Initiative

Initiatives on gender equality

Summary of the initiative

The Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) represents Irish business; home-grown, multinational, big and small, spanning every sector of the economy.

Over the last few years the IBEC has run seminars, conferences and general networking events on the topic of gender and sharing best practices. In addition to providing advice on diversity, recruitment and retention strategies, mentoring, networks and development programmes, IBEC has developed specific tools to tackle gender equality problems.

For example, to assist employers in proactively and positively managing their workforce during pregnancy, maternity leave and upon return from maternity leave, a time when often female attrition occurs, IBEC (with support from the Equality Mainstreaming Unit) developed a Maternity and Parenting Toolkit. The toolkit focuses on supporting and assisting the expectant mother and the new father to try and make this time of transition less challenging for employee and employer. It showcases some of the key areas where attrition can happen for pregnant women or those returning from maternity leave and tries to counteract this with various workshops for parents, line managers etc. This toolkit has checklists for the manager and the ‘parent to be’ as well as guidelines and policies on leave, buddy systems and performance management. IBEC also developed a gender pay audit tool, which is available to employers to self-audit and assess the equality within their remuneration system. It identifies where differences may exist, possible causes for these differences and methods to address it.

A number of IBEC member organisations have been successfully engaging in varied initiatives to support their strategy for increased balance among genders within their organisations. For some this has included setting targets for gender balance that they will achieve over the next one to three years. Unlike quotas and applying a structure solely at the top of the organisation, the organisations have sought to address the myriad of factors that can act against women progressing to the senior decision-making positions in organisations and on corporate boards. Support ranges from: flexible working arrangements to facilitate a range of work-life balance options for men and women; leadership development programmes for women which focus on self-development,
return to work-workshops; new dad’s workshops and others.