Women in Rail Ginn speaking at the Women In Rail launch
Fulfilling potential The official launch of Women in Rail took place in April this year, attended by prominent members of the industry, both male and female, a fact that Ginn mentions several times. ‘We have around 548 members which is fantastic and that includes a lot of men as well. The great thing I’ve realised is that many women come to the industry by accident but stay out of passion and I think for the men in the industry, pretty much all of them are passionate like we are. So we all want the industry to progress, we want the succession pipeline open and stimulation at entry level, so it’s a question of attracting more women and retaining them by having a structure in place that enables them to fulfil their potential.’ As a sector, rail is historically male dominated, and Ginn believes one of the biggest challenges in attracting women lies in overcoming this perception. I mentioned that in Rail Professional’s recent interview with Alison Munro, she spoke about how, when she was at the DfT, she was one woman among hundreds of men, but she never said that she encountered sexism and seemed surprised at the mention of the prospect. ‘Absolutely,’ said Ginn, ‘men in the industry really want to help. The industry might be male dominated but that’s not because it’s anti-female. I’ve never come across that and it’s certainly not how it seems.’
A business case for more women Ginn’s message at the launch event was twofold. Firstly, that it’s important for women to have a platform to meet other professionals who understand exactly where they’re coming from, but she also
pushed for the business case, ‘because a few of the comments I had in setting up the group were sceptical, as if I’m on some sort of feminist crusade, or it will be a fluffy all women together thing, so I wanted businesses to understand that there is something in it for them as well, which is the economic benefit of diversity. Lord Davies’ numbers are unquestionable*. He said as soon as you have a diverse workforce you have a productivity increase.’
‘I always say that two heads are better than one,’ continued Ginn, ‘and women bring a completely different perspective. I think we tend to be carers because of our genetic make-up so we will always look at the emotional side of things. It’s like the yin and the yang, and that’s an aspect of the emotional intelligence that diversity brings. And if you ask a woman to complete a task, you know it will get done.’
Despite bringing so much to the mix though, Ginn has noticed an issue around confidence in women. ‘Our perception is that they can have a lack of it, for example in looking at job advertisements, we always consider the aspects we feel we can’t do rather than recognise we could do the job. And networking is not generally something women are comfortable with because we like creating meaningful relationships, so it can be seen as shallow. To help address this, we’re holding a workshop on confidence on the 9th October in York (see WiR’s LinkedIn page and Twitter for details).
Big response to mentoring scheme The buzz coming out of the launch was ‘fantastic’ said Ginn, ‘because women realised that we’re here to stay and we
want to make a difference. And everyone is ready to work with us as well, as illustrated by the response we had to the mentoring scheme.’
Ginn explained that the scheme came about through Clare Burles, HR director at East Midland Trains who had a contact at Women First, who work with People First. ‘They had a grant available that enabled us to receive mentoring training for ten of us. So initially, a member of the steering committee learned more about mentoring, and after that all ten of us went on the one-day course, which was really informative because it showed the difference between mentoring and coaching and so on.’ From there, the group decided to issue an appeal to the rail industry having already ascertained that the level of interest would be high. That took place earlier this year and 45 mentors and roughly the same number of mentees responded.
The average level of seniority of the mentors is ‘really, really high’ said Ginn and around 50 per cent are male. ‘We have a great number of MD’s, CEO’s, CFO’s and COO’s. We even have one who is not from the industry – Heidi Mottram, (now CEO of Northumbrian Water) who was MD at Northern for many years, and of course she is the perfect mentor because she’s very highly regarded and inspirational, a role model, which is something we want to develop at Women in Rail, to showcase role models.’ Training took place in the summer for mentors and mentees who are new to the concept and the matching process continued with all involved meeting face- to-face ‘so they could get back to us and say ‘yes the chemistry was good’ or ‘no I’d
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