Women's Day: Cos taking steps to encourage gender diversity

In a bid to encourage a diverse, inclusive workplace companies are undertaking various initiatives, like ramping up women headcount, offering extended maternity leave and flexible hours among others.
Various research reports, white papers have been advocating the positive impact of promoting gender diversity in workforce and various women centric policies being offered by companies to retain their women staff.
To ensure an inclusive workforce, companies are opting for extended maternity leave, flexible working hours, adoption leave, creche allowance, committee on prevention of sexual harassment, identification of high potential women employees as a part of leadership talent planning process among others.

Ericsson said that it aims to have one-third of its employees as women by 2020. The company is hiring more female candidates in fields that used to be dominated by men.
Meanwhile, some companies are getting innovative and gifting their women employees gift cards to celebrate the international women's day.
"We have witnessed increased interest by consumers & corporates to felicitate their lady colleagues and women. For Women's Day, we have seen 125 per cent growth of Woohoo base of customers being gifted the Freedom of choice Via Woohoo Gift Cards vis a vis last season," Smartcard technology company Qwikcilver CO-Founder and CMO Pratap TP said.

He further said across its base of over 400 corporates that Qwikcilver is closely integrated in India, this year has seen the preference for Woohoo-Travel related Gift Cards as the number one Choice among Women colleagues.

"Over the last one week, Woohoo App has also registered 44 per cent gifting taking place for Women's Day related Gifting designs and greetings from across all the occasion based designs available," he said.
Saurabh Nigam, VP-HR, Snapdeal said, "We are introducing a number of initiatives to further support employees going on maternity leave. We have further strengthened our mentoring, counselling programmes to assist women employees with career development, enabling them to take leadership roles."

Meanwhile, Telenor India is taking conscious steps to promote diversity in its workforce and aims to have a right balance of women when hiring new employees for next few years. The company has also taken some of the following initiatives at the workplace to make it an all-inclusive workplace.
Piyush Mehta, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Genpact said some of the women centric initiatives being offered by the company include, Genpact Center for Women's Leadership" (GCWL), initiatives to welcome new moms and Career 2.0 Program.
Under the Career 2.0 Program, Genpact would offer flexible, customised workdays to encourage such women to revive their career. Genpact plans to hire 30-50 mid-to-senior -level women in various roles this calendar year.