Lisa Annese
CEO at Diversity Council Australia
Lisa Annese has been the Chief Executive Officer of Diversity Council Australia since 2 June 2014. In this role, she leads debate on diversity and inclusion in the public arena and produces seminal and original pieces of evidence based research that influence the way business and governments respond to matters relating to gender, race and culture, LGBT, age and Indigenous exclusion and inclusion.
In 2018, Lisa was named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. In 2019, she was elected to the Board of Amnesty International Australia. Lisa is also Executive Producer of DCA’s podcast, The Art of Inclusion.
Lisa has had a long career in the diversity and inclusion space across the corporate, government and not-for-profit sector. And some of her career highlights include advocating for policy action in areas including government funded paid parental leave and closing the gender pay gap; presenting DCA’s leading research internationally; developing the first ever census of ‘Australian Women in Leadership’ while at the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, and co-authoring “Chief Executives Unplugged: CEO’s Get Real About Women in the Workplace”.
Takes part in
Class at Work – Does Social Class Impact Inclusion at Work?
Over the last thirty years, researchers and diversity and inclusion practitioners have begun to challenge inequalities in workplaces through D&I initiatives and programs for a range of diverse groups. But for the most part, they haven’t attempted to answer the question of whether an individual’s social class makes a difference in their experience of inclusion.
At the Diversity Council Australia, we asked this question as part of our biennial national survey on the State of Inclusion. What we found was that despite the enduring myth of Australia as the land of the opportunity, that social class does in fact make a difference for individuals and their experience of being included in the workplace. We found was strong evidence that people from self-identified lower classes experience more exclusion, discrimination and harassment than people from higher classes.
Lisa Annese
Kostiantyn Gridin