Diversity in workspace. An online discussion with Afroditi Panagiotakou

What is stopping us from having inclusive workplaces? How can we acknowledge and overcome the conscious and unconscious biases that exist?

The Director of Culture at the Onassis Foundation, Afroditi Panagiotakou, will be speaking with Google’s Regional General Manager for Southeast Europe, Peggy Antonakou, about inclusivity and diversity in the workplace – two values that lie at the heart of everything the Onassis Foundation does, and find expression within the organization’s own work environment. A representative initiative is the award-winning “We Are Hiring Your Ideas, Not Your ID” communication campaign promoting new job openings at the Onassis Group, which encouraged candidates to submit their details without revealing their age, nationality, or gender.

Google’s #IamRemarkable initiative is an open, online event that includes seminars, talks, workshops, and other motivating and empowering activities. For a second consecutive year, Google Greece is inviting distinguished speakers from various fields to share their stories and inspire the public, especially with their respective standpoints. Among the luminaries taking part in this year’s Google #IamRemarkable initiative are: Maria Syrengela, Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, responsible for demography, family policy, and gender equality; Kostas Bakoyannis, Mayor of Athens; Christina Sarri, author and Greece’s first blind BookTuber; and Steve Vranakis, Executive Creative Director at Google Creative Lab.

The idea for #IamRemarkable sprang from inside Google itself, with the aim of empowering its own personnel and encouraging women to take up more leadership roles. The results were so remarkable that Google decided to share this initiative with the general public. Google’s strategic partner in this initiative is MExoxo, which seeks to unleash women’s socio-economic potential, educating, empowering, and connecting more than 6,000 women across 16 countries since 2013. They too specialize in matters of diversity and inclusion, with the help of Google.org. To this end, the #IamRemarkable initiative is mainly aimed at underrepresented groups, with a view to raising awareness about the importance of self-promotion and self-confidence.