IT’S 2069 and women throughout the UK are wildly celebrating the fact that they have finally achieved pay parity with male colleagues. This is not a feminist plot re-write for Back to the Future, but a sad reality unless we collectively as a country, as businesses, and as individuals recognise that we still have major barriers to overcome in the workplace when it comes to women being treated as equals.

I am often challenged on the need to continue to campaign and promote gender equality with examples including “We’ve got a female First Minister and a female Prime Minister and two other female party leaders in Scotland, surely we’ve got equality fixed?”. Or people cite legislation claiming that women are no longer treated unfairly in the workplace.

In response to these challenges I find that the facts tend to work to convince the doubters that change is not happening fast enough.

In Scotland women earn £183 per week less than men. No Scottish company in the FTSE-100 is run by a woman. Three in every four women will experience some form of discrimination because they are pregnant or a new mother. Five per cent of engineers in Scotland are female and the industry faces a skills shortage. Seventeen per cent of employees in the information and communication technology (ICT ) industry are women. Women account for 76 per cent of all part-time workers in Scotland.

Following the facts comes the question of what can we do about it?

The challenges are great and complex and cannot be solved by one simple solution. If there was a magic wand that could be waved to accelerate change believe it would already have been done.

We need a change of mindset at school and in the home to encourage more girls to study maths and physics and consider a career in engineering or technology. We need to look at our culture of work and how rewards and success are identified – unconscious bias is real and plays out in our workplaces every day. We need to encourage more men to stand up and ask for shared leave or flexible working – almost invariably caring responsibilities for children or elderly relatives defaults to women.

At GenAnalytics we have recognised that men play a vital role in overcoming this challenge yet their views and opinions are often overlooked. That is why we undertook the first ever survey on male attitudes to gender equality in Scotland and the results are insightful: 73 per cent of men surveyed did not believe we had achieved gender equality in the workplace in Scotland, with a further 63 per cent stating it also had not been achieved in their industry sector. Yet a majority of respondents believed that greater diversity was very important to the future of the business that they work in. Anecdotal evidence gleaned throughout the research suggested there was still an “old boys” network at the top of companies, that people continued to hire in their own image, that a culture of inertia had set in and that this diversity is not a high enough business priority to force change.

With companies facing continued financial pressures and economic uncertainty we must continue to sell the business case for gender equality and change our language from nice-to-do to essential for business performance and growth.

This year, individual company analysis of the gender pay gap will come into force with new reporting legislation. In certain sectors we expect that gap to be high especially when bonuses come into consideration as part of the reporting mechanism. However, in order to move the needle, we need to know the starting point and this legislation will hopefully shift diversity up the business priority radar. After all what gets measured gets done.

Encouragingly our survey highlights that 46 per cent of men believed that this legislation would help to reduce inequality.

We still have a long road ahead of us. However, diversity is now on many company’s agendas and will only continue to grow in importance. We have only focused on gender equality in this article and still need to have a serious conversation about the opportunities for people with a disability in the workplace, on the lack of ethnic minorities in our businesses and the continued workforce challenges experienced by many LGBT people.

Equality is an economic issue – our society and our businesses will benefit if we can accelerate change and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to achieve their potential. Issues raised in this article will be examined at the Diversity Conference for Scotland, whichtakes place place on May 23 at the Radisson Blu in Glasgow . To book please visit http:/newsquestscotlandevents.com/events/the-diversity-conference.