4 Good places for women to work

There is clear momentum behind the recruitment of women into STEM occupations, driven by support from the senior management of major UK companies and by evidence from McKinsey & Company’s research into the business benefits of a gender diverse workforce (Hunt et al, 2015). This research correlates a company’s financial performance with the gender diversity of its organisation and demonstrates a competitive advantage of diverse organisations compared to less diverse peers companies.

In 2014 WISE convened a group of STEM industry leaders with a brief to develop a process that would guide enlightened companies along a journey from a commitment to gender diversity to actual accomplishment; this brief was supported by the government via the Cabinet Office (WISE, 2014. The output, the WISE Industry-led Ten Steps, has been committed to by 40 chairs/chief executives of major STEM employers in the UK. These companies are fully committed to creating a workplace environment that supports women’s retention and progression. You can find their details on the WISE website [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

Watch Sarah Golding of Bechtel talking about the company’s diversity policies and its use of the WISE Ten Steps.

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SARAH GOLDING

So the way we've approached diversity is kind of how you would approach any other part of the business. We've decided to get corporate goals that the business actually sets for diversity and inclusion objectives, which then are rolled down throughout the business.

And the group that I'm involved with is called Women at Bechtel. So that is a forum for females within Bechtel, offering support on a range of issues.

And we actually have our own goals, and we've linked up with a company called WISE. And so we follow their Ten Steps programme, and what we've done is we’ve broken the ten steps down into lines of operations. And we have champions for each area.

The area I look after is mentoring and sponsorship. So that's increasing the transparency of females up in the career progression, the mentoring and the sponsoring side of it.

So last year we decided to run a number of events. We did something called speed mentoring, where we actually had 70 individuals in the room where they had six nine-minute conversations, and had that chance to meet senior leaders within the business.

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