Celebrating International Women’s Day across the world

By Lisa Marena, VP Information, Just Eat Takeaway.com 

Fostering an inclusive culture, where all of our people are provided with the right tools to succeed, is key to our success. At Just Eat Takeaway.com, our vision is to empower everyday convenience whether that be for our partners, consumers, couriers and colleagues. In line with this, and as a global business representing more than 100 different nationalities, driving inclusion and being responsible towards our people is fundamental. This includes promoting gender equality and diversity, which continues to be one of our priorities. 

Celebrating female talent: 

As a business that operates in 20 markets, from Canada all the way to New Zealand, we’re delighted to be celebrating International Women’s Day across the globe. As an example, in the UK, we’re showcasing independent women-owned restaurants who have shared their inspiring entrepreneurial journeys. We’re also shining a spotlight on our female couriers through the Women Can Ride project in Italy, as well as hosting an event with I’mperfetta Project to discuss acceptance, inclusion and how to overcome barriers. 

In Canada, we’re sponsoring a new award in WXN’s Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 list. The category is the SkipTheDishes Food Industry Award dedicated to standout Canadian women in leadership in the industry, whether that be restaurant owners, franchisees, head chefs or food entrepreneurs.

Internal events: 

Our “Women in Tech” employee network, which connects approximately 1000 female colleagues from across the business, will be hosting a number of global events to raise awareness and champion female inclusion throughout March, such as hosting fireside chats with female leaders. Alongside this, our Grubhub team will be hosting a panel on career wellness, our Menulog team in Australia will be arranging luncheons with themes focusing on IWD, while in Spain, we’ll be organising roundtable discussions on women in STEM. 

Beyond International Women's Day:

We know celebrating International Women’s Day isn’t just about recognising female achievements on one day. It’s important to encourage awareness and take action to drive gender parity across the board. So for the first time, we are pleased to be setting data-driven ambitions to increase gender balance across all job levels, functions, and segments of our organisation by the end of 2025. 

To achieve this, we’ll focus on three main areas: hiring, promotions, and attrition. We aim to have an equal number of men and women in our new hires and ensure equal rates of promotions and departures. By focusing on these specific areas, we can identify and understand any differences that may exist and make improvements to our processes to benefit our diverse workforce. 

In addition, as part of our Early Careers Programme in tech, we widened the scope to help encourage more people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply. As part of this, we’ve targeted an even split between men and women as well as removing the need to have a degree and modifying assessment methods. Overall, we’re pleased that 52% of the programme was made up of female employees last year. It's important to note that we recognise  there are more genders than male and female and are looking to enhance the diversity and inclusion of all genders, including non-binary and other gender identities.

Overall, we know that there is still a lack of credible representation of female talent across a number of sectors, whether that be tech or hospitality. The measures we’ve taken so far to help drive gender equality is a step in our journey, and not the ultimate destination. Our commitment to diversity extends beyond gender. This is why we aim to embed Inclusion, Diversity & Belonging in everything we do and to encourage a culture where everyone is given the opportunity to thrive at work, regardless of who they are or where they’re from.