Paragon Digital Services is deeply committed to closing the gender gap in employment the best way we know how: training women, and those identifying as women, in a growing field, and giving them the skills they need to build careers that are remunerative, personally rewarding and contribute to their local communities.

A stubborn challenge

According to the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2021, the employment gap between men and women remains stubbornly wide. Unless we take active steps to provide women employment opportunities, it will be another 267.6 years before we achieve global parity.

Like you, we find that unacceptable.

Eliminating the gender gap doesn’t just benefit women, it’s good for everybody. Take India, for example, a country where many of Paragon’s technical teams reside. Increasing women’s participation in the workforce by just 10% could add $770 billion to India’s GDP by 2025.

Prior to lockdown in March 2020, India’s overall unemployment rate was 7%, but for women it topped 18%, per a 2019 a Google and Bain & Company report on women entrepreneurship in India. But once the pandemic hit, women in India, like women everywhere, bore the brunt of the unemployment crisis.

Closing the skills gap with the Paragon Digital Academy

The WEF Gender Gap Report states that gender gaps are more likely in sectors that require disruptive technical skills, such as cloud computing, data, AI, and engineering. At Paragon, we also know that it exists in the digital ad tech and mar-tech fields, and we aim to change that.

Paragon’s Digital Academy focuses on the personal and professional growth of our employees, and in turn, our organization, as well as the communities in which our employees live and work.

The Digital Academy provides learning and development opportunities to inspire and upskill our teams in areas that will help them succeed over the course of their lives. For instance, we offer training in technical skills, such as digital campaign management, programmatic advertising and other technical skills.

We also help employees obtain the critical “soft” skills including language, email and telephone etiquette, client communication, US culture sensitivity.

To ensure enough work -life balance, we conduct out our training programs during the office hours.

We educate our staff [men and women] on how important it is to treat our colleagues, and create a safe place to work for everyone.

Certifications to build lifelong careers

We provide women the opportunity to earn numerous certifications, including Google Ad Fundamentals, Google Ads Display and Campaign Manager Basics. We also train women in the full breadth of MS Office and Google Analytics. We also invest time for their individual Development Growth . We are also working on making a “All women team” within Paragon as a special initiative.

These skills are highly transferable to a wide array of occupations. Graduates can go on to hold a wide variety of positions in digital advertising, digital marketing, public relations, and more. And our training is recognized in other businesses. We are proud to help all of our students, women and men alike, build lifelong careers.

The gender gap in employment may be a difficult challenge to overcome, but with a commitment to empowering women, we can make the world a better place for all.

To find out more about the Paragon Digital Academy, or how we can drive efficiencies for your business, get in touch.

To a great many people, equality and equity mean basically the same thing and use the words interchangeably. But equality and equity are different concepts, the differences are more than semantic. We all want to be treated equally, but in order for that to happen, some of us may need more help, and some of us may need less.

Equality is when you give two people or entities something of equal value. If you’re the president of the university, that may mean giving two departments the exact same budget increase, say $1 million. But what if one of those departments is highly specialized and has only 20 students in it, say, a comparative linguistics, and the other has thousands, such as the university’s medical school. Is that a fair move on the part of the university president? One department, the medical school, will be woefully underfunded, and its students will suffer, whereas the other department won’t even be able to spend all of its budget.

The point is, equality sounds great, but it won’t necessarily mean everyone who is affected by a decision will be on a level playing field. To do that, you need equity.

Equity is when you give everyone the resources needed to be successful, which is very different from giving everyone the same thing.

Let’s say we hire two new employees at Paragon, one who came from another digital agency, and the other who just graduated from college. Treating them with equality would mean they’d each get the same level of new employee training, and then be told to service clients. The new graduate can’t possibly succeed without the critical knowledge needed to understand how campaigns work, how to use the tools needed to complete a task, and so on. That person wouldn’t succeed, they are almost set up for failure.

Fairness requires investing in people, in our case, our employees, so they can succeed in their jobs and find personal fulfilment (which is why we launched the Paragon Digital Academy). To many, fairness is getting the exact same thing, but that only works when we’re all the same to start with.

Paragon services clients across all industry sectors and who are located all over the world. Sometimes a client needs a little bit more help to succeed, and we’re okay with that. Equity is what we strive for.

Americans like to say that we all need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. But as Naheed Dosani explains, “equality is giving everyone a shoe; equity is giving everyone a shoe that fits.”

To find out more about the Paragon Digital Academy, or how we can drive efficiencies for your business, get in touch.