Happy International Women’s Day (IWD)! This year’s theme is #EmbraceEquity. The official site describes embracing equity as imagining a gender-equal world which is “free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that's diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated.”
At Kindred, we are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and recognise that we need all components to create a more inclusive and sustainable organisation. We currently have 757 women at Kindred out of our 2046 employees, and our Womenkind network has 114 members and growing. We are individuals united and celebrate our gender diversity and strive to create an inclusive environment where everyone feels that they can bring their authentic selves to work and thrive.
Our CEO, Henrik Tjarnstrom says: "We are committed at Kindred to strive for equality in our workplace and support our fantastic women at all levels of the organisation. We are working towards a 50:50 gender split amongst our senior leaders by 2025. This International Women’s Day we are celebrating our women at Kindred and working to deepen the culture of allyship within the organisation."
We have seen progress in the past year in our senior leadership split, which is now currently 22:78 female to male. We are prioritising gender diversity and equity and recognise that positive steps must be taken to remove systemic barriers that women have historically faced. With this in mind, we have worked closely with our Womenkind employee network and Talent Development team to be more inclusive and equitable such as:
- Our Womenkind employee network successfully launched a mentoring scheme. They have been instrumental in analysing our maternity and paternity leave policies to make them more equitable.
- In 2022, we launched Self ID in the UK, a diversity data gathering and monitoring initiative, which will allow us to benchmark our DEI data against other organisations. This voluntary process will help us develop practices and policies to enhance the employee experience globally. We will be rolling out to more locations this year.
- To support our objective of achieving 50/50 gender parity at senior level, we have created an inclusive senior leader hiring process which includes bias free assessments, diverse panels and gender balanced shortlists.
- To increase our female successors at the level below senior management, we improved our leadership programme FuEL (Future Emerging Leaders) which has seen a 30:70 female to male split.
- To tackle unconscious bias in the organisation around the identification of potential we have focused on embedding inclusive leadership principles and exploring the extent of any unconscious bias at management level. This workshop has been delivered to 429 members of our Executive team, senior management team and is continuing to cascade down our management levels.
- The last seven years we have supported Women in Tech Sweden and taken an active part in their quest to create change in the technology industry.
- We are proud sponsors of the Racing Home awareness initiative programme set up by Women in Racing.
In 2022, we were recognised for our range of diversity programmes, ranking second in the All-In Index, an independent DEI benchmark (2020:12th). Despite this success, we have a long way to go yet. This year, we will focus on reducing our gender pay gap from 3.4% to 3%. We will refine our policies relating to coaching for parents, mentoring and launch a menopause policy.
Gender diversity, equity and inclusion doesn’t just lie in the hands of women at Kindred, we also need allies and representation from a broad range of perspectives and positions within the organisation. We will continue to dare to challenge and work collaboratively to be more equitable and inclusive. #IndividualsUnited.
