International Women's Day '22: #BreakTheBias
Posted by Roseanne: Mar 08, 2022 • 3 min read
On this International Women’s Day, we want to help #breakthebias.
Here at Pod Point, we’re rolling out the charging infrastructure to facilitate, what has been described by some, as the biggest change to the automotive sector in the past hundred years.
We know that developments on this kind of scale have not always taken a diverse range of needs into account.
As Emma Pinchbeck, CEO of Energy UK, explained in our Electric Insights series last year, some demographics seem to have been overlooked in the past when planning big infrastructure projects.
During our research we learned that:
- Women make up 20% of transport sector employees in Europe. This gender imbalance “fuels the bias in transport planning towards typically male modes and patterns of travel”.
- The first computer programmers were women, but women now make up less than 10% of software developers worldwide.
- In a car accident, women are 73% more likely than men to be seriously injured or die.
- Speech-recognition software is trained on recordings of male voices: Google’s version is 70% more likely to understand men.
(With credit to Caroline Criado Perez’ book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World designed for Men for highlighting the above findings).
So, how can this gender gap be tackled?
1. Come and work with us!
We need more women’s perspectives and experiences to help with balanced decision making as we develop new products and roll out charging infrastructure.
Read what it’s like to work here from Alice Huckin, our SME manager
2. Help us with our research by joining Pod Point Labs, our user community group.
Our most recent survey generated more than 1,300 responses, but only 15% of our respondents were women. We’d love to see this become more even; after all, charging infrastructure needs to work for the needs of the whole population - not just half of it.
Want to hear from key female players in the EV and energy industry?
Check out our Electric Insights series:
Emma has been CEO of Energy UK, the trade association for the energy industry in the UK with 100 members (including lil’ ol’ Pod Point), since September 2020. She previously served as Deputy Chief Executive of Renewable UK and Head of Climate Change and Energy for the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF).
Emma is a passionate advocate for greater diversity and inclusion within the energy sector and has won acclaim for seamlessly balancing her high-pressured leadership role with raising her young child.
Imogen has got some excellent experience under her belt, from starting her career in the aerodynamics engineering team at Jaguar Land Rover, to wearing many hats at ZEV van, bus and car maker Arrival.
Now, she’s juggling a number of roles, but most notably for our viewers is her joining the Fully Charged team, working alongside the likes of Bobby (Robert Llewellyn).
Natasha is Joint Head (with Vicky Edmonds) of OZEV. She also drives a 2014 Nissan Leaf.
OLEV is a joint unit between the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK Government.
A cross departmental unit that holds the purse for low-emission transport funding, OLEV is responsible for the grants for electric vehicles and infrastructure and therefore in a significant position of power when it comes to shaping the industry.
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