Recognition for hitting gender diversity targets Tuesday, 09 August 2016

Global engineering company AECOM has received Engineers Australia's Most Outstanding Company in Gender Diversity Award for 2016.

The company's Chief Executive Australia & New Zealand, Lara Poloni, said their Australian operation has successfully increased the percentage of female senior leaders (associate director and above) from 10% to 12.6%, following a 12-month intensive campaign, and was on track to achieve its commitment of having 20% female leadership by 2020.

“Doubling our group of senior female leaders by 2020 was a real stretch target when we made it as part of our 2015 Gender Pay Strategy, especially in an industry with a small talent pool of senior women, but we are well on our way to achieving it,” said Poloni.

"It is also important to highlight that this is not a numbers game; all employees’ progress according to our merit based performance and rewards system, not because they are women. We have had to be bolder in the market to get more than our fair share of senior female hires. In the last year we have appointed Nicole Stoddart as managing director to lead our new Construction Services business and Kate Drews and Annette Pittman as group directors of our Buildings + Places practices in Sydney and Brisbane respectively."

She said she was also delighted that between May 2015 and May 2016, the company reduced the gender pay gap by 3.4% across its 2,750 Australian employees and achieved a 50:50 gender split amongst this year’s undergraduate intake.

“Considering the low representation of women studying STEM subjects in Australia, I’m very proud of the 2017 graduate recruitment intake of 119, where we have managed to achieve a fifty-fifty gender split for the very first time, with 100% gender pay equity,” she said.

The awards were presented in Sydney on Saturday as part of Women in Engineering's Winter Gala Dinner. The award for Most Ambitious Company in Gender Diversity was given to Transurban while the Most Encouraging Student or Non Profit Group in Gender Diversity Category winner was UNSW Engineering.

[AECOM Chief Executive Lara Poloni]