Last night I had the privilege of attending an event at the House of Commons with some colleagues. The event was for the launch of a report, from PwC and industry body POWERful Women (PfW), called ‘Igniting Change; building the pipeline of female leaders in energy’.
PfW is an organisation that seeks to advance the professional growth and leadership development of women across the UK’s energy sector and the report focuses on four areas of recommendations:
• What CEOs can do
• What HR can do
• Aspiring women
• Senior Management
You can read the full report here.
The objective of POWERful Women is simple, to ‘ensure that 30% of executive energy company board members and 40% of energy company middle management are female by 2030 - at latest’.
This might not sound such a big challenge but when you consider that in the energy industry only 15% of employees are female, you start to get an idea of the ambition of the project.
At SSE we know that a diverse workforce helps drive better business performance and make better decisions, and currently 25% of board level roles are filled by women, meeting the ‘25% by 2015’ target set out in the Davies report. Our Chief Executive, Alistair Phillips-Davies’ thoughts on diversity have been very well captured throughout the ‘Igniting change’ report and one comment in particular focuses on why diversity is a business issue for us at SSE;
“It’s a business issue because at SSE the customer is at the heart of everything we do. We know that half of our customers are female, and 30% of our workforce is made up of women. Whilst our gender split is better than the overall industry average it really makes us focus on the need to be wholly connected to the customers we serve.”
What struck me most of all last night was the strong commitment to make a difference. The business case for diversity is accepted, the fact that we are not seeing enough progression in the sector means we are either not attracting talent or we are losing or stifling talent. None of these scenarios are acceptable. Lord Davies summed it up well when he said;
”If you are not addressing this issue, you are asleep at the wheel."
So what about SSE? Well for the last four months we have been looking carefully at the issue of diversity in its widest sense. We realise that it's a detailed and multi-faceted subject and one where actions need to be carefully thought through and planned in advance. A three to five year diversity action plan is being developed. Although SSE’s gender split is above the industry average we are under no illusions that there is still a lot of work to do in this area. I fully intend to make sure we are not asleep at the wheel.