Friday Faves - What We're Reading This Week - Ripple Effect Group

Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive.

Remote Work Meetup: Flexible Work with David Shirley

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Have you registered for our next remote work meetup on Friday 28 August (8am AEST)? We’ll be discussing embedding and normalising flexible work practices with special guest David Shirley, Partner & Co-Founder at Flex We Are. We’ve had some great discussions at past meetups and this one will be no different – we’d love you to join in the conversation! RSVP on meetup (link below) to secure your spot.

See you next Friday!

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/Remote-Working-Meetup-Group/events/hhgcrrybclblc/

Gender pay gap 2020

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Jakkii says: This year’s Australian gender pay gap statistics are out, and as always they make for depressing reading.

The national gender pay gap is calculated by WGEA using data from the ABS.

Currently, Australia’s national gender pay gap is 14.0%. (emphasis added)

The impact of covid is obviously an unknown quantity particularly heading into next year’s statistics, and I’m not optimistic about that – there have been a number of articles written on the subject of women and covid that are certainly cause for concern, if not straight up alarm. The ABC reported in May that women were bearing the biggest brunt of job losses, while both the World Economic Forum and Unicef declared coronavirus a backwards step for gender equality. RMIT has tried to quantify the impact on women’s financial health, while UN Women have an entire segment of their website dedicated to the impact of covid on women and girls.

As the yearly results of the gender pay gap assessment show, there is still so much work to be done to achieve parity – and it seems likely covid will only make that work harder and longer.

Read: https://www.wgea.gov.au/data/fact-sheets/australias-gender-pay-gap-statistics-2020

Digitising burning man

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Jakkii says: This is a great read on adapting to overcome. One of the obvious impacts of the coronavirus is that most festivals around the world have been cancelled – large gatherings of people aren’t exactly on most lists of ‘safe things to do in a pandemic’. One such impacted festival is Burning Man, which has been held annually since 1986 and in 2019 attracted almost 80,000 participants. I’m sure a Burner would step in here and point out that it’s more than just a festival, and they’d be right – effectively a temporary city is erected each year for the festival, and deconstructed and removed at the end of the event. It’s also a community, with clearly defined and stated principles:

Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy

So what do you do with a huge group of people who want to come together, not just because they like going to Burning Man, but because they are a community? You do what everyone else is trying to do with connecting their people to work and learn from home – you digitise the event so people can participate remotely. This TechCrunch article is a great exploration of their thinking, the challenges, and what they’ve built to try to deliver some sort of an experience in 2020, albeit digital, and what they’re thinking about in terms of the future.

We may not all be trying to distill an enormous festival, community and temporary city into a digital experience, but most of our workplaces are grappling with how to move from crisis mode to the ‘next normal’ with hybrid models and remote workers, and keep the workplace community, culture and alive. It’s a relatable problem, and there just might be something to learn from the Burning Man approach.

Read: https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/12/digitizing-burning-man/

Shooting Masks Onto People’s Faces

An American problem needs American solutions!

Jakkii says: this is a surprisingly entertaining video (just under 10min) in which the creator, Allen Pan, builds a “mask gun” (or mask launcher as it is mostly referred to throughout the video to avoid the ‘g’ word) to shoot (or launch) masks onto people’s faces. It’s a bit of fun with a serious underlying message – do your bit for public safety and wear your mask when you’re around others.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa6BlJlrL-k

Around the house

here i am, ready to take on the week!!! pic.twitter.com/bB78QwkiIU

— Anne T. Donahue (@annetdonahue) August 10, 2020

Jakkii says: it’s Friday, almost the weekend, some feeling fairly ‘normal’ and some are still in fairly strict lockdown. Whichever scenario you might be facing, we hope you’re staying safe and healthy and looking after your mental health too.

Here are some ways to entertain yourself at home this week:

Friday Funnies

me, to plumber: I’m so sorry about the cat, he thinks everyone is his best friend
plumber: it’s okay, I’m used to people’s cats.
::two minutes later, from the other room::
plumber: mister smitten, you are a born plumber; after this we will get a nice sandwich.

— Fiona Zublin (@bear_foot) February 1, 2019

Everything I know about the stock market is from accidentally googling 2 or 3 letters when I meant to type in a full website

— Ashley Hamilton (@AshleyHammm) August 12, 2020