Grygo is the chief content officer for FTF & FTF News.
On International Women’s Rights Day, March 8, a banking giant made a surprising announcement, and challenged itself to do better: “The BNP Paribas Group has set itself an ambitious target: to have 1,000 more women in our IT professions by the end of 2024, through both internal and external recruitment.”
While the Women’s Rights Day goal got a lot less coverage than the 2022 BNP Paribas Open, a tennis tournament that runs from March 7-20, in Indian Wells, Calif., in the Coachella Valley, the self-challenge is much more significant.
It was announced via an article the bank published online, “Bringing women closer to Tech: our challenge for equality and performance,” In it, BNP Paribas officials declared: “The programme [sic] for the feminisation [sic] of IT is one of the Group’s strategic priorities.”
The effort, co-sponsored by Bernard Gavgani, group chief information officer and member of the BNP Paribas group executive committee, and Sofia Merlo, head of group human resources at BNP Paribas, is underway because “women are still under-represented in this key sector — at the BNP Paribas Group, in the financial sector and, more broadly, across society!” according to the online story.
“This imbalance is largely due to stereotypes that are hard to reconcile and that prevent young girls, students or ‘active’ women from taking the plunge and moving into professions and technologies that today influence our lifestyles and consumption patterns,” according to the bank’s announcement.
“Beyond the figures, increasing the number of women in IT jobs is also a collective performance issue,” says Isabelle Moirez, human resources director for IT at BNP Paribas, in a prepared statement. “Balanced teams produce more effective solutions that better meet the needs of users in their diversity.”
The firm notes that for several years, BNP Paribas has pursued long-term actions to encourage “the technological inclusion of women through its various entities around the world. And the results are there to see. The Group achieved the very good mark of 83/100 in the ‘50inTech Gender Score,’ which measures companies’ progress in terms of inclusion, equality, and diversity, and the impact of initiatives they take to counter women’s lack of interest in tech jobs.”
In fact, in 2020, BNP Paribas’s IT staff launched “Women In IT … to attract women into the sector.” The cross-functional program pulls together “different teams and professions, from hiring to career development and training,” to coalesce around four pillars of consensus:
- Raise awareness of IT professions among young girls and female students;
- Identify and attract women who could be recruited into IT;
- Train women in IT professions;
- And retain women in IT.
In addition, the banking group has other initiatives already underway:
- Women & Girls in Tech, described as a program “to trigger vocations … [via] events throughout the year to encourage young girls to embark on the path of Tech by promoting exchanges with women already working or studying;”
- “In Italy, BNL’s female IT staff share their curriculum and career choices in schools through the ‘Women in STEM’ project and the bank can provide funding to enable girls to pursue studies in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics);”
- And “In Turkey, the TEB Women Academy, offers digital courses that bring women entrepreneurs together with clients from leading companies, as well as pro bono consulting and mentoring services — and introduces them to national and international networks that they would otherwise not have access to.”
BNP Paribas has also been involved in many external efforts such as the coalition known as “Technologies and innovation for equality between women and men,” via the Generation Equality Forum, which the bank joined last year, officials say.
Just to provide perspective on the scale of the goal, the Paris-based giant has operations in 65 countries and a staff roster of nearly 190,000 employees, including nearly 145,000 in Europe, and 13,576 in North America. For 2021, BNP Paribas recorded €46.2 billion ($50.7 billion) in revenues and €9.5 billion ($10.4 billion) in net income.
The firm has the resources to achieve its goal and doing so could challenge other exceptionally large financial services organizations to follow suit, if they haven’t already done so. It could also encourage smaller firms to challenge themselves.
The full text of the article can be found here: https://bit.ly/3u2nJ6B
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