Female Health and Safety Professionals in the Workplace
Papers /Female Health and Safety Professionals in the Workplace
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Female Health and Safety Professionals in the workplace Roya Gorjifard ProfNZISM, HASANZ Registered, Researcher PhD Candidate, Victoria University of Wellington, HSE Consultant DECEMBER 2020 Women in the Workplace There are 17 goals defined as the blueprint of achieving economic growth and sustainable development. These goals are interconnected and are challenges that nations across the globe are keeping up to attain. Gender equality is the fifth among the seventeen goals. Females shared an average of 49.6% of the world population in 2017 (H. Ritchie, 2019). This ratio might slightly be different in different regions (The World Bank, 2019). Nonetheless, it bounces the reason why females play a significant role in the growing economy as well as why gender equality makes sense. The International Labour Organization’s Decent Work Agenda (Decent Work, 2020) and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2020) have both recognised this. Figure 1 creates a visual image of the workforce market in terms of female participation between 2000 and 2019. It shows female share in employment remained almost unchanged during that period (~39%). The good news is that female share in management improved 3% from 25% to 28% over the period, which displays a knock-knock on the glass ceiling. Page 1 An Executive Summary looking at skills and experience of women in Health & Safety roles (an evidenced-based research) Figure 1- A comparison of female share in the management, employment and the working-age population between 2000 and 2019 (ILOSTAT, 2020).
Nov 2020. Chris Peace, NZISM Fellow and lecturer in OHS at Victoria University, Wellington, shares his thoughts and sources as he considers the use of safety nets in construction. The key question is, do they work?