Using Data to Advance Gender Equality

Using Energy Sector Data to Measure the Talent Pipeline at Delsur 

When El Salvador’s Electric Company, Distribuidora De Electricidad Delsur S.A De C.V (DELSUR), joined USAID’s Engendering Industries Program in 2019, less than 20 percent of the company’s employees were women, and there were no women employed as technicians, line workers, in-grid dispatchers, or system operators. Engendering Industries often advises companies to use available talent pipeline data to set realistic hiring targets for women, but this was not possible since there was no current industry-level data available since a study that the General Superintendent of Electricity and Communications had carried out in 2012. Without knowing how many women were in the talent pipeline, it was difficult for DELSUR to develop a hiring strategy and set realistic targets. 

In 2021, Engendering Industries provided DELSUR with a grant to conduct a labor market study and assess employment prospects for women pursuing technical careers in El Salvador. DELSUR used this funding to hire a Salvadorean consulting firm specializing in diversity, equality, and inclusion to conduct the study. Their objectives were to update sector-level employment data by gender, assess energy sector growth prospects over the next decade, and map these factors against the pipeline of people pursuing a STEM education. DELSUR then used these data to develop recommendations for improving outreach, attraction, recruitment, and hiring practices. 

The survey team contacted 83 companies across the energy sector value chain in El Salvador, including generators, distributors, and prime contractors. However, motivating companies to share confidential employee data proved challenging, and the response rate was initially low. 

“We were asking other companies to share their private information and needed to reassure them that information would be kept confidential and that DELSUR would not receive the raw data,” explained Lorena Hernández, DELSUR’s New Business and Strategic Marketing Specialist. To address these challenges, DELSUR created a confidentiality policy, used the data collection firm as a firewall, and only received results in aggregate without company identifying information.

DELSUR’s CEO also sent a letter to each company, explaining the objective and requesting participation. In the end, 32 companies shared their employment data. 

The results showed that the proportion of women in the energy sector increased from 12 percent in 2012 to 18.7 percent in 2021. Despite this, the study revealed that women held only 3.9 percent of technical positions. Interestingly, the women in technical roles had more advanced educational qualifications than their male counterparts, with a larger proportion of women having completed undergraduate and graduate degrees.

In terms of the talent pipeline, women represented only 21.1 percent of the total number of students pursuing an education that could lead to a career in the energy sector. Both male and female students consistently agreed that technical jobs were “masculine.” Female students reported that even their families questioned why they were taking courses meant for men. The results painted a picture of few women studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), an equally low percentage of women working in the energy sector, and even fewer women occupying technical roles. 

DELSUR used the data to develop new outreach and recruitment strategies with confidence. “The results highlighted the need to continue to develop programs to encourage women to join technical careers and study STEM,” Lorena Hernández said. The company held an internal session to share the survey results with human resources employees and then added language encouraging women to apply to all job postings alongside gender equitable photographs. They also joined the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology to launch a program to break down gender stereotypes for women STEM that has so far reached more than 3,500 girls in 24 public schools. 

DELSUR also took its advocacy one step further by organizing a national conference to disseminate its study findings to other companies in El Salvador’s energy sector. Twenty-nine senior leaders and regulators worked together to form a roadmap for gender equity in the industry and committed to establishing a permanent, sector-wide gender equality committee to discuss progress regularly. This will likely have a positive impact on gender equality in the industry as a whole and position DELSUR as a national leader on gender equity in the energy sector.

Data Reveals Biases Against Women at SENELEC

When the Société Nationale d’Électricité du Sénégal (SENELEC) joined the Engendering Industries Program in 2020, only 22 percent of SENELEC’s employees were women and women held only four percent of technical roles. To deepen its understanding of the underlying causes for the underrepresentation of women in technical roles, the SENELEC Engendering Industries team conducted qualitative data collection and paired this with an analysis of existing quantitative data from labor market surveys. Early in the Engendering Industries’ engagement with SENELEC, a change management coach from the program supported the company to hold focus groups with employees USAID.GOV 3 ENGENDERING INDUSTRIES Photo: DELSUR El Salvador that revealed underlying misperceptions and biases about women’s representation and role in technical careers. Focus group participants shared their perceptions that the company was unable to recruit women for technical positions because women were underrepresented in STEM programs, lacked interest in technical careers, and were less capable of succeeding in such fields. 

Mohammed Al Mansour, Head of the Operations and Technical Management of SENELEC’s Power Distribution Department and an Engendering Industries participant, suspected that those perceptions were not based in fact and were having a negative impact on the utility’s recruitment and hiring efforts and practices. “Some thought that there weren’t many women available in the talent pool, and there was a perception that women weren’t interested in being recruited for technical roles,” Al Mansour explained. However, he also remembered there were numerous women in his own university classes as well as many female interns that he had mentored at SENELEC. Al Mansour set out to find quantitative data to test his colleagues’ biases against his observations. In 2022, Al Mansour conducted two analyses, first collecting publicly available data to determine the number of female students in the talent pipeline and then using data about scholarships that SENELEC provided to university students to assess the success of women in STEM fields.

In the first component of the study, Al Mansour’s use of open-source university data came with some limitations. He gleaned publicly posted lists of applicants and those accepted to STEM programs at local universities and then worked to disaggregate the data by gender. But Al Mansour had to infer the gender of the students from their names, where possible, and excluded students with gender-ambiguous names. Both practices slightly increased the study’s margin of error. Additionally, using these data sets did not allow Al Mansour to ask questions of the universities or the students. However, the method also had advantages, allowing Al Mansour to move quickly and to conduct the study using available quantitative data. 

Ultimately, this first analysis allowed him to identify notable trends that disproved his colleagues’ beliefs in STEM studies and were not interested in taking jobs in technical fields. Looking at data from 2020 and 2021, he determined that 45 percent of university applicants and 40 percent of those accepted to STEM programs were women. While this showed some potential bias in the admissions process, it also demonstrated that women were interested and widely present in STEM courses. These statistics were in line with SENELEC data that showed that 37 percent of applicants to SENELEC were women. The data supported Al Mansour’s hypothesis that women were studying STEM in significant numbers and potentially interested in working in technical roles at SENELEC.

Next, Al Mansour further analyzed additional company quantitative data to determine whether women were successful in STEM studies to address his colleagues’ belief that women were not successful in such fields. Each year, SENELEC awards scholarships to select employees’ children based on their high school grades. Those with the highest scores are awarded scholarships. Al Mansour analyzed six years of awards data and found that SENELEC provided more than half of the scholarships to women. Looking at awardees that had enrolled in STEM programs, he found that 61 percent of scholarships went to female students. Though the data were limited only to employees’ children, it confirmed that women are not only present in these university programs but also likely to be top students.

The data analysis points to women’s interest in STEM and their high levels of acceptance into STEM programs, with some earning high marks in those programs, suggesting that the talent pool of women for technical positions at SENELEC might be larger than previously assumed. Despite these facts, there is a gap between the 37 percent of women who applied for positions at SENELEC and the 21 percent of women who held entry-level positions at the utility, pointing to a need to address biases at the company and reassess recruitment practices. 

Since Al Mansour conducted the study, an Engendering Industries change management coach has supported the team of SENELEC participants to develop a strategy to improve its attraction and talent outreach, recruitment and hiring practices. So far, they have secured leadership buy-in to rewrite job ads with a statement encouraging women to apply. Moving forward, the plan is to implement unconscious bias training for hiring managers and establish a gender-balanced selection committee. Additionally, they hope to focus outreach efforts on students, including developing a scholarship fund for women in STEM fields and partnerships with universities where they can promote opportunities for women at SENELEC. Al Mansour and his colleagues believe that these efforts will increase the proportion of women in technical roles to 10 percent by 2025 and grow the number of women across all fields in the company. And Al Mansour plans to present his study’s findings to SENELEC’s leadership to shine a light on biases within the company. “I think we can convince them. When they see the data, it can disprove their beliefs, and it can lead things to change,” he explains.

Conclusion 

By supporting DELSUR and SENELEC to study female talent pools in their countries, Engendering Industries helped both companies develop actionable insights that formed the basis of their strategic attraction, outreach, recruitment, and hiring plans. Though the two studies varied in scale and cost, both generated valuable data. DELSUR was able to position itself as a leader in gender equality by organizing a national-level study and convening leaders from across El Salvador to disseminate results. While SENELEC’s study was smaller in scope and relied on open-source information and data in the company archives, it was still valuable, uncovering biases in the hiring process and catalyzing interest in recruiting women in technical positions. 

Making data-driven decisions is a key component of the Engendering Industries approach because it can help accurately target interventions and check biases. The best practices to develop surveys and market studies can be applied at any scale to meet an organization’s needs.