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

Gender equality initiatives 87
In the UK, two charters deal with women in science and technology. The approx. 70
“CEO Charter” signatories demonstrate a commitment from the CEO and top management
to implement a positive culture change to increase the participation and progression
of women in science, engineering and technology (SET). This entails to
actively support the increase of women in SET, to develop and communicate the
business case for gender equality within their company, to promote their approach and
to develop clearly defined strategies and implement practices. To this aim, the
enterprises have set measures such as taking part in benchmarking surveys, assessing
their company culture, setting up mentoring and networking schemes and offering
gender equality staff training. 35 universities and research institutes have signed the
“Athena SWAN Charter for Women in Science”, an initiative originally developed in the
framework of EQUAL, and include therefore six principles in their action plan: to
address gender inequalities, to tackle the unequal representation of women in science,
to examine the implications of absence of diversity at management level, to address the
high loss rate of women in science, to recognise the negative consequences of the
system of short term contracts for women and to consider the structural obstacles to
women in an academic career. A similar memorandum signed by different stakeholders
(among them business organisations, trade unions and individual companies) in
Germany supports the increase of women in the fields of mathematics, informatics,
sciences and technology.
Besides these initiatives tackling the horizontal segregation of the labour market, in
Denmark five private and five public employers drafted a charter dealing with the
vertical segregation. The ministry for gender equality launched the charter as no
consensus on gender quotas had been reached in parliament and the political majority
seemed to favour measures supporting initiatives which can be followed by voluntary
means.
The “Charter for flere kvinder i ledelse” (charter for more women in management)
has been signed by 64 mostly large enterprises who commit themselves to undertake
concrete efforts to bring more women into management positions, more specifically
• to prepare a plan or strategy to attract more women into management positions
or maintain an equal balance and to launch initiatives to this end;
• to develop and set goals and/or target figures for the number of women in
management, for the proportion of women at selected executive levels to be
achieved within a fixed time period or for the proportion of women in talent pools
or in the management pipeline;
• to support a human resources policy that promotes equal career opportunities
for women and men;
• to ensure that appointment and recruitment procedures help identify women
with leadership potential and thus attract both women and men candidates in
internal and external recruitment drives;
• to set a minimum number of women candidates if the company uses headhunters
for management recruitment;
• to create conditions for women to develop their careers through networks,
mentoring programmes and other targeted initiatives;