Lynk & Co pledges 50/50 gender split in its workforce by the end of the year

Lynk & Co has pledged to have a 50/50 gender split across the company by the end of this year.

The Swedish firm, which has close ties to Volvo, describes itself as a mobility company, but builds cars that can be ‘owned’ through a month-to-month subscription model.

It has conducted research with data analysts at Statista and found that the average automotive company has just 15 per cent female workers, with the highest being around 30 per cent and the lowest just two per cent.

The company said the research looked at an employee’s ‘legal gender at the time of hiring’, and ‘doesn’t account for teammates who identify differently from their legal gender, or who identified outside of the gender binary’. It also doesn’t look at how factors such as race and sexuality can widen inequality, but the firm says it will explore this in further research.

By contrast to the industry average, Lynk & Co says 45 per cent of its staff identify as female.

The research also indicated that an average of just 11 per cent of management roles were held by women, while 18 per cent of board directors are female. Lynk & Co’s figures are 33 per cent and 50 per cent respectively.

Lynk & Co has also pointed to recent research that indicates companies with higher female representation see better financial return and a more collaborative and innovative workforce.

Alain Visser, CEO of Lynk & Co, said: “The gatekeepers of the automotive industry have excluded women, and pretty much anyone that isn’t a straight white man, for too long. Lynk & Co is committed to changing that. How can we create solutions that work for everyone, if we don’t have everyone at the table?”

Telma Negreiros, vice-president of PR and communications, said: “Equality within the workplace should not just be a goal or a target, what we have found is that it is absolutely critical to the growth and productivity of a company.

“If people are held back, then we shall never move forward as an industry. Today we have revealed some truly sobering statistics and we are not perfect.

“That is why we’re setting ourselves a challenging and bold pledge to have a total parity between genders across our entire workforce by the end of 2023.”

Lynk & Co launched its subscription-based ownership model in Europe last year, but it won’t be coming to the UK until 2022 at the earliest.