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

Gender equality initiatives 7
behavioural patterns of men and women) and to comprehensive career development
programmes as well as systems to ensure equal pay. Besides having a reporting
system and monitoring the figures, the companies analysed find it crucial to detect and
understand the reasons behind career breaks of women in order to react adequately
and elaborate targeted initiatives.
Training: Enterprises often use training on diversity and inclusion issues (that also
includes gender equality) to familiarise new employees with the company’s diversity
culture. Specific training on gender issues for managers may help to become conscious
of personal biases and develop strategies to overcome these. Many of the more comprehensive
initiatives to enable gender equality in a company include such trainings.
There are also measures that can be used in other fields of training, i. e. to provide
training in a way that is supportive to gender equality. Some of the enterprises analysed
in this study have set minimum training targets for all their employees or make sure that
their trainee programmes have a fairly good distribution of men and women.
It has been noted by the companies that training is often designed in a way that
appears to suit men more than women. Among the measures to design a training
that also accounts for the exigencies of women are e. g. considering both “male” and
“female” learning patterns, considering male and female trainers as well as determining
appropriate training mode, time and learning environment. Training is also used to
promote gender equality in other fields of intervention, e. g. women specific training in
career development.
Networks: While in most companies internal networks of women, respectively of
women and men, have emerged to serve the purpose of gender equality, there are also
examples of companies that start networking activities for women by participating in
external women’s networks.
There are mainly networking approaches that concentrate on a certain hierarchical
level (e. g. on women in management respectively men and women in management
supporting gender equality), but networks that allow for membership from any
hierarchical level could also be identified.
Networks often act as drivers for the development of new strategies to promote
gender equality, they have proven very useful to raise and share information among
members (e. g. about fields that require action), discuss priorities and develop action
plans. Some rather powerful company internal women networks are described in this
study. Networking may also be applied as means to support career progression of
women, e. g. when different hierarchical levels are brought together. Several
mentoring programmes follow this approach.
Communication: Clear and concise internal and external communication about an
enterprise’s gender equality approach (in general within the corporate diversity and
inclusion policy) is crucial to impart a reliable and sustainable picture of a companies’
corporate identity and values. Among the measures to support this are e. g. written
statements by the Board that show the commitment to the issue (the identification of
the top level with the issue is crucial) but also internal Codes of Conduct or Agreements
with external parties (such as unions). In this context, many companies have also
become more gender sensitive towards their external appearance (and their
advertising).