International Women’s Day: Inspiring Inclusion in the workplace

One of our values at the Foundation is being inclusive and we are committed to creating a workplace where everyone is valued and can fulfil their potential. With the theme of International Women’s Day 2024 being #InspireInclusion, we wanted to share our progress towards being an inclusive organisation and highlight the impact this has had on women in particular.

We looked at the barriers that women commonly face, especially those who face other forms of discrimination such as ableism, and considered how we can support women better in the workplace so that they feel valued and supported.

Making recruitment more inclusive

As an HR team, we have been reviewing our recruitment practices and how we can make them more inclusive and give everyone the best chance of doing well.

Some of the changes we’ve made over the last few years to achieve this include:

• providing interview questions in advance, we started by sharing them 15 minutes before the interview, now we share them when we invite people to interview
• asking work-based questions instead of requesting traditional cover letters so that we can focus on people’s experience that is relevant to the role rather than prioritising writing skills, particularly for roles where this is not essential
• moving towards values-based interviews so we can prioritise shared values rather than experience alone
• offering different ways of supporting people during the process such as note takers during interviews

All of these changes enable people to highlight their skills and experiences that do not always get recognised through traditional interview methods. This benefits women as traditional methods can often be biased in favour of male candidates, and allowing flexibility around interviews also supports people with caring responsibilities.

We have worked to ensure that we are using gender-neutral language in our job adverts to attract candidates of all genders and avoid inadvertently perpetuating gender stereotypes. We have also minimised the number of recruitment criteria in job descriptions, as we know women are more likely than men to rule themselves out of job roles if they do not meet all the criteria and/or may not have had access to the same educational and professional opportunities.

We have signed up to the ‘show the salary’ pledge and show our salaries on all our job adverts for transparency. This avoids scenarios where getting a competitive salary is reliant on how good you are at negotiating – men have historically tended to negotiate more than women, and this can increase gender pay gaps over time.

Being transparent about our progress

Across the Foundation we have a good representation of women on our Board of Trustees and in management. However, our senior leadership team is still male-dominated, and we will be considering how we might be able to balance this through internal learning and development as well as through our external recruitment practices.

Last year we published our gender pay gap data (as well as our ethnicity and disability pay gap data) as we want to be transparent about our progress and the areas we still need to improve in. We will continue to monitor our progress and make changes to our recruitment processes and policies to reduce our pay gaps.

Since 2020, we have moved to hybrid working and we now have a flexible working policy. There are no core hours, so our employees can work at times that suit them. This benefits a lot of people, but can be especially beneficial for women with caring responsibilities or women going through the menopause.

Looking ahead to how we want to continue to support women in the workplace, we will be looking at how to better support women through the menopause, focusing on how we can support internal promotion, reviewing our family friendly policies and considering what more we can do to equalise pay for all.

International Women's Day 8 March 2024 | #IWD2024 | #InspireInclusion | www.internationalwomensday.com