Christoph Achammer, ATP Architects & Engineers

Well, actually, as a CEO of a large consulting company with around about 1,000 employees in the construction field, which is not really appropriately done for gender equality, I think one step is to forge this during education, especially in the engineering part. In the architectural part, we are already there. In the engineering part, we really have to promote more female students into the technical educational parts, number one.

Number two, within our company, we did a lot of organizational changes which make it work that the old habit — somebody who is working in a project leading position has to work 10 hours, five days a week or even more — is not any longer necessary due to digitalization in our job. I think it is a big chance, and we see this already, that with 20 hours a week, with 25 hours a week, with a lot of remote working — I'm making a difference between remote working and home working. We don't support home working, but we support remote working from another place, from an office location near to your home or a working space adjacent to your home. That makes it much more possible to forge gender equality.

In general, I think gender equality needs quotas. Yeah, I know that's difficult when I say that, but especially in the management and C-level positions, I think without quotas we're suffering another 30 years.

Actually, within the hiring process, we use a very similar procedure like it was successfully done at our universities. I'm teaching at the Technical University in Vienna, and at the university you have this definition: if there are two persons and they are more or less equally qualified and one is female, then you have to take the female one. Sometimes, even a bit more — if there is a female person to be evaluated, you have to have a good reason why not to take them. And this we're even practicing within the office, because I mean the old school boys who are in leading positions, of course, would appreciate not to change their leading behavior. And leading behavior in a project is easier if you have one person 24/7 available for you and you don't have to talk about family problems, child problems, etc.

So, this really needs to have a change in culture, in leading and directing culture within a company. And this gets very strong support top down within our company, so therefore I think that's one of the best measures we took the last five to six years — that we by intention are looking for female C-level and next-level leading people to do that. Because only when you reach 25 to 30% female leading positions, then you really can prove that the cultural change has been successful.

Even more challenging in certain disciplines where you just don't get enough people from the universities into this field, that makes it necessary that in some professions — let's talk about HVAC, electrical, etc. — we are taking students right after their bachelor degree, probably in just an adjacent discipline, and the continuing education is done within our office.

I wouldn't call it bias, you know. I mean, a lot of people, even in the industry, are very optimistic and say that's great and that makes it possible that gender equality is going to be improved. I don't believe that. I mean, we are working in the discipline, for example, designing offices where we try to make ideal workplaces — not only individual workplaces, but even collaborative workplaces — with ideal conditions from the surroundings, from noise protection, from concentration, etc., even from personal behavior. And now, suddenly, we accept that we find it positive that male and female — but predominantly female — workers are sitting at home and the only quiet space in their little apartment is the toilet, and outside the kids are running around. And we think this improves their position. No, it doesn't at all.

And so therefore, I think the bias starts much earlier — that you say if somebody is really concentrated onto the job and is reorganizing his job, and that he can separate private business from their own business, and if they can separate that and is supported by the organization of work, then this bias disappears.

Actually, it's not just a matter of this year. We started this four years ago, that we found out that we have nearly 40 to 45% of all our employees are female employees. And the higher you get into group leader position or even into C-level, the smaller this percentage is. And since five years, we have an active campaign not only in hiring but even in career planning, that one of our success benchmarks is how much is this percentage improved.

What we are already doing and very carefully doing, is that we have equal pay. Yeah, there is absolutely no difference. And even in the yearly leadership talks, it is a very critical point if somebody shows the bias that he says, listen, I don't want to hire a female person because most probably she is in danger to get kids and then I'm losing her for a year or for two years.

By the way, in Central Europe, that's something which is really prohibiting gender equality — are the social laws out of the, I always say, middle of the 20th century, that a mother could take up to three years out of the office after a birth of a child and then have the rights to re-enter after three years, which is definitely counterproductive for females to be in the job, because the pressure starts in their own family.

But we overcome that by reorganizing the work. And again, this is a very, very important point when we do our quarterly interviews with our employees — if we find out that here somebody wants to make it easier for him, in this case for him, if he's not hiring female persons. Because the center of our work is to make buildings to improve the world, which is something for the next generation. And because the culture of our company, top down and bottom up, is a culture where we know that if we're coming to gender equality, we can do a better job to improve the world.