Netguru’s Road to Empowering Women

Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian, international keynote speaker, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Having been on the market for many years, Netguru has never been afraid to question the status quo. We believe that our duty as a company and as people is to speak up and not to stay silent.

International Women's Day is no different. This global day celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality.

While International Women’s Day was a month ago, on 8 March, we felt that was not the time to send our usual wishes and publish the article you’re reading right now. Instead, we took a different approach and paid tribute to all women, especially the ones from Ukraine, who show their bravery, resilience, and strength each day. We also committed to supporting Ukraine the best way we could. Read more about our commitment here.

The “why” behind Netguru’s diversity dashboard

Where is Netguru in terms of women empowerment and gender balance?

Let’s dive in.

Netguru gender balance in numbers

​​Stereotypes about knowledge, competencies, and skills associated with certain individual characteristics — gender being one of them — mean that achieving career goals still requires great determination from women in many industries. We know this and we want to address it at Netguru.

Our ambition has always been to foster an inclusive workplace culture, boost social participation, and advocate it outside of Netguru.

We want to understand the real challenges, name them, and address them, then share the knowledge and tools with people across different levels of the organization. We started with focusing on women.

Netguru is a certified B Corp and a signatory to the ten principles of the UNGC. Both of these initiatives strongly support gender empowerment.

2022 is a year where we want to focus on gender diversity at our company — calculate and share indicators, name challenges, pilot some solutions — all to ensure we are inclusive in terms of gender.

The presence and representation of women at every level of the organization are a force for good. We’ve developed a diversity dashboard to showcase different diversity angles including the ratio of men and women in our organization, raise the bar for ourselves, and encourage other organizations to support workplace diversity.

Our main achievements

At Netguru we have nearly 900 talented people. All of them deliver value every day.

The conclusions we came to allowed us to look at the picture from a wider perspective. This may also be an inspiration to other organizations to deep dive into gender balance in their workplaces. Here’s what we are most proud of:

• The Core Team gender balance has increased within the past 18 months: from 12.5 % to 50%.
• Overall women’s representation at Netguru is 34% compared to the 30% average in IT.
• Women constitute 38% of our top management.
• We make sure the pictures and language we use in job offers don’t favor any gender.
• To ensure there are no differences in salaries, we analyze the gender pay gap and include it in our salary reviews.
• We run workshops on unconscious biases and use the concept of Inclusion Nudges by Lisa Kepinski and Tinna C. Nielsen to drive behavioral change.
• We support women returning from maternity leave with a dedicated onboarding program and make sure they are included in salary reviews during maternity leave.

Main challenge

We’ve developed the Netguru diversity dashboard to make the changes tangible and transparent. Spreading awareness and the importance of diversity in the workplace is already a step toward change. However, there are still aspects that need to be addressed.

We still observe a high level of gender segregation, especially in Delivery teams where only 15% of team members are women. Only 22% of all people hired into Delivery teams are women. The number is significantly higher in non-delivery teams, where 60% of people hired are women. Although this is a trend commonly observed in many companies in the industry, we strive to improve the gender balance in these teams.

Opportunity to improve

As Aleksandra Paszkiewicz, Head of People at Netguru, underlines:

“Despite the clear educational advantage of women, where they account for 58% of students and 63% of graduates in Poland, only 34% of the Netguru team are women.”

“We can build an inclusive culture with respect to diversity only when we actually have diversity in the organization and we focus our efforts on equal opportunities. This is one of our priorities to reduce the gender imbalance and implement people practices supporting it,” Aleksandra adds.

We’ve been developing our core values since day one. As the company has grown, we’ve been learning from our experiences and making improvements. One of our seven core values is: “Build an inclusive, transparent, and socially responsible culture,” — and we proactively drive this change.