The coronavirus emergency has put women’s work to the test. Between family management, lack of family services and contractual instability, millions of women have found themselves in trouble. It is no coincidence that in Italy – as recalled by the data of the Labor Inspectorate of a few days ago – women are on the increase who as soon as they become mothers give up their careers. This is why in this context it is even more important to recognize women friendly work environments. Great Place To Work, a global consulting and people analytics company, has compiled the Best Workplace for Women 2020 ranking to identify the 20 companies most attentive to the issue of gender and inclusion.
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These are organizations active in very different sectors that have in common a high level of professional satisfaction for the female population, in some cases higher than that of male colleagues. We are talking about companies with a high “Parity Index” or the index that measures the flexibility of working hours, the fairness of pay and promotions and the correctness of treatment in the company regardless of gender.
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The podium
This year climbs the top R-Everse, a small Italian company that applies digital innovation to the recruiting sector. Two service companies follow, both led by women: Zeta Service and American Express. The sectors represented by the 20 companies highlight how it is not so much the field but the environment that counts for women. In fact, we find companies active in professional services, pharmaceuticals and finance but also manufacturing and ICT companies.
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The 2020 ranking testifies that it is not only foreign multinationals that are at the forefront of women’s inclusion policies. As explained by the consultancy firm if we start from the experience of the women who work in these companies, in our ranking we find 35% of Italian companies, 50% of US companies and only 15% of companies from other European countries.
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The vertices
An important fact to report concerns management. All the companies in the ranking have a deep-rooted female presence in managerial and top management positions: 47% of managers and top managers of these 20 companies made up of women (the Istat average of 27% for Italy). But what is the recipe to help women? From Great Place To Work they emphasize that all these organizations promote meritocracy and offer advanced conciliation tools to help their employees organize their lives: from smart working, guaranteed in 95% of cases even before the lockdown, to telework (expected in 47% of classified companies), up to very flexible part-time and parenting support policies. It is striking, for example, that 75% of these companies provide support for childcare such as internal or affiliated kindergartens, additional permits, reimbursements of expenses for children and longer periods of parental leave.
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In addition, during the Covid-19 health emergency, these companies were at the side of their employees trying to propose innovative solutions. As in the case of Biogen Italia, a medium-sized company that deals with biotechnology, which has proposed an online recreational program for families. A support made of courses and workshops paid by the company to create a network of solidarity between parents-colleagues.
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