8 March 20239 January 2024

Celebrating International Women’s Day and beyond

What is International Women’s Day?

Today, 8 March, is International Women’s Day (IWD), a globally marked day that:

• recognises the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women
• educates and raises awareness for gender equality
• lobbies for accelerated gender parity.

The global campaign theme for IWD 2023 is #EmbraceEquity. This means to understand the journey still required to achieve equality for women.

But what’s the difference between equality and equity?  Equality means each individual, or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognises that each individual person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. For more information on the difference, you can read more here.

Accelerating change from within

Energy Assets is made up of brilliant people. Each of us is unique, whether in terms of our background, personal characteristics, experience, skills or motivations. And we value our people for the differences they bring to the table. We believe these differences – this diversity – is powerful.

We’re committed to calling out all forms of discrimination, drawing attention to any bias, and seeking inclusion across our workforce. However, the utilities and construction industries are still largely male dominated, and there’s a wealth of research outlining the benefits of workplace gender parity, including increased revenue, better innovation and better decision-making.

In an effort to encourage more women into our profession, help close the skills and visibility gap and further support our own female colleagues, this IWD we’re excited to announce several initiatives…

EA Women’s Network

We’re launching the EA Women’s Network in a bid to support our female colleagues with some of the specific challenges they may face, providing them with a network for additional internal support.  

Help in difficult circumstances

It’s not a nice truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless – a lot of issues that predominantly affect women are considered taboo or sensitive, making reaching out for help extremely difficult.

We’ve provided information on available support, including our Employee Assistance Programme, throughout our locations and colleague materials.

Female focused thought leadership

As a leading company in the utilities sector, we house a wealth of experience and industry insight within our experienced and esteemed colleagues. We regularly publish thought leadership articles discussing the latest industry news or predictions.

We’ll be setting a goal to feature a thought leadership article per quarter from the perspective of a female colleague to ensure we use our industry platform to help to accelerate gender parity.

Additional EDI training for our colleagues

We pride ourselves on providing excellent training opportunities for all our colleagues, from onboarding basics to upskilling in numerous departments. However we recognise that there’s always room for improvement.

We’re going to look into implementing additional EDI-focussed training into our already extensive L&D calendar.

Marking International Women’s Day

These initiatives are part of a long-term plan to make meaningful and permanent changes that will benefit our existing and future female colleagues. They’re small steps that can make a huge difference. There’s a lot of work still to be done within the wider utilities sector, but we aim to be an industry leader in every way, equity included

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