Sky
Mind the Gap: Driving gender balance at Sky

As Europe’s leading entertainment company, setting an example when it comes to driving gender balance is critical and achieving better gender balance is key to closing the gender pay gap. Not only are we focused on getting more women into senior leadership, we’re also building our female pipeline in teams where women are traditionally under-represented, such as technology and engineering.

To increase the number of women in leadership, we’re insisting on 50/50 shortlists for leadership roles and supercharging the great women already working at Sky through our 24 month, bespoke Women into Leadership programme. We’re constantly sourcing new ways to attract the best female talent and this year launched our returner programme supporting talented individuals back into senior positions after a career break. This has changed the mind-set in two of our biggest challenge areas for women, with returners sites considered a great go-to recruitment tool to fnd female talent.

Additionally, our female-only scholarship and training schemes encourage more women to join our STEM professions, including a six-month paid trainee engineer programme, where women learn all they need to become engineers. Our aim is to have 800 women trained as engineers by the end of 2019.

‘Talented people come from all genders, ethnicities and backgrounds, and they should all have the same opportunities to come to a big business like Sky and be successful. This is the right thing to do, diverse businesses better reflect and understand their customer base, and can cast a wider net in search for talent. That’s why we challenged ourselves to change the status quo and have set targets to ensure we sustain that change into the future.’
Stephen van Rooyen, CEO Sky UK & RoI