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

Gender equality initiatives 111
In the Automobile Division, between 1999 and year-end 2008, the percentage of
workstations rated as “heavy” declined from 35 % to 11 % of the total, while the
percentage of “light” workstations increased from 26 % to 49 %. At PCA France, in the
same period, the share of women employees could be raised from 13.6 % to 17.4 %;
the share of women operators augmented from 13.4 % in 2003 to 16.2 % at the yearend
2008 while the share of women in management also rose from 16.0 % to 18.2 % in
that period. The share of women in the workforce at PCA France has continuously
been rising in that period.
At Motorola Inc., in fields where the company sees a lack of gender distribution, e. g.
when pure male organisational units are detected, the managers are fully supported
to increase diversity in these teams. The programme Inclusive that is operated at
Manpower Inc. in Sweden has a similar purpose by aiming at equal shares of men and
women throughout the company and in particular in managerial and higher positions.
As many other multinational companies, Toyota Motor Europe NV/SA has developed
and implemented a monitoring system to observe the share of women in different
hierarchical positions over time. The company then seeks to ensure gender equality
by training and promoting women for internal career advancement (target quotas for
women have been set for a range of positions). The so called Diversity Cockpit that has
been elaborated at Henkel AG, is a monitoring tool to examine gender, age and
nationality distributions within the company and within management positions.
Royal Dutch Shell plc assesses the potential of all their employees (men and women)
according to the 3 main characteristics (internally the approach is referred to as CAR):
capacity (intellectual capacity/"thinking"), achievement ("doing") and relationships
("people"). Although the same assessment process is used for men and for women,
different behaviour of men and women is accounted for and people become aware
of their potential biases.
Every year BP International Ltd. goes through a talent review process that considers
issues such as women and minorities on succession plans (are there some/enough,
why/why not, in which positions are they, what development plans were put in place for
them, etc.). To improve the careers of female and minority employees, BP focuses on
training managers and also HR in helping to understand some of the unconscious
biases that can come into decision making, e. g. about whom to promote or whom to
recruit. BP International Ltd. has the opinion that particular attention needs to be paid to
spotting good women and giving them opportunities to progress; as it has been noticed
that, in general, women to a lower extent than men network and push themselves
forward in an organisation.
Similar to what has been described in the section on recruiting Sodexo S.A. has also
recognised that in many cases there is a gap between aptitudes and educational background
of a person. Therefore the company, rather than promoting only persons with
adequate educational background, has developed a specific Skills Training Programme
to equip high-performing women in operations (e. g. working in cantinas) who
lack the relevant formation with additional skills that prepare them to be promoted as
site managers.