Interview with Georgina Worrall: Bringing a gender balanced and diverse workforce to the energy sector
Founded in 2014 by Baroness Verma and Laura Sandys, POWERful Women are the leading professional initiative dedicated on working towards a gender balanced, diverse and inclusive energy sector.
Georgina Worrall is the Head of POWERful Women and it was great to discuss the progressive work this important initiative is doing in the energy sector. The overall target for POWERful women is to challenge the energy sector’s leaders and ensure a shift that 40% of women will be in middle management or leadership roles in the UK.
In 2015, POWERful Women released the first of their annual ‘State of the Nation’ reports where the top 80 energy companies have their employee structures assessed and challenged in an attempt to reach diversity targets.
Outside of top level reports and professional advice, colleagues and industry leaders are essential in creating a gender balanced and diverse workforce. Georgina explained four ways employees in the energy industry can support and promote women in the energy sector:
The first is by being an ally and calling out bad behaviour and discrimination at work. The second is by setting up mentorship schemes and providing support to employees. A third way of supporting women in the energy sector is by sponsoring projects with people from underrepresented groups. The fourth is to connect with people and find out ‘what it is actually like?’ working for your company.
Fortunately for POWERful Women, Georgina explained, there has not been any major push back from the work in promoting a balanced and diverse energy sector.
The main issue POWERful Women tackle is engaging business leaders to not just implement diversity and inclusion methods because it is ‘a nice thing to do’ but because it is the right thing to do. Georgina explained that education of the benefits of implementing diversity and inclusion measures into companies is one way of tackling this issue.
POWERful Women’s Energy Sector Coalition help to implement appropriate education of these measures and help challenge industry leaders. This coalition is made up of sixteen CEOs across the energy sector and meet five times a year to share best practice around implementing diversity and inclusion measures.
Education and sharing best practices of the benefits of diversity and inclusion measures are fundamental to achieving a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Watch our interview with Georgina Worrall and subscribe to the Solar&StorageXtra YouTube channel here.
Here is a link to POWERful Women’s ‘State of the Nation’ report.
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