Women in the company, between welfare and equal opportunities
10 February 2020Gender pay gap, women’s training, equal opportunities and inclusion: what is the situation of women in the company? We talked about it with Linda Serra, Alumna of the Executive MBA and Co-founder and CEO of Work Wide Women.
Work Wide Women is a social learning platform that deals with women’s training. Born in 2014 to offer courses on new digital professions, it developed B2B solutions at a later time to help companies develop Diversity & Inclusion projects.
What is the origin of the project?
We work both alongside women and companies to create inclusion and employment opportunities: with these premises, we have created Diversity@Work, the first videogame dedicated to the diffusion of inclusive culture in the company, through the simulation of real situations that bring the player to fall into the prejudices of which the woman is too often a victim. This is a project born from months of accurate market analysis and from interviews with HR and Diversity Manager, which led us to understand on the one hand how much training on diversity is considered superfluous, on the other hand, to understand how much weight they all have now some stereotypes.
In your opinion, what is the situation of businesswomen in Italy compared to the rest of Europe?
In our country, there are objective obstacles in the professional growth of women, divided between family and career: guarantees and safeguards are lacking, and the few existing services are entirely borne by businesses. The situation changes in other states of the European Union, where there are public measures of assistance to women and families (in some countries it is possible to pay the grandparents who take care of their grandchildren). Furthermore, in Italy there are few businesswomen to fill managerial roles, and the wage gap between men and women who perform the same job remains very high.
What is the added value that a woman can bring within a corporate organization?
Women make up half of the world’s population, but companies are far from reflecting this evidence in their internal organization. Numerous studies have shown that a varied corporate population performs 15% more than others and invoices up to 20% more and that companies with an inclusive welfare system have a better performance in talent attraction and retention, equal to 35%.
