Resources for Building Equity in the Workplace

by the WILA PPN Leadership Team

image: You X Ventures on Unsplash

This article is part of a guide the Women in Landscape Architecture Professional Practice Network (WILA PPN) Leadership Team is releasing this month titled How To Reach Gender Equity in Your Workplace: A Guide for Landscape Architects. For more information about the guide and why we developed it, check out our first article, Introducing the WILA PPN’s Gender Equity Guide: A Toolkit for Landscape Architects.

The American Society of Landscape Architects’ Women in Landscape Architecture Professional Practice Network (WILA PPN) Leadership Team, led by PPN Co-Chair TJ Marston, has curated a list of resources to help businesses and individuals tackle four important workplace issues that affect gender equity in landscape architecture: flexibility, caregiving, pay inequity, and discrimination:

Startup Pregnant is a five star-rated podcast about reinventing work and parenthood, looking at deep human questions around what it means to become a parent, grow a business, deal with success, and learn from failure.

  • Why we love it: You don’t have to run a start-up or be pregnant to find this podcast helpful. Regular listeners will find the stories from entrepreneurial women and leaders cut to the core of issues facing parents and women in today’s workforce.
  • Fun fact: The founder, Sarah Peck, is a former landscape designer who received her MLA from the University of Pennsylvania. While she keeps the focus on her new business ventures, she knows our industry and the demands it takes. Plus, she has a great radio voice that you’ll find easy to listen to on your commute or in your free time!

Disrupt Design is a design-led approach to systems change that takes complex problems, works them into engaging narratives, and builds those stories into innovative designed change.

  • Why we love it: Unschool’s Disruptive Design Method says it all. Be a pioneer. Build a circular future by design. Build your way to positive social and environmental change.

Remote.co provides tools and resources for individuals and companies looking to expand their remote work options.

  • Why we love it: Extensive content from 141 companies using remote workers on some level. Information is organized by broad categories of content: Why Remote, Hiring Remotely, Managing Remotely, Working Remotely, Remote Worker Insights.

1 Million For Work Flexibility is a movement to support flexibility in the workplace with resources from individuals and companies who are reinventing what work looks like.

  • Why we love it: Outlines ways to inspire, educate, lead, mobilize, and support flexibility options. Have 3 seconds or 3 minutes to commit to work flexibility? 1 Million For Work Flexibility has ways to use your support.

PL+US is a national campaign whose mission is to win paid family leave for everyone in the US by 2022. The movement engages in all levels of change by working with companies, public policy and culture to educate, and transform policy.

  • Why we love it: Includes templates and sample proposals with cost benefit analysis for public and workplace policy change.

Let’s Fix Work is a podcast from Laurie Ruettimann, a former HR executive who’s “dedicated to the revolutionary and long-overdue mission of fixing work by telling stories and teaching leaders how to create workplace cultures that support, empower, and engage workers meaningfully.”

  • Why we love it: A down to earth podcast asking in depth questions about how we can adjust and tailor work today.

The Equity Collective: a self described “non-hierarchical collaboration” who’s goal is to investigate social inequity and systems of oppression and create a radically inclusive society.

  • Why we love it: The collaboration works hard to be the radically inclusive society they are helping other build.

B Lab and the Inclusive Economy Challenge: B Lab is the non-profit that certifies B Corporations, companies using the power of business to address social and environmental problems. Their initiatives include B Corp Certification, administration of the B Impact Management programs and software, and advocacy for governance structures like the benefit corporation. Starting with B Lab’s first Inclusive Economy Challenge in 2016, Certified B Corporation business leaders were asked to set goals and track metrics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but any business or organization can make use of the tools, articles, and free best-practice guides associated with the challenge.

  • Why we love it: Outlines best practices and case studies outlining programs to increase equity across a number of businesses.

Women at Work: A podcast hosted by three editors from the Harvard Business Review. In open and honest conversations, they “untangle some of the knottiest issues around being a woman at work.”

  • Why we love it: Each episode takes a deep dive into a specific challenge in building equity in the workplace. In addition to providing further tools and resources, they will often talk with other women who are experts on these topics!

The WILA PPN leadership team hopes these resources and the tools and tips in the compiled PDF (coming soon!) contain helpful information for firms and individuals tackling gender inequity in their workplace.

As this is an ongoing conversation, we welcome additional collaboration and resources that you have found to help increase gender equity in your workplace. Send us your feedback and help us keep this “living” document up-to-date. We also want to hear your success stories. Let us help you spread the word on what’s working.

ASLA 2009 Student Honor Award in Communications. Women in the Dirt: Landscape Architects Shaping California. Robyn Newkirk, Student ASLA, Pavel Petrov, Student ASLA, and Carolann R. Stoney, Student ASLA / image: Women in the Dirt

ASLA Celebrates Women’s History Month: learn more about the women who’ve shaped landscape architecture and how ASLA encourages women leaders. For more Women’s History Month coverage, follow ASLA on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

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