Gender Diversity in Deutsche Telekom

By: Erin Galloway

Overview

Over generations women have come a long way in the realm of gaining equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII makes it illegal to discriminate against any individual in respect to compensation, conditions or privileges. Also, the government has put into place an affirmative action plan, that  employees are urged to hire groups of people based on their race, age, gender, or national origin to make up for historical discrimination (Mathis & Jackson, p. 80). Since, Deutsche Telekom is worldwide these laws only focus on the subsidiaries in the United States and the other subsidiaries outside of the United States are struggling, for example Germany.

Explanation of Article/Connection to the Text

The article that I chose to look into has to do with reaching a gender goal within Deutsche Telekom and how they are acquiring new techniques of recruiting. First off, Deutsche Telekom is the largest telecommunications company in Europe and is headquartered in Germany. In March of 2010 the CEO Rene Obermann announced that women are going to make up 30 percent of senior and middle executives by 2015. Obermann felt this was necessary because a study done by the German Institute for Economic Research uncovered that only 2 percent of all executive committees were women (Clark, 2011). Since Telekom is headquartered in Germany and a third of the workforce resides in Germany, this change needed to occur to acquire more diversity. Telekom in Germany only has 13 percent women in senior and middle management, much lower than the other subsidiaries within the company. Since Germany is a country that is very reluctant on having women in the top ranks, recruiting became very difficult. Deutsche Telecom initially recruited internally but now need to follow a whole different path to recruit these women to meet the quotas set by legislature. Telekom’s recruiting efforts followed what the text suggested as alternative ways of recruiting. For example, Telekom started to recruit externally to broaden their range of recruits to reach more women. Also, Telekom has offered to help women with a more flexible work schedule to make working for them more desirable. Telekom has improved their hiring of women college graduates to 53%, which Telekom puts these women into internal programs to groom them into future leaders. Even though Telekom has changed their recruiting process drastically they are still falling short in acquiring women to fill these senior and middle management positions in Germany. The culture in Germany see women as mothers and once they have children they should stay home and not come back to work. Once this became a norm it has been difficult to find women that are willing to come back to work after having children. The culture in Germany has hindered women in the workforce for many years, and it is going to be a difficult and long process to overturn this norm. However, Telekom can learn one additional recruiting technique that another organizational put into place which was creating a database of top women in the workforce. This database allowed them to have a place to look for top executive women, who were looking for jobs.

Take Away Points

There are many take away points that I gained from this article. First off, change is difficult for any organization, especially when the culture has been set for decades.  Top executives need to realize changing culture and the structure of a business will be costly and time consuming. For example, shifting the culture within an organization can anger many employees and many may quit, but diversity is a key to success and will be beneficial in the future. Diversity within the workforce allows the organization to broaden their target market and possibly increase profits. Also, by changing your recruiting aspects and hiring criteria it will allow you to target the group of individuals that you would like to hire more of. Lastly,, gender diversity or any diversity within an organization allows for the flow of different ideas which can be beneficial to improving the organization as a whole. 

Works Cited

Clark, N. (2011, October 02). Deutsche Telekom struggles with gender goal. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/business/global/deutsche-telekom-struggles-with-gender-goal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=Human Resource improvements&st=cse&scp=7

Mathis, R. L., & Jackson, J. H. (2010). Human resource management. (13 ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.