Today, March 8th, we celebrate the International Women's Day. This day aims to give visibility and raise awareness of the differences and difficulties suffered by women and other minorities, still today, in the workplace.
Some data that we want to highlight is that, in Catalonia, women earn 23% less than men (source: INE. Encuesta anual de estructura salarial, 2017), or the fact that only 34% of managerial positions in Spain are occupied by women (source: INFOMA. Presencia de mujeres en la empresa española, 2021). In addition, it is also necessary to notice the difficulties of reconciling work and family life, which usually have greater weight in the female gender.
What can your company do to help?
A few years ago, the EQUALITY PLAN FOR COMPANIES was created in Spain. The plan's mission is to analyze how the company works while making visible and improving aspects of inequality through recommendations and proposals. Although now it is only mandatory in companies with more than 50 workers, everyone must work to reach a situation where there is no discrimination of any kind.
One of Axxon's values is to ensure equal opportunities and a better future. Therefore, we have had an active equality plan for almost 10 years to ensure gender equality and awareness in our team aiming to help reach a parity society.
What does the business equality plan include?
The objective of the equality plan is to carry out an analysis of the company's situation and, thus, establish different measures to promote equal treatment and opportunities among all people through a document.
To collect all the information and experiences within the company, you must prepare a permanent equality committee. In this committee, there will be both representatives of the company and representatives of the workers. The more diverse this committee is, the better. There should be different points of view from the company, so the entire staff feels represented. Therefore, ideally, it should be made up of people of all genders and from different departments. In addition, it can be subject to changes, since it adapts to the needs and possibilities of each company, and it is progressive.
The idea is that, once true equality is achieved, the equality plan is no longer necessary.
How to implement it?
For its correct implementation, we recommend you contact specialists on the subject or obtain more information through official documents. Nonetheless, our goal is to show you how it works so you can consider applying it to your company.
1. Commitment of the organization
To begin with, the highest positions of the company must commit to the plan, which includes established points such as the integration of equal opportunities and others. It is crucial to communicate it to the workers to make them aware of the plan and develop jointly with the new company policy and values.
2. Equality Committee
As mentioned above, the permanent equality committee is a mandatory step. Their job will be to help create the plan, to inform and raise awareness among the team. The committee will also monitor and evaluate the commitments.
3. Diagnosis
Through a collection of quantitative and qualitative data within the company, the analysis of the current situation will be carried out from a gender perspective. Some conclusions and proposals will be established once the data is gathered to reach an equal situation within the company.
4. Programming
In this stage, it is about acting on what has been found previously. Different actions will be established with a long and short-term goal to achieve the main objective. The document must gather all the information about the actions: the dates, details of the execution, and their evaluation.
5. Implementation
Once the plan is finished, the planned actions must be implemented.
6. Evaluation
According to the model of the equality plan, the evaluation is structured around three axes: results, process, and impact. Through the previously marked indicators, the idea is to evaluate if the purposes have been achieved and at what level, identify new needs and analyze how the plan is developed.
Does your company still not have an active equality plan? Now that you know what it is, we encourage you to apply it. It is important to be aware of the actions of your company so that it helps to contribute to the improvement of society.
In addition, it is crucial to always report discriminatory practices that may appear in the company to the equality committee or a superior, to eradicate them. We can only reach the goal by working together.
Information extracted from the following official documents:
Manual para elaborar un Plan de Igualdad en la empresa- Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos sociales
