Study on non-legislative initiatives for companies to promote gender ...

Gender equality initiatives 103
Siemens AG relies on assessment centres with assessors of both genders to avoid
gender biased results and to give male as well as female applicants the feeling that
they may succeed. At Royal Dutch Shell plc, interesting persons may be recruited
although there might not be a specific position available for them at that point in
time. Nevertheless, these persons can benefit from getting acquainted to the company
and as soon as an adequate position is available (or has been created) they can take
over responsibilities. The company has noticed that such a procedure that values the
qualifications and aptitudes of a person and that is conducted without the time pressure
to fill a specific position has proven beneficial to recruiting more women.
To conclude this section on recruitment, an outstanding approach that is pursued by
Motorola Inc. in Poland shall be presented; although it starts well before actual
recruitment. Having realised that they are not able to recruit the share of women they
would be willing to for software engineering positions within the Motorola Software
Development Centre in Poland, the company in 2000 started their Diversity 29 Programme
that consists of a competition among high school teams of mixed gender on a
technical subject and of online training. In the past years the share of women who
chose technical studies in Poland has continuously been rising and Motorola Inc.
perspectives to recruit well educated female software engineers are ameliorating.
When the manager of the Krakow Software Centre realised that despite the clear
commitments to a (gender) diverse workforce and to support women at the workplace
with careers, they were not able to recruit as many qualified women as they wanted
to, the company sought to go one step further and tries to solve the cause of this lack of
women in IT education (i. e. the traditional barriers preventing young Polish women
from pursuing software engineering or other technical careers).
Therefore, the Krakow Software Centre elaborated and introduced the Diversity Project,
an educational programme and competition aimed at increasing gender diversity
among future software engineers. The project is designed to encourage young people,
and girls in particular, to consider pursuing computer studies and to show them the
advantages of work in this field. Motorola Inc. is collaborating with school boards and
technical universities in the implementation of the project.
The Diversity Project is launched on an annual basis. Every edition is created, prepared
and maintained by Motorola employees. The task of the project is to create a web
page, each year on a different subject. The project is based on the competition
between schools, actually between teams of pupils. Women have to make up for at
least half of the team, but there also has to be at least one man per team. The best
projects are awarded according to 3 categories (interface, graphic design and content);
a forth award comes from internet voting of all those who have participated. The jury
does not reward the utilisation of expensive photography, etc. on the web pages.
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The term „diversity” is used as synonym for „gender diversity” in Poland.