now. These experiences have helped to open my mind and drive that passion to help others to open doors. People are shaped by their demographics, their experiences and the culture around them, they do not fit into neat categories.
As the Singapore and Asia Pacific Diversity Lead for PwC, how do you drive inclusion and acceptance at all levels?
For PwC, we have a 2+1 strategy – all markets drive gender initiatives, valuing the difference between people. Each market also focuses on one other area, and for our office this would be ethnicity and culture. Many other markets focus on generational and culture issues.
We still have a lot of work to do, focusing on proportionate promotion for example, and we use a lot of data to help us understand where we need to focus our energies rather than making assumptions. We survey our people regularly to understand the working environment and how we can help our employees for a more inclusive workplace. Inclusion leaders across the markets work separately from Human Resources and are completely more of an independent perspective, not becoming part of the process and working with the business leaders to assist them using the data we have compiled.
How can companies in our network make changes for the better without simply paying lip service to the issues?
It will be ineffective to approach diversity and inclusion with the mind-set of “my company requires us to do this” or “the new legislation requires us to make these changes on paper”. If initiatives are coming to you from