Diversity and inclusion initiatives at Grant Thornton France have gathered pace over the last year, with progress being made on the back of Grant Thornton International Ltd’s Women in Business campaign, and the launch of the Blueprint for Action.

Fresh thinking and long-term objectives are combining at Grant Thornton France to create a workforce that’s increasingly diverse from a gender perspective. A growing number of women at the firm are being promoted to senior roles, and levels of gender parity across the business are improving.

New inclusion programmes make their mark

The last 12 months has seen Grant Thornton France launch what it calls its ‘Women Experience’ – a two-pronged approach for improving the firm’s diversity and inclusion (D&I) position. It comprises Women in Leadership (also known as Springboard for Women), an internal training and mentoring programme for female executives, and Women in Business, an external programme aimed at helping senior women at Grant Thornton France grow their business network.

The initiative has had a measurable impact. The firm hosts four events per year around its Women Experience programmes, with the total number of attendees recently hitting 400. Since its launch in 2017, the Women in Leadership programme has mentored 60 Grant Thornton France staff.

Creating value for clients through diversity

Frédéric Zeitoun, head of people and culture at Grant Thornton France, says that bolstering the firm’s D&I initiatives over the last year has encouraged attitudes at the firm to shift, with the business benefits of promoting and maintaining a diverse and inclusive workforce now apparent to everyone in the business. “Diversity creates value,” he says. “We are confronting complex issues with our clients that often require different perspectives to resolve, so having diversity in the team is essential for helping clients manage complexity.”

Setting long-term gender balance goals

Raising awareness around the tangible business benefits of D&I has improved benchmarking at the firm. Grant Thornton France now regularly tracks key indicators such as gender pay gaps among its teams, differences in wage increases and the distribution of promotions between male and female staff, and the number of women returning from parental leave. By benchmarking this data year-on-year, the firm hopes to level the playing field completely for women at Grant Thornton France, although this remains a long-term objective.

The firm’s challenge, says Frédéric, is to not lose sight of its D&I goals, and to keep building on the progress and momentum new initiatives such as the Women Experience create.