Nine months of gender balance at Trust-IT

28 Oct 2022

Progress status - October 2022

Trust-IT is committed to ensuring a culture that enables women and men equal opportunities within our organisation. How this is implemented in the everyday workflow is described in our Gender Equality Plan (GEP), published in January 2022 which states clear and measurable goals for ensuring gender and equality balance and monitoring the status of progress within the organisation.

Work-life balance

Slowly coming out of the COVID-19 emergency, and acknowledging that remote working is indeed possible for us, Trust-IT has worked hard on identifying the best solution to ensure that the collaborative and team building-oriented approach which has always been at the heart of the company’s mission was back in place, while ensuring a sustainable work-life balance for the employees. In fact the team can now enjoy a favourable office-to-remote ratio in the energetically efficient building of via Redi 10 in Pisa, with a 20% remote fraction to be introduced in all employment contracts and additional flexibility allowed on a case-by-case, this being - rather than a novelty - a confirmed policy, in line with the open-minded approach adopted to ensure a collaborative environment at Trust-IT. 

“We know how essential it is, on the one hand, to ‘live’ the office to ensure cross-fertilisation and team growth, to keep that continuous human contact that is so vital in society today and, on the other hand, to guarantee the kind of work-life balance we want for our employees”, says Silvana Muscella, Founder & CEO of Trust-IT and its controlled technical arm, COMMpla Srl - “that’s why we are proud of the context, culture, and people-first mindset we are managing to sustain with our Trust-IT and COMMpla team members: We are bringing back the human interaction factor in our jobs, without losing, whenever possible, the effectiveness of some meetings being held remotely - one of the few lessons learned from the pandemic - which we all know it also means a more environmentally-friendly carbon footprint”.

Clear valorisation

Gender equality is promoted also by giving employees the same opportunities for visibility of their work, activities, and skills. Between January and October 2022, some 85 newspieces of Trust-IT’s achievements have been published and promoted via various communication channels, 44% of which are authored by women. Staff skills and competences are also positively exploited by means of internal training sessions that take place on a monthly basis within the company. Out of 16 training sessions organised (on topics ranging from UX and web analytics, to PM2 techniques to HTML), 8 (50%) were given by female colleagues.

Team and leadership

As of October 2022, the Trust-IT+COMMpla team counts 15 women out of a total of 40 highly specialised professionals – which is a truly remarkable ratio (37.5%), considering that the EU-27 average of women in ICT is 18.5%, according to Statista.com, and the highest percentage is 28.2% (Bulgaria), while in Italy it amounts to a mere 15.7%. This figure is also on a growth trend, as in the last recruitment campaign, just closed, 2 out of 3 new employees have been females.
Finally, out of 4 EC-funded research projects coordinated by Trust-IT, 2 (50%) are led by women, with Silvana Muscella coordinating the StandICT.eu (www.standict.eu) initiative on supporting European experts' presence in international standardisation activities in ICT and Sara Pittonet Gaiarin the Blue-Cloud flagship initiative (www.blue-cloud.org) on developing innovative services for marine research & the blue economy and supporting the European Open Science Cloud.
 


Interested in bringing gender balance to your company?

Let's have a chat!

Publication date: 28 Oct 2022

Article by

Sara Pittonet Gaiarin

Senior Project Manager