“Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world” is the motto chosen by the United Nations for International Women’s Day 2021. In fact, the pandemic has made it clear that without the contribution of women, a way out of the health, social and economic crisis will not be possible. The majority of healthcare workers and caregivers are women, but they are rarely in leadership positions.
Women are Heads of State or Government in only 22 countries around the world, and only 7.4% of the companies included in the Fortune 500 list are run by women. In Spain, only two Ibex 35 companies (Red Eléctrica Group is one of them) are chaired by women and only Red Eléctrica has a board of directors with an equal number of female and male directors, with an average of 31.2%, far from the 40% recommended by the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV) (National Securities Market Commission) for 2022.
“The world has made unprecedented progress, but no country has achieved full equality, although we are well aware that Nordic countries are the most advanced. We have landed on the moon, the internet and telecommunications have revolutionized the world, we have even photographed a black hole... Nonetheless, there are still legal restrictions preventing 2.7 billion women from having the same job opportunities as men. Only 25% of the world’s members of parliament are women and one in three women continues to suffer gender-based violence worldwide…It is clear that, indeed, there is much to be done”, declares our Chairwoman, Beatriz Corredor Sierra.
Therefore, once again this year we highlight the crucial contribution that women make to Red Eléctrica Group and we will continue working to increase female representation in our workforce and for the energy and telecommunications industries, traditionally male, to be equal.
III Women's Week in RED
Following the thread of the motto chosen by the United Nations this year, we celebrate the III Women's Week in RED focused on the pandemic and the challenges posed to gender equality.
Thus, among the activities we have organized, we celebrated the Co-responsibility in Pandemic Times presentation by the psychologist, lecturer and author of numerous books on emotional well-being, Maria Jesús Álava. This conference addresses how Covid threatens to decapitalize female talent in organizations and gives evidence of women’s despair when analysing the development of their professional careers in this complex and uncertain environment.
Likewise, we focused on women in rural areas, in a discussion with Elena Sainz, an entrepreneur who has participated in Holapueblo, a Red Eléctrica Group, AlmaNatura and Correos platform to fight against rural depopulation. Elena has left the city to settle in a town in Cuenca, Tragacete, and has started up her entrepreneurial project PlanB Residuo Cero, an online store of zero waste products.
Also, we have prepared the presentation, Co-creating a New Reality through Co-responsibility. Ritxar Bacete and Mercè Brey, transformation, diversity and leadership specialists, explain in the presentation how the pandemic has focused on the need for real co-responsibility, in other words, an equitable distribution of roles between men and women.
Equality and diversity have been two key corporate values from the company’s earliest days, when it was created in 1985, chaired by Paulina Beato. Since then, Red Eléctrica has been a pioneer and we stand out from other companies with actions such as collective bargaining, which in the last century already included the principle of Equal Opportunities between men and women, when this was certainly unusual.
In 2010 we were awarded the Corporate Equality distinction granted by the Ministry of Equality to organizations proving excellence-driven policies and practices of equal treatment and opportunities between women and men. And today we aim at bridging a 20% selection bias to favour women in the selection processes, to increase female representation in highly male-dominated technical positions, and to increase the current 33% of women in managerial positions to 50% in 2030..
What do you know about the female presence in the energy sector? What percentage of women are there? Who was the first femile engineer in Spain? Which of the IBEX-35 companies are led by women? Test your knowledge of women and engineering with our quiz (only in spanish).
