Inclusively: How can women succeed and improve the workplace?

This year, at Inclusively, we celebrated our first International Women’s Day as we are still in our early infancy, having launched it last fall, with a wide-ranging conversation on how gender diversity is valuable in telecoms for women, men and business. 

Increasing women’s participation in the workforce, especially at high levels, is more than a box to check or a quota to meet. It improves profitability and the workplace for everybody and gives women the opportunities they deserve. Yet it also requires real work – we need to actively change the way we operate as an industry to increase women’s participation in the workforce. 

In this Inclusively event, Antonella Faniuolo, Head of Network Demand Planning Delivery and Transformation for Europe at Vodafone, and Eugina Jordan, CMO at Telecom Infra Project (TIP), shared their experience and vision, and told us what they are doing to increase gender diversity in the workplace both strategically and in their daily activities.

We covered a lot of ground, and here are some of the topics we discussed:

• The power of policies, such as parental leave and other flexible work arrangements, e.g., to take care of elderly family members or to take career breaks
• Support for different types of talent, with differences not necessarily due to gender, e.g. some people are more/less willing to speak out
• How to identify and confront bias, and become more tolerant of diversity of behavior or preferences (e.g., clothing)
• How to build more inclusive work communities
• Hiring and retaining women to reach the C suite, and the role of mentoring and coaching
• A diverse workforce has a broader set of valuable skills
• Equity and equality
• What we can do to help women (and everybody else): listen, ask “How can I help you?”, and be open to feedback even when it is not what you want to hear
• What has changed over time: the impact of technology and societal change in encouraging women to enter technological careers, how the young generations are more used to and expect diversity
• Promoting and sponsoring women while ensuring the best candidate gets the role