Rome, 13 December 2016
Gender equality, combating discrimination and standing against violence towards women concern us all, including men.
This is the idea behind the HeForShe global awareness campaign, promoted by the United Nations and supported by our Group, with the goal of involving a billion men in promoting gender equality.
The FS Group joined HeForShe on 8th March when the CEO, Renato Mazzoncini, took part in the main event of the campaign, publicly making three major pledges.
Today, nine months on, the General Director of Human Resources and Organisation, Mauro Ghilardi, showed how our Group is upholding these pledges at a conference held at the Senate of the Republic, which was attended, among others, by President Pietro Grasso, the new Vice-President, Linda Lanzillotta, and the new Minister for Education, Valeria Fedeli.
“First of all, we began working to break the gender stereotype linked to railway professions and to increase the number of women in technical schools and universities, which are the main pool for recruitment in our selection campaigns.
Women still only account for 14% of our workforce, a figure that falls dramatically in technical professions that inevitably require technical qualifications.
Thanks to the new project, “Women in Motion”, we are opening school doors to bridge this gap and to promote our technical professions straight from our female colleagues who work at our construction sites, plants and workshops every day.
The goal is to visit at least 100 schools throughout 2017 to meet young students and tell them about our world.
Another one of our major pledges is to increase the number of women in management. As such, a resolution from the BoD has set the FS Group a clear target for the number of women in management by 2020 (20% in line management and 30% in staff management, + 9% in both sectors).
The last pledge we are working on involves creating positive conditions to find a balance between personal and professional life. Work is therefore already under way to advance the implementation of the company welfare system so we can meet the many needs that such a large number of colleagues requires.
Gender equality is a struggle the FS Italiane Group tackles every day: at stations, on board trains and at the workplace by talking with customers, employees, institutions, associations and anyone else involved in the world of railways. FS Italiane pursues this pledge with its workers in the firm belief that achieving gender equality does not only concern women.
We are fully committed to the reasons behind this initiative primarily because men should be active promoters in reducing gender inequality”.
In this sense, everyone can make their own contribution; first and foremost, HeForShe is a call to action and anyone can register to the portal heforshe.org , which will help the campaign achieve its goal of one billion members.