Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We're glad you're here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:16Hello, everybody, this is Chris Hoyt. I am the president of CareerXroads. You are listening to the CXR broadcast, which we're actually going to do a recap today. I'm pretty excited about this. We did our first DE&I meeting of the year for 2021. I can't believe 2021 is here already quite frankly, I've got a couple of folks with me but also my co host the lovely and talented Gerry Crispin, Gerry, say hello to everybody.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 0:39Hello, everybody.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:43So we've just wrapped up our first meeting, we thought it might be fun to just talk a little bit about it. And a couple of big takeaways and with us to do that, I have Cris Castillo Brizard of MMC and Cris say hello.

Cris Castillo-Brizard, Marsh & McLennan Companies 0:55Hi, there.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:57We have Chad Godhard longtime CXR member from Assurant Chad, how are you? doing? Great.

Chad Godhard, Assurant, Inc. 1:02Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:03So guys, this was really interesting. We had a guest speaker, from thoughtworks, she was lovely, she shared a little bit about the journey with some of the work that they are doing. And just just kind of set the stage with things that they are doing with regards to sort of attacking from a DE&I standpoint, attacking the funnel. So really taking a look at collecting information with regards to gender and gender identity. And looking at the attrition within the funnel, how to prevent that I thought that was fascinating. But then we also broke and we did an exercise on solving for hiring more females in the workspace. So well, sort of dissecting the entire meeting. Cris, I'll just I'll ask you first. Did you have? Was there a big takeaway? Or was there something from from the conversations that we had today to our meeting that just sort of resonated or that, you know, you're going to walk back to the office with the virtual office with an implementer? begin to talk about with your peers?

Cris Castillo-Brizard, Marsh & McLennan Companies 2:00Yeah, no, absolutely. The first one was the comment from Raja around, just rethinking what gender looks like. And I loved how she made the distinction between the gender identity versus the legal definition of gender for that individual. So that was an aha moment, because at Marshall McLennan we've been looking at, do we have an opportunity to re label the way that we're asking people to self identify their gender. And this is not one item that we discussed. And the other takeaway for me was from the group discussions, and it was about the, what I heard from everyone on that call, just the importance of flexibility of companies really creating a culture where there is genuine, flexible programs in place, but that they apply not just to women who have children in the workplace, but also individuals who are caregivers, and just kind of redefining what it means to have flexibility and not just being applied to women. I just thought it was a really valuable concept to think about all of our colleagues and how they're being impacted by the state of work today.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:06Yeah, I love that, Kristen. I think so. So my B piece there, my big takeaway when Ryan was presenting was that there is a difference. I think we're creating two funnels of data, right to two silos of data from a talent acquisition standpoint of what we're collecting. And now as more of us begin to collect gender identity on that front end, and what's actually being collected and recorded on sort of the hiring side or the the company side, so that the HR side of the talent acquisition side, and what's ultimately at least in the US being reported on one reports.