What happened after I submitted an application for “Best Place to Work for Women”

6 min read

It’s well known that women are under-represented in the tech sector. If you search "Gender Equality" online, you'll be faced with countless articles about how women are underpaid, passed up for promotions and generally faced with everyday sexism in the tech sector. It’s no wonder that women are more likely to leave the tech industry within a year, compared to their male counterparts.

That being said, gender equality is important to us at Reward Gateway and an area we’re proud to talk about. I'm hugely proud to share that RG is one of the companies changing that.

Our annual diversity survey showed that one third of our Senior Manager and Leadership positions are held by women and an almost 50% split between managers with 48% females and 52% male. 

Overall we have an equal gender split with 49% female, 49% male and 2% who do not wish to say or prefer to self-describe.

The results of our diversity report, among a few other things I’ll be sharing later, led us to rank 12th place in “The Best Workplace for Women list by Great Place to Work.”

I’m especially proud not just because I’m a woman, but I had the wonderful task of writing our submission, so I learned so much along the way. 

How we create an inclusive and human workplace

Helping Reward Gateway stand out as an inclusive employer of choice is something that continuously motivates me every day. Sharing stories of our equal opportunities for all and how by living our Be Human value we were, regardless of gender, able to understand that every colleague is another human being. Reward Gateway really does understand that everyone has a career and personal life to juggle and we work hard to understand what each person needs to be happy and successful.

We’re making an inclusive, human environment, and with “Be Human” one of our core company values, it means we all take part in doing this every day.

So, what else made us stand apart as an inclusive employer of choice?

Connecting company values to your innovative benefits

Well, it never fails to make me realise how supportive of new parents Reward Gateway is when I tell my friends about our Modern Parental Pay benefit. Many new parents feel a huge financial strain on starting their family, there is the fear of losing their career and in many cases a choice has to be made between being a parent or having a career.

We don’t believe in that and our Parental Pay is a demonstration of this. Our Parents Network on Slack has grown over the past few months and it’s really nice to see RG employees supporting each other through this stage of life and sharing many tips which are helping our new parents to cope, especially with the help of flexible working.

On the flip side of this, seeing women in my own family become carers for their partners in later life and the huge impact that makes showed me the incredible value of our three months paid leave to take care of your family when you need to support poorly family members. It’s difficult to combine work and caring responsibilities and with our gender neutral and inclusive family benefits, RG really does enable us to value family at times when it can matter most.

It’s initiatives such as the above which led to results such as 98% of females and 99% of males stating that they are treated fairly at RG regardless of sex.

The alignment here is something I am so delighted to see and shows the strength we have in showing the world how we can make it a better place to work for all. But wait, there’s more…

Making the world a better place to work for all

Gemma Matthews, Head of Global Recruitment at RG, partnered with Vercida earlier this year, and its mission is to promote equality at work for everyone. Being featured on this site is just one of the ways we demonstrate to our employees and potential employees that we truly wish to make Reward Gateway an inclusive space for all.

We also continue to develop the RG Foundation, which will provide grants to organisations and projects which address inequality and disadvantage, with the ultimate mission of making the world a better, fairer and safer place to work for everyone. A key area of focus for the RG Foundation is the improvement of education and opportunity for women and girls, who are routinely excluded from opportunities to participate in the same working world as men. In turn, this can create unequal pay and situations of financial dependency.  

When we launched our RG Coding School in Plovdiv, we were very aware of the stigma associated with Engineering. Computer development, I.T. and data security is a male-dominated industry and so we took steps to address this. We believe in offering all our employees the opportunity to develop – not only in their current role but in the roles they want to be in a few months or a few years. So, by making an inclusive learning environment we’re really looking forward to watching our employees learn and grow.

And lastly, every single manager in the company was invited to participate in our Unconscious Bias training with our experts in the field – Mind Gym. Everything we’ve done to make RG a tech company that is inclusive for all would be in vain if our people did not understand how to recognise and address bias in the workplace. Managers commented on the session with accolades like “Terrific,” “good tools and tips to take away” and “really informative” – it showed me how eye opening sessions like this one could be to improving our inclusion focus.

We’re making the world a better place to work for women in tech. 

Continuing to make a difference

Our journey to making RG a better place to work doesn’t stop here. Diversity and Inclusion remains one of the top focusses for our People Team as we move into the new financial year and we’re preparing to push ourselves further than ever before with making RG an inclusive, fair and equal place to work.

We'll keep listening to feedback and encouraging people to Speak Up, so that we can support more women to become leaders in tech and create an environment where everybody can succeed regardless of gender.

My door is always open to anyone who'd like to talk more on this topic and discuss ideas, plan new initiatives and have these types of conversations that make people feel welcome, respected and included in all we do. I would absolutely love to hear all the things you're doing to make your business a great place for women to work too.

Send me a message on LinkedIn or at catrin.lewis@rewardgateway.com.