While agriculture has traditionally been a male-dominated workplace, the gender gap is slowly improving. However, industry leaders understand the strides need to be greater, as the gap still exists.
According to a 2021 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey & Company, important gains were made by women in the workplace, especially in leadership. While strides have been made in the agriculture hemisphere, it still seems to be lagging, underscoring the importance for more companies to step up and pave an inclusiveness path in their workplace.
One such company that is doing this is where Fernando Cuccioli has been employed for more than a decade. When Cuccioli took over as president of North America for DeLaval in 2015, he gathered early on in his new position that something seemed off-kilter.
“I realized that when interacting with producers more and more, the dairies were run more and more by women,” he notes.
With more women becoming decision-makers on the farms, Cuccioli felt that DeLaval needed to not only be mindful, but also dig deep to ensure the same kind of inclusiveness was occurring within their own organization. Cuccioli admits that when he began looking at the positions within DeLaval, including the managerial positions, he quickly realized it was primarily male-dominated.
“I have three daughters and so I have a personal interest in this matter,” he shares. “Yes, of course, we want the most qualified candidate working for us, but we also need to be mindful that we are creating an environment for people who want to have a career and also raise a family.”
Women in Blue
In 2016, DeLaval introduced their Women in Blue employee resource group (ERG) to help attract, develop and retain strong female talent. The program championed supporting equal opportunities and room to grow with a focus on female employees.
DeLaval took a hard look at their human resources department, ensuring that their benefits were inclusive, particularly to women in the workplace. Changes were made in 2018, including extending maternity leave as well as offering paternity leave, too.
One employee that helped initiate the Women in Blue ERG is Carolina Mateus. Dr. Mateus, who originally is from Colombia, joined DeLaval in 2010 in their research and development (R&D) department starting the company’s microbiology lab, and through hard work, has seen growth within the company to Director of Sales for DeLaval Cleaning Solutions and now Director of R&D for Milk Quality and Animal Health with global responsibilities. Dr. Mateus notes that the R&D lab is a very diverse team in race, religion and nationality.
“To be able to work for such a diverse team is comfortable,” she states. “We are a global team and are constantly working with people from other geographies and entities within the company since we are headquarters for research and development for chemicals in DeLaval.”
Part of Dr. Mateus’ role is providing technical support for DeLaval’s sales organizations, which she said is eye-opening as it is primarily all white males. Being an extrovert and a stand-alone female inspired her to get involved with the Women in Blue ERG.
A mother of two, Dr. Mateus comments how vastly different her two pregnancies were, as she was employed with two different companies.
“With my first pregnancy, it was great. They had a lot of systems already in place to help mothers,” she shared.
Her second pregnancy was when she began working for DeLaval and the staples required for comfortably returning to the office as a new mother weren’t offered. This is in part what motivated Dr. Mateus to help build Women in Blue and press for the much-needed changes in the workplace.
“We did a review of the impact that supporting new parents could have for retention of employees,” she notes.
That review led to further conversations that pushed for policy change to include a nursing room in the workplace at DeLaval, as well as include families that adopt children in their parental leave policy.
“This project was near and dear to my life, even though I knew that I was not going to directly benefit from it,” she remarks. “I wanted these changes for others because I knew it would make a difference.”
Now, DeLaval also provides a flexible working environment. In addition, they also instituted an employee-training program on unconscious bias and updated its recruitment policy to help mitigate bias.
“We are promoting learning and development and are driving actions to ensure a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture, where all employees can thrive,” says Helen Hu, Human Resource Vice President Asia & Pacific and part of the Sustainability Group at DeLaval.
“Our gender distribution remains imbalanced, and we need to improve significantly,” says Gavin Strang, director of market development and sales support for DeLaval. “The female manager’s ratio has gradually improved year-over-year.”
Dr. Mateus, who was able to advance within the company, states that other improvements have been made within DeLaval by providing a safe environment to talk about a different position within the company and not feel like their current position is being jeopardized.
“You feel safe knowing you can look at a potential opportunity without feeling like you’ll lose your current job,” she says.
DeLaval has been steadfast in promoting diversity in its management with nine nationalities within its leadership team, including female leaders.
“We are trying to have a lot of diversity on all aspects of background, education, gender,” Strang says, who is originally from South Africa.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
The 2021 McKinsey Report emphasizes in order to drive change, companies need to invest deeply in all aspects of diversity, equity and inclusion. This begins with taking bold steps to ensure that women of diverse identities are well represented, but the diversity of numbers isn’t enough on its own.
The report also took a closer look at challenges that are more likely to push women out of the workforce. Fueled by the pandemic, especially for women, some of the reasons that an employee considers leaving include:
- Lack of flexibility at work.
- Feeling like they need to be available to work at all hours.
- Discomfort sharing the challenges they are facing with housework and caregiving burdens highlighted during COVID-19 with teammates or managers.
- Feeding blindsided by decisions that affect their day-to-day work.
- Feeling unable to bring their whole self to work.
Females are present in all aspects of dairy—working for suppliers, operating dairies, running food companies, working for packaging companies, and being involved in retail and foodservice businesses.
“The diversity that women have brought to the dairy industry is one of the key elements contributing to the creativity, flexibility and overall sustainability of this business,” Cuccioli states.
In 2022, DeLaval’s International Women’s Day them was “Break the Bias”, which Cuccioli says was the perfect call to action to strive for a more equitable workplace.
