PEAK DMC is one of the world's largest, particularly in the experiential area, inbound tour operator. So you've probably never heard of PEAK DMC, and that's fine. That's actually a good thing, because our role as a DMC is to make our tour partners look fantastic. And it's a brand that we represent around the world. I'm the managing director of PEAK DMC, which is part of Intrepid Group. And it means I have one of the biggest jobs in Intrepid Group. I'm personally responsible for 21 DMCs around the world and looking into the further expansion of that. So it's a big business now. But when I started with the group 13 years ago, it wasn't. And we never necessarily had a plan to be the size that we are now. But over those 13 years, we've grown the business from one DMC to 21. We now employ over 450 staff all around the world, and work with over a thousand tour leaders, tour guides, porters, drivers, cooks, and horse men, and horse women. I'm told though, despite having achieved all of this, I'm told that I don't sell my achievements and I don't talk about my achievements nearly as well as my male colleagues do about them. And I think that's one of the really interesting things about women in the workplace. I think sometimes we're not our own best brand ambassadors. And that can either hold us back or not allow us to really reach the levels that we potentially could. I also find it interesting that whenever I am asked to speak alongside my male colleagues, they'll be talking about different things they're doing in business. It's all very interesting. When I'm asked to speak, I'm always asked to speak about what it's like being a female leader. Not a business leader, or on issues about gender diversity. Which is good, because I'm passionate about gender diversity. But it is interesting when I look at the events that my colleagues will be invited to. And whenever I'm talking to a journalist, it's always what is-- what's it like being a female leader. So today, however, isn't necessarily about reflecting on these things. But it is looking at what are some of the tangible actions that we can take, and particularly what actions we've been taking at Intrepid Group and throughout PEAK DMC network. So [? Stramer ?] asked us because we have done a lot of work in gender and diversity in recent years. But it wasn't always the case. It wasn't at the top of our agenda for quite a while. Not that we discriminated against women of course, but we have done a lot of work in the last couple of years to really make sure it is very much at the top of the agenda for us. So today I'm going to talk to you about what we have been changing. And I've broken it down to three stages that they have been overlapping, so it's not each is a distinct phase. But the first really was awareness. The second was then education. And finally, looking at setting some specific targets and goals. So to start at the beginning, how did we become aware of the issue? We had some external influences and some internal influences. We'd worked out that we did have a gender pay gap. And despite having 60% of our workforce being female, we weren't seeing enough of them coming up to the senior level. So we really decided that was something we wanted to start working on and looking at. We also started going through the process of becoming a B corp. Now for those of you not familiar with B corps, B corp is a company that balances purpose with profit. They meet the highest standards in social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability. So Intrepid Group has recently been certified as a B corp, along with six of our DMCs around the world, becoming-- making Intrepid Group the largest B corp in tourism globally. So that's something we're really proud of. Particularly as the process, it's not an easy process. We had to have 23 of our companies rigorously assessed over a number of years. And there was a lot of time, a lot of investment, a lot of reviewing how that process was going, and going back and picking up ideas and improving things as we went through the process. So it wasn't just the B corp certification that made us start-- that raised the awareness, but it certainly helped. At the same time though, we had quite a bit of a ground swell around the world. A lot of our general managers started realizing that perhaps we weren't doing as much as we could have in terms of empowering women, both in the workplace and, more importantly, out in those roles on the road. So particularly out there on the road, tour leaders, tour guides, that's where we found that we really had the biggest gender imbalance with not very many women at all. In many countries, as [? Stramer ?] pointed out earlier, tour leading is seen as a man's job and not suitable for women. Why is this? It's because the going away from home. They're traveling by themselves, away from their family, with strangers, often in the company of men. In many countries, this is seen as a scandal. Places like India and Cambodia, we have had our leaders coming out with very similar comments to what you touched on earlier. For some people, this was a cultural challenge they thought we just had to accept. Culturally, that's the way it is in some countries, and we need to accept it. But gradually, some of our people and some of our general managers-- our general manager in Cambodia said that now he took it upon himself to say we can start doing something to address this cultural challenge. So he started going out and talking to guiding schools, talking to our staff and our contractors, and really looking at what could be done to encourage more female tour leaders out there. And I'll come back to our female tour leaders shortly. So having identified and become aware of this area for us to improve on, we had to start looking at how we're going to educate everybody more. And that's where the unconscious bias training came in. We had a team of senior managers from our business attend a half-day workshop in unconscious bias, and go through that kind of difficult and awkward process of realizing that as much as we might think we don't have any biases and we're doing the right thing in terms of diversity, that actually there is inherent bias in all of us. So going from the awareness stage onto education, we started getting educated in that. We also put that online, and rolled it out around the world for all of our people globally. As a result, going on from that unconscious bias training, we started thinking what else can we stop putting in place as a business. And the first place we started then was recruitment. Looking at whenever we're recruiting roles, we must if we have applicants who are both male and female and who meet the criteria, we must make sure we take at least somebody from each gender through to the recruitment process. In the final round of recruitment, we must have interviewers from both genders to start addressing this issue of unconscious bias. So that was one of the key takeaways that we took from that training. We also launched a women's leadership forum. So this is now an annual event we hold for three days with women from around the world. And this was last year in Cambodia. We had 12 women from six different departments across five different countries all come together and meet with the senior female leaders of the business to talk about things like commercial insights, to talk about how they might put themselves forward, and really start talk-- trying to address who will be the future leadership of our business. Coming out of the women's leadership forum last year, we always try and get one major takeaway that we can then go and embed into the business. And so last year we decided to-- well, the participants decided that a mentoring, a formal mentoring process would really be helpful to them. So that has since been implemented. We're just starting on the third round of formal mentoring. And that's really been a great learning experience for both the mentors and the mentees who they've been talking through. Finally, we started setting some goals. Obviously, having goals, what measures gets done. And goals get everybody within the business moving in the same direction, motivate the team to really do more, and hold us accountable. So one of the goals that we set was around this issue of female leaders that I was talking to earlier. So in March last year, Intrepid Group CEO James Thornton publicly committed to the fact that we would double the number of female leaders working for us by 2020. So the work that we had initially done in Cambodia, looking at how we could bring more women on, and one of those steps was also looking at the recruitment, making sure they were male and female interviewers, it also involved going around actually talking to families and allowing families to be more supportive of their daughters going out to the world. And that really started getting the attention of other general managers. This initiative then spread to India, and then onto other DMCs of ours around the world. The numbers of female leaders. We had 153 leaders in March 2017 when we committed to doubling the number. By March this year, we had already got to 206 female leaders. That was a 36% increase. That has increased again. And I'm absolutely confident we'll reach the target. And I'm hopeful that we'll reach it well before 2020, which was our original plan. Other things we've done through this initiative with female leaders. We've been gaining a lot of interest. We've had some of our amazing women on the covers of publications such as Guardian and National Geographic. And this lady is [? Ushanari, ?] one of our two leaders from southern India. She was not only our first female leader from southern India, she was the first tour leader who was female in all of southern India for all companies. We brought her out to Sydney, Australia to talk with the women in travel awards. And she told the gathering that three years earlier, she had never even met a foreigner. When she told her mother she was going to Sydney, her mother asked, is that New Delhi? But it's great. Her story was absolutely fabulous. And it also turns out that after she joined us as a tour leader, so did her husband. So therefore, she had that support. Following on from the success in India and other parts of Asia, our general manager in Morocco, [? Zena ?] [? Benchek, ?] decided that she wanted to do more in Morocco. Previously, we were told culturally it's just not going to happen in Morocco. But she realized one of the problems was there weren't even very many licensed guides who were female in Morocco. So she had to go lobby the government. And she lobbied the government, and actually got them to put on additional testing to allow more women to become accredited. And I now believe we are, the company, the destination management company in Morocco, that has the most female leaders. And I certainly know that we're attracting female leaders, because they are hearing about us and now proactively coming to us, which is fantastic. Continuing on. I just heard this afternoon that we have just tripled the number of female leaders in Egypt to nine leaders. So this is something. Going through the awareness and the education, we are really starting to see this ground swell going on around the world. Now, however, we're looking at the next stage. Not just leaders, but other roles, such as drivers. Which leads me to the final part of the presentation, which is a short film from our team in Kenya. And I really love this, because it's inspiring to see what our wonderful team member Becky is doing, but also the role that men in that office have actually helped in getting her there. [BEGIN VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Becky, and I'm a single mother of a son called Louis. I longed to be a truck driver since I was a young girl. And this was because my dad was a truck driver [MUSIC PLAYING] Becky is the first female overland truck driver in east Africa. I love my job. [LAUGHTER] I drive my travellers or guests to national parks to see wildlife. OK, my guests. In front of us, we have white rhinos. At first, men used to give me a hard time. I used to be very bullied. Every place that we go to, yes, they will react. First time I came here, I was so shocked to see a lady driving the truck. A lot of companies call me, say George, there's a lady driving your vehicle. I said yeah. They said how? What do you mean how? She-- you saw her driving it. They said, does she fix it? I said yeah, she drives her truck and then service her truck on this side of the road. She changes tires. People think she's supposed to be back in the village or in the house cooking for husband or cooking for kids. They would even come and block me in the front. Like in Tanzania, they scream. Those ones will tell me, Becky, you are not supposed to be driving a truck. You are a woman. Why should you? Can't you go home and do something better? Maybe take care of your family. Anything to make me feel like I'm not supposed to do this. Plus our men who are like, I don't think she should be in the truck that I'm in. That day, I think I cried half of the day. And I had never cried before. [MUSIC PLAYING] George, he's the-- he's one of the person that I will never forget. Because if it was not for his encouragement then, I was to quit. [MUSIC PLAYING] Becky I'd been like, don't lose hope. You'll find challenges. People talk bad about you, but you keep strong and you'll make it. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] is believe in yourself. [MUSIC PLAYING] I was very new so she helped me with some tips for the road. And I just wished for her to carry me, take me for a ride. And it was awesome. I think she drives it like she was born with it. She knows the truck inside out. She does what I can do. She's one of us. She's no different from anyone. [LAUGHTER] I have been driving trucks for Intrepid for the last six years. Becky's very famous. The police know her. Even the border, they see her they're like, bring it. She comes here in the office and everybody's chatting up with her. And she has to run away. I've work to do. She's part of our family, and we're really proud of her. My daughter. She loves Becky so much because of driving trucks. She call her Auntie Becky. One day, I'd like to drive like Auntie Becky. I said, even you can drive if you want to. Just have the courage, determination, and you'll make it through. People think she has triumphed. She has done what other females do not accomplish. [MUSIC PLAYING] I just told her once, Mom, do you know what? I'm driving a truck. She was like, oh my goodness. So she looks up and says, I wish your dad can see you. She had made a lot of companies think about employing female drivers now. So we're looking forward to have another second driver, lady driver. Just all because of Becky. She encourages a lot of women now. A lot of women are looking for that to do, driving. They say I'm a go-getter. You'll get it. You'll get whatever you want. I'm proud to say that we have the first female driver in east Africa. And that is Becky. [MUSIC PLAYING] [END VIDEO PLAYBACK] [APPLAUSE] And I'm proud to say that Delphine, our second female driver, has now been on the road for quite a few months. Thanks very much.