New milestones for VFS Global in building gender-diverse workforce

VFS Global, the world’s largest outsourcing and technology services specialist for governments and diplomatic missions, continued to move ahead on its commitment to improve gender diversity in the workforce. Among our recent milestones, the ratio of women leaders in the company increased by 7% over the last two years, reaching 27% in 2022. We also maintained a gender ratio of 57% women in our global workforce of over 8,800.

In line with the International Women’s Day theme of #EmbraceEquity this year, creating equal opportunities for women and nurturing women leaders has been an integral part of VFS Global’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.

“Strategic integration of DEI principles in our workforce is a part of Nurturing Our Colleagues, one of the five fundamental pillars of VFS Global’s sustainability strategy. In 2022, we also linked leadership performance to annual sustainability targets to ensure year-on-year measurable improvement. Empowering women and achieving gender equality is not only important from a social perspective, but is also the right thing to do. Organisations with more women in top management and board positions reflect the profiles of their customers and employees in a better way and benefit from more diverse views,” said Nirbhik Goel, Chief Human Resources Officer, VFS Global.

Initiatives in 2022

United Nations Women Empowerment Principles: Signed a commitment with UN Women to follow their principles towards gender equality and women empowerment at workplace.

Women of VFS Global Network: Leveraged our Women Employee Resource Group for women empowerment and career development. Initiated several talk series with reputable guest speakers from UN Women and other Gender Balance leaders.

Inclusive Language Guide: Designed and developed Inclusive Language Guide to help employees understand how to use diverse terminologies and foster an inclusive organisational culture.

·Lead Like A Woman Workshop: Facilitated a workshop for women leaders wherein the participants were taken on a transformational learning journey to help them design their individual leadership development action plan.

·Mentoring Programmes: Leveraged subject matter experts and/or senior women leaders within the organisation to mentor young women and equip them with life skills by knowledge and experience-sharing. The mentoring programme is designed to transfer the lessons of greater experience to improve the capability of other individuals or work groups.

Region-centric initiatives

·Unstereotype Alliance: Became a member of the UAE chapter of Unstereotype Alliance, convened by UN Women, to eliminate stereotyping gender in marketing activities. Participated in the global summit to set the narrative for the next three years, at the UN Headquarters, along with reputable organisations (Mastercard, Unilever, L’Oreal, Mars, etc.).

·UAE Gender Balance Council Pledge: Supported the UAE governmental initiative on gender balance.

·Women in TAAI & Tourism (WITT): Collaborated with the Travel Agents Association of India (TAAI) to support their WITT initiative to upskill women in tourism by providing specialised training and networking opportunities.

·Future Skills Scholarship Programme: In partnership with Friends Union for Energising Lives (FUEL), a credible not-for-profit organisation in India, trained young women in future skills including Java and Artificial Intelligence. The participants also received training in soft skills, specialised mentoring and internship opportunities which helped them to enhance their employability.