We’re celebrating International Women’s Day, where we give greater attention to the issues women face, including gender equity, bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. These aren't problems that are solved by having a single day of recognition once a year, but the significance of International Women's Day lies in raising awareness with others, having difficult discussions and making good on these promises to effect change.
OUR PLEDGE TO EFFECT CHANGE
Last year, Ubisoft Singapore was one of the first companies in Singapore to join the SG Women in Tech Company Pledge initiative. We made a promise to enable our women to tap into their full potential and to build the local talent pool with academic partners. To do this, we pledged to create new groups and programs, create more flexibility in our policies, and partner with schools to create more industry awareness.
NEW GROUPS AND PROGRAMS
We started by working with the women on our team, launching the Women in Leadership Programme. It was tailored to address unique barriers that females experience in the industry, to help empower and support our female talents to reach their goals, and gain confidence in what they do. The pilot test participants received a four-month training program via our external partners, 1:1 coaching, and the opportunity for hands-on learning.
At the same time, we created the Women@UbisoftSG Employee Resource Group (ERG). This is for all women of Ubisoft Singapore to help support each other and find or be a mentor, while providing them with a safe way to provide feedback on what we can do better to support them.
Externally, we also played host to W Coffee (Women in Games) alongside others in our industry. Not all video game and technology companies tackle the same issues in the same way, and hearing what's happening from outside our studio is eye-opening. It also means we're included in making change and listening to feedback across the industry.
FLEXIBLE POLICIES
Our policies have seen some significant changes in the past year, and we've been thinking about our women as we've gone through this process. As a result, we enhanced our maternity and paternity benefits significantly. We also re-examined our flexible work arrangements with the awareness that rigid schedules can be detrimental for gender equity and to challenge the stereotypes around parenthood.
We changed our hiring panels to ensure they are more diversified, while at the same time launched our Hiring Right Training Program for interviewers. This provides them with critical interviewing skills to fairly assess candidates, while giving them more perspective on unconscious biases that might come up during interviews.
INDUSTRY AWARENESS
In the past year, we've held career talks with just about every institute of higher learning, and this is in addition to our global Ubisoft Graduate Program!
Many of our team members have great stories to tell, and in addition to our Women in Spotlight series, we also had nominations to the Singapore 100 Women in Tech listing. Since the list began, we've had two women included in it each year (2020 and 2021).
Coming back to the pledge itself, we were one of the first to sit down with more than 40 other companies that made a commitment last year and share what we've learned. We want to make sure that not only can we enact change in our own studio, but across the tech sector in Singapore as well.
FUTURE SUPPORT
This International Women's Day, Ubisoft Singapore is taking a moment to challenge the status quo. With the theme of this year's day being #BreakTheBias, there are a number of ways you can participate, even if it's showing solidarity on social media.