International Women's Day 2021

We have made enormous progress towards reaching a 50/50 gender split over the last few years, attracting more female recruits through a complete review of our HR policies, recruitment processes, and more.

This is what we’ve done so far:

• Since 2015 we have increasingly focused our HR policies on providing equal opportunities for women and men whilst fully embracing flexible working.
• Introduction of a ground-breaking maternity/paternity policy that benefits both our male and female employees.
• A complete review and redesign of our recruitment process has broadened the appeal of working at Islabikes to a much more diverse set of candidates. We set about removing words more commonly used by men from our recruitment adverts, updating our careers page with women equally represented and even re-named some of our job roles with the aim of having more cross-gender appeal. This fed into our interview process with us moving to more competency-based questions; these are designed to draw more on previous work experience and help discover transferable skill sets.
• We operate an outreach programme to promote Islabikes and cycling with women in the area, as well as at schools and nurseries.
• Embracing flexible working has possibly seen the biggest benefit, with our team able to access flexible working options from day one instead of having to wait the statutory 26 weeks. Indeed, this has been so successful that nearly 90% of our team work flexibly. This includes part time or reduced hours, hours designed to work around childcare and school runs, working from home or home/office working split.

Although we’re proud of the progress we’ve made we’re still on a learning journey. Our goal is to continue improving diversity within the Islabikes team and to achieve a 50/50 gender split.