Kindred is committed to working towards gender equality both within Kindred and in the communities in which we operate. In 2018, we launched an ambition to reach a 50:50 gender split in the senior management team by 2023. Since then, we have delivered a range of projects to help drive more gender diversity in our leadership teams, however in 2020 and 2021 we saw that the gender split in senior management remained unchanged at around 20:80 female to male.
Therefore, in 2021 we invested in extensive research to better understand our position in gender parity. We found several key challenges keeping us from building better parity. For example, that we have a very low turnover rate in our senior management team of about 5 %. While this is positive for retention, it of course poses a challenge in balancing the gender ratio short-term. We also found that the gender ratio of internal successors was skewed.
On the back of this research, we decided to recalibrate our ambition of achieving gender parity from 2023 to 2025 and look at encompassing other groups as we build our data for ethnicity, LGBTQ+ and disability.
Some of the projects we have undertaken over the last years includes
- In 2020 and 2021 we invested in building gender-balanced internal talent-development programmes and we have widened the focus externally from pure attraction of females to also include growth of external talent pools. As a result, our Future Senior Leader cohort consisted of 59:41 female to male.
- The research also identified a lack of female successors at the level below senior management. In 2021, we designed and launched a new programme named FuEL (Future Emerging Leaders) with a clear focus on ensuring a balanced application ratio we were happy to see a 30:70 female to male split. Through evaluating on data and working with programme alumni, we have worked to further enhance and develop these programmes with a forecast increase in numbers of females for 2022.
- In 2020, we saw some unconscious bias in the organisation around the identification of potential and we have therefore focused on embedding inclusive leadership principles across the organisation and exploring the extent of any unconscious bias at management level. This workshop has been delivered to our Executive team and senior management team.
- Over the years, we have engaged in several important initiatives focusing on gender equality to support diversity, inclusion and equality in our communities. As founding members of the All-in Diversity Project and annually taking part in the All-Index to support the industry benchmark for diversity, equality and inclusion. The last six years we have supported Women in Tech Sweden and taken active part in their quest to create change in the technology industry. In 2020, we announced our sponsorship for Women in Racing’s Racing Home programme and this year we have extended this collaboration. The Racing Home programme aims to raise awareness of the issues that working mothers in the racing industry face – and now with phase two of the programme it delivers very specific initiatives to support women in the racing industry.
We will of course continue our focus on diversity and equality
One of our next projects is to work on intersectionality, and ensure we look at diversity in a wider sense including sexuality, disability, and ethnicity to our strategy.
