The Women in Wind Global Leadership Program has released a guide as a resource to advance gender equality in the wind industry.
Best Practices for Gender Diversity in Talent Recruitment aims to support employers in clean energy in adopting a “diversity lens to strengthen their hiring practices, and ultimately increase the dynamism and competitiveness of their workforce”.
The Women in Wind Global Leadership Program is a joint initiative of the Global Wind Energy Council and the Global Women’s Network for the Energy Transition.
Women represent only 21% of the global wind workforce and only 8% of its senior management, according to a 2020 report by IRENA and the Women in Wind Global Leadership Program.
The new guide aims to support employers in the wind sector to integrate diversity and inclusion principles into their hiring practices, and combat inequalities in talent recruitment, representation, pay and advancement.
Rather than providing a set of hard rules, the guide outlines broad recommendations that can be adapted to job requirements and local market contexts, to create more diverse and inclusive workplaces, said the programme.
The guide focuses on three key areas: inclusive recruitment, inclusive application and selection processes and diverse workplaces.
Recommendations include reconsidering workforce representation at recruitment forums, employing targeted outreach and encouraging employee referrals, standardising and diversifying shortlist selection processes and supporting diversity during the interview process.
They also include implementing wider diversity policies, such as collection of gender-disaggregated data, merit-based promotion as well as equal pay.
GWEC policy and operations director Joyce Lee said: “The wind industry’s talent recruitment and hiring practices should reflect wind energy’s role in driving sustainable and inclusive growth around the world.
“According to IRENA, every $1m invested in renewables for a green recovery could generate at least 25 jobs – as governments make smart investments in clean energy, the sector must make its own smart investments.
“That means tapping into the widest pool of human talent which can hone our industry’s competitiveness and place wind energy at the forefront of innovation.”