Sky (Sky Broadband) has today launched a new paid training programme (‘Women in Home Service‘) that will aim to offer career and development opportunities for up to 1,000 UK women interested in a becoming one of their engineers. At present, just 2% of the engineering workforce at Sky are female.
The company says they’re committed to creating an inclusive culture and over the next two years they aim to increase representation of female engineers from 2% to 20%. Apparently the new programme will be supported by over £2 million of investment and further details can be found here.
Chris Stylianou, Sky’s COO, said:
“Engineering is an industry that has long seen underrepresentation of women. That is an issue for society and one that we at Sky have a responsibility to address. It is important that our Home Service engineers are as diverse and inclusive as the customers and communities they serve and that’s why we’re focussing our efforts on increasing the number of female engineers at Sky over the next two years.”
End.
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Institutional discrimination against men is not going to solve this issue(if it actually is an issue beyond gender politics), the things over people preference that draws men to “technical” careers is rooted in biology(male monkeys also show the things over people preference, as to an extent do girls exposed to extra testosterone in the womb – congenital adrenal hyperplasia). Two links underlining this – a 2011 NRK documentary called the Gender Equality Paradox(English subs and English) –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
And the second link another study into cross cultural/country career choices showing countries with greater gender equality see a smaller proportion of women taking degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) –
http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/
This is appalling. Recruitment should be on merit and ability, not gender or ethnicity.
The school where I was a governor for several years had virtually an all-female workforce, the only male being the caretaker. There is no evidence for discrimination, it’s just that few men applied for the jobs.
Similarly, the BBC and other media companies recruit via Creative Access, which accepts applications from non-whites only (they exploit the get-out clause in the anti-discrimination legislation). Imagine the furore if it were the other way round!
Only a snowflake would have a problem with this.
Or someone who doesn’t appreciate sexism.
Lol
I really don’t see a problem in trying to encourage a potentially large untapped resource in this way, quite the opposite in fact. In my work abroad I have encountered a lot of excellent female telecoms engineers – particularly in central Europe.
Agreed entirely. Jobs where its a male or female roll are a thing of the past. Anyone that thinks different is a luddite at best and a biggot at worse.
Having schemes which encourage men or woman to try jobs they would have never thought of before is a good thing.
Its not gender bias to encourage a role to the gender that would have never thought of it. In fact you could argue that is why it needs promotion in the first place, men and woman judged for too long over roles in not only the work place but society.
People that still think a job involving hovering, ironing or cleaning is womans work and a job involving engineering or lifting/manual labour are for men are nothing more than idiots living in the past.
I wonder how they would feel if a female firefighter turned up and saved their child from a fire or if they stayed at a hotel with an immaculately clean room only to find it was a man that cleaned/hoovered the room. Suddenly its all ok if it suits them.
As long as they’re fit (just kidding ladies)
Hello this a very interesting concept to me, this type of training, would my age hamper me from traing in this field? Is there an age limit?….
No age limit, just a gender limit!
This is outrageous. Bottom line up front is that Sky, in trying to make themselves look like the diverse employer they wish people to see them as, with this sexist recruiting campaign, they are going against everything that equality and diversity stands for.
This is total exclusion of the modern day male who takes no blame in how evolution got the statistics to where they are. The recruitment should be fair and jobs given on merit regardless what gender an applicant is. The fact a programme is set up targeting a particular sex leads the nation to fear that recruiting is more than likely not as fair as it should be.
Being from a military background I would be the first to argue that females surely can undergo anything a male can. That said, dare I say, Sky HQ probably has a canteen with 2% of Males working in it. Are they, or are there plans to, have a recruiting surge to target more males? I fear not being as the canteen staff are not the front of house and play little part in Sky’s single minded representation. Shame on the Sky recruiting and shame on the UK government for allowing such a sexist recruiting campaign and segregation to happen.
Let diversity evolve naturally and stop excluding males to force it to happen.