Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | MAY 2023 | 9 Networks ommendations such as the creation of a maternity/parental returners toolkit," she adds. Making the sector attractive While there is much work ongoing to retain female employees, the gender split across each DNO shows there is still a mountain to climb in terms of actually attracting women into the sector in the first place. As Adam McEnaney, Northern Power- grid's workforce resilience programme lead, observes: "Our gender pay gap continues to reflect the balance of men and women in our business and the roles they carry out; it's not about pay equality. "The proportion of men in the tradition- ally higher paid technical and engineering roles, which make up the majority of our workforce, has a significant impact on gen- der pay." In its latest figures, covering April 2022, Northern Powergrid has reported a 0.2% increase in its gender pay gap, which it says was largely a result of the timing of a new pay deal for colleagues being secured a‹er April 2022. Across the Northern Powergrid group, men get paid on average 24.5% more than women in hourly pay and 40.6% more in bonus. McEnaney says the company is creating more than 1,000 new job opportunities in its region by 2028, which will give the DNO "great potential" for it to reduce its gender pay gap. "We acknowledge that 80% of our total workforce (over 1,900 people) are men, and in the operational cra‹, engineering and technical roles that grows to over 94% (on average). "Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion plan prioritises attracting women to apply for these types of roles; as new entrants to the energy sector, or by switching roles within Northern Powergrid." The company's figures are a slight improvement on what it reported in 2018, when men made up 83% of its total workforce. Getting the message out early to school and university students is another way the DNOs are working to improve the gender split. At Electricity North West, for example, women made up only 25% of the work- force as of 31 March 2022, similar to figures reported in 2018. In total 32% of its leader- ship roles are held by women. Its diversity and inclusion manager, Cheryl Iontton, believes engaging those of high school age "is key". She explains: "Last year we ran work placements and we had 20+ students come through the door and spend a week with us. "When they came, they just didn't know what they wanted to do as a career but by the end of the week they were saying 'I want to be an operational engineer, I want to be a design engineer, I want to work in IT… even if that doesn't end up being the case, they walked away with not just understanding what we did but the roles and the different types of roles that are available." She adds that this year the DNO will dedi- cate one of its work placement weeks to all girls. Sharing similar views is O'Hara: "We've also been looking at how do we source tal- ent through our pipelines, whether that's graduate programmes or apprenticeships. And now we're seeking out a broader set of schools, a broader set of universities and colleges, where we might find deeper repre- sentation, new talent pools that we hadn't necessarily thought of before." Additionally, there is a recognition that language has an important role to play in improving gender balance, with concerns over masculine language being used in job adverts. Iontton says the DNO has examined how inclusive its language is in advertising by using AI technology which scans the com- pany's job adverts. "It doesn't just look at gender, it's all areas of inclusivity. It then reaches out and speaks to everybody and we are not unknow- ingly excluding anybody," she says. It's clear there is a lot of positive action being taken to improve gender diversity but there is still a long way to go before we have a truly inclusive industry. Adam John, senior reporter

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