To attract people, we have been doing a number of the same things that my colleagues have spoken about. We worked with Skills Development Scotland on the not just for boys campaign, which was great for showing people that there are great opportunities in pursuing a career in a STEM-type subject. For a long time, we have had a 50:50 graduate intake and, at the moment, about 31 per cent of our apprentices are girls. Over the past five years, there has been quite a lot of progress, but there is still much to do.
We utilise some of the people who are breaking through into new space. For example, we have a number of distilleries on Islay and we brought in two male and two female apprentices and used them to front campaigns to drive the idea that there are some fabulous experiences for women in our industry.
We do a lot of role modelling and opening up people’s minds to opportunities. You might think that Scotch whisky is quite a male-dominated industry—for some operations roles, it is—but even some of our master blenders are women who have worked for 40 years in our industry. With the stories that we tell, we can encourage people to see the world of work differently and to really think about the possibilities for themselves in that world.
A lot of work is being done to get new people to come into the business in a gender-balanced way, but we are very fortunate in having a loyal workforce and, when people join us, they tend to stay for a long time.
Among the things that we have done on gender balance, specifically in our supply operation, is running internal women in leadership programmes, using role modelling. We run virtual sessions that are voluntary and open to everybody, and in which I participate, as well as colleagues who might run factories, supply chains or procurement departments. We gather together all the materials and words of wisdom that people have given us as we have developed our careers and we try to impart that knowledge to people who work for us.
We have different seminars that are designed to give people confidence to try things differently or to go for promotions when they might naturally see many reasons not to. Hundreds of people have signed up for the seminars in the past couple of years and our main mission is to give people the confidence to experiment with different things.
What really strikes people is that no two people’s stories are the same. Some of the feedback that we have had is about mindset. We get a lot of feedback from our female employees that says that they see many reasons why things are not possible. They might have caring accountabilities or they make assumptions about what it must be like to do one of those senior jobs, so they almost self-select out. We do a lot of work to encourage people to think about what the conditions would have to be for them to succeed in that role and to build their confidence on that. We give them mentors and coaches who help them to think about what they want to do and how they can do it. That is fundamental to many of the things that we do.
Other people have mentioned targets, and we have also had those. About 40 per cent of Diageo’s executive committee are now women. We have spent a lot of time trying to address gender balance, particularly in the management arena, and the numbers show that we have done that successfully. However, the part of the business that I am accountable for, which is manufacturing and operations, is still quite male dominated in some particular areas of production. Because we have 24/7 operations, there is a lot of shift working and only about one in four of our shift workers is female. At the moment, we are running focus groups to get insights into some of the things that we could work on to address the balance and to consider how we could make some things a bit more possible.
I can give another couple of examples. In the supply chain operation, it is more difficult. We get a lot fewer applications from women because, way back in the system, fewer women take the right subjects to enable them to go into STEM, and so it goes on—I am sure that you have heard that from many people. We all have the same challenges in this arena so, last year, we ran an event to which we invited other companies and organisations—some of the other people who are here came to it—with the aim of learning from each other and finding out other things that we might think about. It is such a complex area and so many things could be done, so it helps to have data to try to pinpoint the things that we want to achieve.
As I said, we have a lot of people and they stay with us for a long time. For some functions, it is very easy to recruit women. For any business, some functions will have a healthy balance and some will have more women than men. We are considering what we could do to encourage a bit more cross-functional movement. Maybe somebody did not take physics or something like that at school but, certainly for me, school was a long time ago. Therefore, we are considering what other opportunities we might create for people to do different roles. Some of our policies are about trying to document what is required in people’s roles and what cross-functional skills they might have to bring into an operational area as a team leader. Maybe somebody does not have the functional capability or knowledge beforehand, but we can give them those skills and utilise their leadership in different areas.
Those are some of the things that we are trying to encourage at the moment.