ENGIE Brasil has endorsed the “Women’s Empowerment Principles” (WEPs), a UN Women’s initiative. The company’s  CEO, Maurício Bähr, has made a commitment to foster the promotion of gender equality, starting with an increase in the number of women in positions of leadership.

Signing up to the WEPs represents the group’s long-term commitment to ensure that the theme becomes a value shared by the company as a whole, “The greater female presence helps the businesses and improves the company’s performance with the inclusion of different competencies and visions. The practice of equitability also helps expand the range of potential sources of finance for our projects”, Bähr pointed out.

The largest private sector energy generator with a major focus on solutions, ENGIE recently created a Diversity and Equality area in the company – which operates in a sector which historically has been more male dominated.

“To our business objectives where the goal is decarbonization, decentralization and digitization, we can say that the company has now added one more ‘D’: for diversity and inclusion”, noted ENGIE’s CEO.

The theme is at the core of ENGIE’s global strategy. By 2030, the group’s goal worldwide is to have 50% of all leadership positions held by women. Currently, the two most important global leadership positions are occupied by women: Isabelle Kocher (CEO) and Judith Hartmann (CFO).

UN WOMEN

ENGIE Brasil’s initiative contributes to Goal Number 5 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. ENGIE already conducts differentiated actions to identify female leaders, such as sessions of onsite meetings held by senior management for women deemed to have a leadership profile, with participation in the first Conecta Conference – Women Engineers of Industry Edition, held this month for 109 junior engineers.

UN Women was created in 2010 in order to unite strengthen and expand the global effort in defense of women’s human rights.

One of the organization’s projects is the “Win-Win Program: gender  equality means good businesses”, an initiative undertaken through a partnership between UN Women and the International Labor Organization (ILO)  with financing from the European Union and to be implemented in six countries — Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Costa Rica, Jamaica and Uruguay. ENGIE is also engaged in this initiative.