Noticias

Buenos Aires, September 19 – Central Puerto SA (“Central Puerto”) (NYSE: CEPU), Argentina’s largest private sector power generation company, in terms of power generated, was cited as a success story for its women’s empowerment initiative in the 2018 Annual Report of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). With the support and advice of the IDB, the company, which used to have a predominantly male workforce, began implementing initiatives to increase female participation .

Although the company never made any discrimination based on gender, there were several areas for improvement to increase the participation of women in the Company not only in the administrative areas of the company, but also in the operational areas, where participation male was traditionally older.

To do this, the company used the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEP) developed by the IDB to identify areas for improvement and received guidance from external consultants. “The first thing was to work with management to achieve consensus on the need to have with gender policies and set goals that were ambitious, but at the same time achievable,” said Jorge Rauber, CEO of Central Puerto.

Some of the measures implemented were:

• The creation of a Gender Committee with the participation of employees and union representatives from different areas of the business, and the coordination of Human Resources (HR), to develop the Gender Action Plan;
• The introduction of an internship program under which 6 engineering students were hired to work in the new wind farms and environmental areas;
• The emphasis in vacancy announcements on the promotion of gender equality in the company, explicitly highlighting from the job title itself that applicants are welcome to participate in the selection processes, putting the feminine form first in the name of the candidates. positions sought (for example: production engineer/ro);
• Women-oriented benefits, such as part-time work after maternity leave to help mothers return to work;
• The creation of an internal Mentoring Program not only to guide new hires, but also to facilitate promotions of women, and exit interviews to explore reasons for leaving;
• Training courses for all staff.

These measures bore fruit, increasing women’s participation in the Central Puerto workforce. During 2018, the company received 6,450 Curriculum Vitae, of which 40% corresponded to women. However, of the 30 vacancies filled, 60% corresponded to hiring women. This trend continued during the first half of 2019, when of 16 vacancies, 50% were filled by women. As Javier Torre, human resources manager of Central Puerto, recently indicated in his recent presentation during the seminar on business and gender diversity organized by the United States Chamber of Commerce (Amcham) and the IDB, “when this type of gender action programs begins to be implemented, the feedback itself makes it sustainable over time, which helps change companies and industry in general.”