Chorus join the Bristol Women in Business Charter

Chorus are proud to join the Bristol Women in Business Charter and become a signatory to show our commitment to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace that promotes gender equality.

What is the Women in Business Charter?

Founded in 2019, the Bristol Women in Business Charter’s purpose is to recognise and support businesses around Bristol that are making progress towards gender equality. Based on the belief that businesses cannot reach their full potential if they fail to recruit and retain a gender-balanced workplace, Chorus are proud to be joining the other 37 organisations that have made the pledge to the charter.

At Chorus, we have always strived to encourage women into the tech sector and put great focus on evolving our strategy to continually look at ways to support a balanced workplace. In 2020, Chorus became a female-led tech organisation with our new Managing Director, Nicola Saner, putting a strong focus on diversity, equality, and inclusion. As an IT company, we are naturally very male-dominated, however we want to change this to make IT a career that more women choose to work in by providing a welcoming and inclusive workplace.

What action has already been taken?

We have put a strong emphasis on supporting women in leadership roles and are proud to have a gender-balanced Executive Team, which was formed in late 2020. Alongside supporting women into leadership roles, we have also introduced new benefits to better support inclusivity, which have included moving to flexible and hybrid working and introducing a new enhanced maternity and paternity policy.

What goals are we focusing on for the next 12 months?

The Charter has seven main goals, which you can view on their website here, and we have focused on these three for the next 12 months:

Making one member of the executive team responsible for reporting on gender, equality and inclusion.
This is to ensure accountability and a way of measuring ourselves so we can report on our progress, which will tie into everything we look to achieve.
Encouraging and supporting female employees in lower paid and lower skilled occupations to progress through the organisation, through appropriate training and other on-going support.
We are proud to have a high number of women in senior and leadership roles, so we want to turn our focus to supporting women in lower paid/skilled roles to support career progression and development. This will include offering more apprenticeship roles, providing more structured career paths, and launching an internal training academy.
Supporting women where they are under-represented, through mentoring and women’s networks.
As well as supporting women into roles in Chorus we want to encourage girls and women into the tech sector, which we plan to do through more speaking opportunities, apprenticeships, and mentoring.

As part of the Women in Business Charter, we are excited to hear from other like-minded organisations to gain inspiration and ideas into how we can continually better ourselves and support out long-term equality goals. By joining we also want to make ourselves accountable with regular reporting to keep track of our goals and publicly show our commitment to gender equality, diversity and inclusion.

Nicola Saner, Managing Director at Chorus

You can find out more about the charter at https://www.bristolwomeninbusinesscharter.org/

If you’re looking for your next role or want to get started in the tech sector, then have a look at our Careers page for our latest vacancies. If you don’t see the right role, please send us a speculative email as we we’d love to hear from you.