Gender Equality

Gender Equality Process Overview on the example of SWW Wunsiedel GmbH

What and why?

The Gender Equality Plan (GEP) is a collection and evaluation of gender-specific company data with the aim of uncovering and compensating for any gender inequalities. Today we experience that, especially in the field of research, there is an imbalance between men and women which cannot be simply explained with the different sizes of pools of applicants. Meaning that most companies claim that there are only few female applicants compared to male ones. But it has shown that other non-male genders tend to be less motivated in male dominated domains or even leave them due to micro-aggressions, values which do not match their lifestyle, discrimination, harassment and assigned tasks which do not result in a promotion or leading positions. It is consequently not only a problem of smaller applicant numbers but also a structural one. This, the GEP wants to tackle for that all genders have the same opportunities and support in a company.

The process of the SWW GEP

As first step diverse data referring to the following areas were collected:

  1. Work-life balance and organizational culture;
  2. Gender balance in leadership and decision-making;
  3. Gender equality in hiring and career development;
  4. Integration of the gender dimension in research and teaching content

In a second step a survey to portray the feelings, opinions, experiences and wishes of all employees was recently started. The survey is running and starting from the beginning, the interest and response to completed questionnaires is high.

According to the results possible goals and matching measures will be discussed internally and action points will be prioritized to draw up a plan of implementing adjustments. Possible examples of such adjustments are: equal duration and social acceptance of parental leave for all genders, gender-neutral job advertisements, and much more.

Finally, a document is created from this data, which includes data explanation and evaluation, uncovered inequalities as well as planned measures in order to achieve jointly defined goals for the company in the area of ​​gender equality. A version of the GEP is signed by top management after it has been created and will then be published on the company's website.

After this, the implementation of the GEP over two years will begin. During this time, relevant data is collected to monitor and evaluate the progress achieved and to give indications on which to include in the following GEP.

Sophia Rohbogner und Lisa Ben Baruch