As a global company striving to develop ways to engage, attract and retain women - Schneider Electric has now joined the UK wide Working Forward campaign, an initiative of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
The campaign which focusses on supporting pregnant women and new mothers is backed by some of the UK’s leading businesses and industry bodies.
Schneider Electric's Diversity and Inclusion lead, Francesca Stone, believes joining the campaign was a no-brainer, particularly when she was recommended to it by a fellow diversity manager at another top company. "Joining was an easy decision for us. Although we already belong to other partnerships such as the United Nations HeForShe movement, we wanted to join Working Forward to benefit from other employers’ experiences as well as share some of our own learnings along the way," she explains. "We are proud of our retention figures but have set a target of 42% female representation in the business by 2018 and won’t achieve this without working with our peers. For us this isn’t a HR ‘programme’ but a key part of our business strategy to help us build an inclusive and high performing company."
Attracting and retaining impressive women
Schneider Electric's diversity approach is built on a four pillar strategy to include women at every level of the company. Culturally it has senior support from the top of the organisation led by its President Jean-Pascal Tricoire who has made sure that the senior leadership team are right behind it. By offering gender workshops for its leaders, women in leadership programmes, a women returners’ programme, inclusion ambassadors and a flexible working policy for not only mothers but fathers too, Schneider Electric is steadily increaasing the number of female employees from 26% to 36.5%.
Opportunities with great support at Schneider Electric
As a global leader with 180 years of heritage in energy management, automation, software and services, employing around 20,000 across 130 countries, Schneider Electric is proud to have attracted over 23,000 women in the last 3 years. If you are interested in joining this innovative and supportive employer, why not take a look at their exciting opportunities.
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Disclosure: Where Women Work researches and publishes insightful evidence about how its paid member organizations support women's equality.