Clir Renewables becomes a signatory of Equal by 30 campaign

Clir Renewables became a signatory of the Equal by 30 campaign today, 16 June 2020. Equal by 30 is a public commitment by public and private sector organizations to work towards equal pay, equal leadership and equal opportunities for women in the clean energy sector by 2030. An initiative like this is needed because, as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) stated in their 2019 report, Renewable Energy: A Gender Perspective, women held only 28% of renewable energy STEM jobs.

Inclusion is one of Clir Renewables’ core values, and an internal Inclusion & Diversity team works to develop initiatives to build a more gender-balanced workforce. The Equal by 30 campaign fits perfectly with this core value given that Clir Renewables is already committed to creating an equal opportunities work environment.

Clir Renewables CEO, Gareth Brown, said “Gender diversity in the clean energy sector is essential for its success, and we will only achieve a more even balance if there is equality for women in terms of pay and progression opportunities.

“When starting Clir Renewables, we knew that creating a diverse team was important but not necessarily going to be an easy task, and so we chose to have Inclusion as one of our core values so that it would help drive business decisions.”

Sampoorna Biswas, Co-Chair of the Inclusion & Diversity team, said, “We are delighted to become a signatory of the Equal by 30 campaign. The company has worked hard to get to a position where we currently have 41.3% of all staff, 42.1% of those in a leadership position, and one-third of the C-suite identifying as female.

“By joining the Equal by 30 campaign, it shows not only the clean energy industry but women wanting to work in the industry that Clir Renewables vows to provide an equality driven workplace for women.”

The high-level principles for private sector organizations are:

• We aim to lead by example, integrating equality principles into our organization and policies, and will step up our efforts to promote gender diversity activities, in areas of recruitment and career advancement in particular.
• We pledge to highlight and support women, and close the gender gap, by promoting actions in our business.
• We will provide leadership, and share our experiences and lessons learned on gender diversity programming and initiatives.
• We recognize the importance of reporting on progress and will support efforts to improve the collection of gender disaggregated data so that we can and report on our progress in a transparent, open manner.

We are working on finalizing our commitments which will be published on the Equal by 30 website in due course.