In the engineering industry’s battle to attract and retain more women, individual victories are well-worth celebrating and learning from.
Take global infrastructure firm AECOM, which recently announced it had boosted its proportion of senior female leaders from 10% to 12.6%, and achieved a fifty-fifty gender balance in its graduate intake for the first time.
Between May 2015 and May 2016, AECOM also reduced the gender pay gap by 3.4% across its 2750 Australian employees.
These milestones, achieved during an intensive 12-month campaign, earned AECOM the Engineers Australia Most Outstanding Company in Gender Diversity Award in August.
The company’s Australia and New Zealand Chief Executive, Lara Poloni, says they are still working toward the ultimate goal of doubling the number of female leaders by 2020.
“Doubling our group of senior female leaders by 2020 was a real stretch target when we made it as part of our 2015 Gender Pay Strategy, especially in an industry with a small talent pool of senior women, but we are well on our way to achieving it,” she says.
Poloni emphasizes that promotions are not given to people just on the basis of their gender– rather, all employees’ progress according to a merit-based performance and rewards system.
“We have had to be bolder in the market to get more than our fair share of senior female hires,” she says.
“Considering the low representation of women studying STEM subjects in Australia, I’m very proud of the 2017 graduate recruitment intake of 119, where we have managed to achieve a fifty-fifty gender split for the very first time – with 100% gender pay equity.”
As part of its push toward gender balance, employees engaged in unconscious bias awareness training, were given increased workplace flexibility and were given access to mentoring circles.
“Systems and policies are relatively easy to change when it’s being driven by an executive group that believe diversity and inclusion is a key enabler of our future success,” Helen Fraser, HR Director for Australia and New Zealand says.
“However, the cultural change takes longer and can be harder to quantify. We know that we have to maintain high engagement at all levels and celebrate the right behaviours, especially amongst our people managers.
“We have also had to be sensitive to our female employees, who want to be valued and recognised for their capabilities, promoted on their merits and not as part of a gender equity strategy.”
Fraser says while there is still work to be done, she is confident AECOM is moving in the right direction.
“We are also taking steps to create a workplace that is truly flexible and rewards our people for outputs not hours on a timesheet, encouraging flexible work arrangements for all employees and adapting the performance and reward framework to support,” she says.