Women@Capgemini

Women@Capgemini global program

A woman brings a unique perspective to business challenges. To get the most out of our talents, we need a support network. That’s why we adopted the Women@Capgemini global program to leverage all our people’s talent through initiatives based on the “equal opportunities, equal chances” principle.

The entire history of Women@Capgemini began in 2012 when a small group of female leaders launched a global initiative to establish the overarching standards for gender parity inside the organisation.

Since then, Women@Capgemini has become one of the primary employee-led networks within the company. It now consists of both men and women and are spread across the globe. The network aspires to strengthen our company by mobilizing all of the Group’s talents – including all gender identities and expressions to provide better results to our clients, partners, shareholders, and employees.

WinspirE program, India for advancing gender balance

At Capgemini, India we have WinspirE program which provide equal growth opportunities and favorable working conditions for all colleagues, enabling our women colleagues to achieve their career aspirations and organizational milestones. WinspirE, is globally aligned to the Women@Capgemini program.

The four main goals of the global program are to:

What factors are holding back real progress?

One of the biggest challenges for women in the workplace is the shortage of women role models – whether at senior levels, in specific industries, or both. Industries based on the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) present many examples of female underrepresentation: the UNESCO Institute for Statistics recently reported that women make up less than 30% of the world’s researchers.

Today, our commitment to diversity and inclusion is stronger than ever

With a workforce of 185,000 employees in over 13 locations in India, Capgemini is proud of its wide cultural diversity. Capgemini is an equal opportunity employer and diversity, and inclusion is a business priority. At Capgemini in India, our women employees constitute over 40% percent of our workforce. We believe that women in decision making roles are key to truly bringing the culture change on an equal opportunity workplace. To achieve an improved diversity ratio of workforce and to accelerate the pace of inclusion, we have focused programs to address leadership pipeline and targeted initiatives at various phases of the employee life cycle. 

We advance gender equality through four pillars of delivery.

Recruit

Disrupting the status quo on gender hire trends is a critical D&I acceleration priority for Capgemini. With this, we focus on gender balance across employee’s life cycle and grades.

Since hiring the right talent is a critical element of our vision of being a Leader of Leaders, we are continuously working towards creating a level playing field for our people and have new admissions based on merit. We work on the principle that talent has no gender, age, race, nationality, or sexual orientation, thereby ensuring that selection is based only on a person’s ability to perform the work.

Our redefined recruitment process, including structured assessment formats and panel decision making which starkly reduces hiring bias and delivers outcomes that are both fair and merit based.

Some of the best practices we follow are:

At Capgemini in India, we see limitless value in diversity of experience and are committed to supporting those looking to return to the workforce. 

Since pioneering the first program of its kind in 2019, Capgemini India has sought to listen and continuously innovate to increase the number of opportunities in this space and recruit the best talent regardless of career breaks.

Capgemini’s return ship program, Captivate is designed for experienced professionals who took a career break and are looking to restart their careers.

Capgemini India also has an Alumni Hiring Initiative where we regularly check interest of our women ex-employees and give them a chance to join us back across suitable roles.

Develop 

We often talk about the “glass ceiling” that prevents women from reaching senior leadership positions. The biggest obstacle that women face is much earlier in the pipeline. Progress at the top is constrained by a “broken rung” which results in more women getting stuck at early stages of their career and leaving jobs due to conflicting responsibilities in their personal and professional lives thereby fewer women reaching managerial roles. Fixing this, is the key to achieving parity.

Capgemini is committed to internal growth of our talent and over the years, we have honed our talent development initiatives and built programs to equip women to self-reflect on career choices and accelerate talent in pipeline. Across all programs at every level, we ensure to have a critical mass of women participation aligned to our growth targets.

Capgemini is also a signatory of UN Women – Women Empowerment Principles (WEPs). In context of the above-mentioned challenges and in-line with UNWEPs principle 4 of ‘Promoting education, training and professional development’ for women; Several targeted development and advancement initiatives are running for Capgemini’s women employees across levels focusing on increasing their career advancement, retention and strengthening their inclusion. A few such programs are:

Retain

At Capgemini, we take pride in investing in programs and policies that support family needs so our employees can be their best at work and in life.

We have launched several initiatives for our employees and pre-empted the maternity break of 26 weeks ahead of the legal mandate. The intent is clearly to support our women to absorb and integrate with a new member of the family. To be more inclusive to a family unit, we address surrogacy, adoption, and paternity breaks as well.

Several programs which strengthen our commitment towards providing best work environment to not just our employees but also the entire family unit are:

At a time of continuous technological and other workplace changes, there is a need to build a continuous workplace connect for women during their long absence from work. fareWelcome! is Capgemini’s a maternity support program designed to support women colleagues end to end during the maternity phase, take care of their physical-mental wellbeing, assist them in transition from office to maternity leave, help stay connected with the organisation as well as the colleagues during the maternity break and ease ‘back to work’ transition process. It provides employees an opportunity to constantly upskill their technical knowledge in this ever-changing world of technology.

We also provide infrastructural facilities like lactation rooms to support our employees by balancing their return to work with their needs as mothers of young children.

We also provide reserved parking slots for pregnant women and persons with disabilities (PwD) across office locations.

Parents@Capgemini

Parents@Capgemini is our parental network support program which aims to support all our colleagues with parental responsibilities and strengthen their existing parenting abilities and promote the development of new competencies so that parents have the knowledge and skills needed to carry out child-rearing responsibilities and provide their children with experiences and opportunities that promote child learning and development. 

The ambit of program & policies has expanded to support our working parents through adoption, surrogacy and to caring for a parent or their loved one. Parenting support programs typically include features like early support to expecting parents, their involvement at all levels of program operation, parenting activities including, but not limited to, parent and child play groups and parent information workshops, such as health and wellness, nutrition, or childcare resources, is also an important feature of these programs.

Capgemini recognises the importance and benefits of breastfeeding for infants and has made special accommodations to support new mothers as part of its commitment to providing a family-friendly work environment. Through our practices, policies, buildings, and personnel, we are working to ensure that all of our employees are supported in providing the best, most nutritious start to their babies’ lives.

Crèche Benefits at Capgemini

As working parents have found it challenging to manage their childcare obligations and job due to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, parents had various alternatives for childcare, including grandparents, in-home caregivers, local crèches or preschools, and so on. In the new normal, finding a safe alternative for childcare is the need of the hour.

Capgemini in India, to overcome this problem and ensure gender equality, have adopted various policies and steps to ensure friendlier and stress-free atmosphere for working parents. We have in-house daycare facilities or tied up with daycares to help working parents in the organization.

Crèche is a facility which enables parents to leave their children while they are at work and where children are provided for and are safe. In-house crèches are designed to provide group care to children, who need care, guidance and supervision away from their home during the day.  Capgemini provides crèche benefits to the age group of children 6 months to the age of 6 years. We have in-house, near-site crèche facility and tie-ups with credible day-care vendors in all cities. Our commitment is reflected through our crèche benefit being a gender-neutral initiative to ease childcares for all working parents.

Capgemini La Lumière – A preschool initiative

At Capgemini, we understand that early childhood education is crucial to building a strong foundation for a child’s future. As working parents strive hard to double up between multiple roles, there is a dire need for a solution that effectively manages the development needs of young children. Keeping this in mind, we launched the Capgemini La Lumière program, a ‘Preschool initiative’ to address the virtual learning requirements of all the parents and children.  Post pandemic, we have enhanced it to physical schooling requirements, as we become accustomed to the current normal across the country.

Promote

We conduct awareness sessions on the various policies and practices we have for women, like: fareWelcome!, flexibility policy, child care benefits, sessions on prevention of sexual harassment and overall process, leadership connects, one to one connects and women connect forums to address the diverse needs of our women employees and provide them enablers which they need to excel at the workplace. We also run different initiatives on acknowledging and addressing unconscious biases from gender equality perspective.

We weave inclusion aspects in all communication related to organisation culture, performance management and more. We also have inclusion conscience keepers as part of the promotion nomination, conversions and performance appraisal discussions.

Our leadership is committed to promote gender equality and we invite leadership commitment to advancing women at work through different channels like; newsletters, stories, blogs and biannual inclusion week celebrations.

Watch our award winning video reflecting our Diversity & Inclusion initiatives in India: