Women account for 60% of the Aragonese business group’s management positions.
With 50 years of experience in the management and recycling of waste for sectors such as the automotive and domestic appliance industries, Industrias López Soriano has become a benchmark in Aragon for the circular economy, care for the environment and revaluation. A goal that the business group has achieved by responding to its customers with agility and quality, with modern facilities and state-of-the-art machinery, and through a firm commitment to equal opportunities in the business environment.
According to the manager of Industrias López Soriano, María López Palacín, equality has been incorporated into the company’s corporate policy and strategy in a very natural way. ‘We are a family business and the eldest in the third generation are women’, she says. Women now account for 60% of the company’s management positions, an example of female leadership in the industrial sector. In middle management, this percentage is around 25%, similar to other companies in the same sector.
To try to continue advancing along this path, Industrias López Soriano is developing an equality plan that tries to ‘put on paper what we are already doing’, as the manager says. The company has a young workforce and this has led them in recent years to apply conciliation and flexibility measures in order to adapt to new demands and new times.
Flexibility
These measures include adapting the timetable to a single morning shift from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. in administrative positions or the possibility of teleworking, at certain times, in those positions that do not require physical presence. In addition, women and men have the ‘same salary and working conditions’, so that ‘the wage gap does not exist’, although ‘in terms of recruitment, equality is more difficult to achieve’, acknowledges the head of the business group.
Ours is a very male-dominated sector, specialising in heavy machinery, where the presence of women is rare, if not non-existent,” says López Palacín. In those positions where there may be equality, such as in the small electrical appliance processing plant, women represent 50% of the workforce, but in other cases the female demand for employment does not even exist“.
The manager refers mainly to the positions in the treatment plants where the hardest and most demanding jobs are carried out. ‘There are jobs where if you comply with the law on equality, you don’t comply with the law on prevention of occupational hazards, in the end you don’t know what criteria to apply’, she says.
The manager refers mainly to the jobs in the treatment plants where the hardest and most demanding work is carried out. ‘There are jobs where if you comply with the law on equality, you don’t comply with the law on prevention of occupational hazards, in the end you don’t know what criteria to apply’, she says.
Nor in these cases is flexibility of time and space applied, but rather the working day is organised in three shifts and is completely face-to-face because the production lines demand it. In this sense, the business leader calls for greater coordination between administrations when it comes to adapting public equality policies to the size of companies and to the different sectors.
“Benchmarks of success”.
From a general point of view, for the manager of Industrias López Soriano, work-life balance concerns both women and men and should be common to all sectors, ‘not only in industry, but also in leisure, commerce and catering’, and although she considers that ‘progress is being made and awareness is growing’, she sees the need to continue working to ‘reduce these gaps’.
In this sense, Industrias López Soriano collaborates through other institutions and organisations in actions that favour equal opportunities, especially in access to management positions for women in order to put an end to glass ceilings. As president of the Aragonese Association of Women Entrepreneurs (ARAME), López Palacín points out that ‘there is still a lot to do: inform, educate and give visibility to the fact that it is possible’.
According to the manager, ‘women have a tendency to undervalue themselves or to think that it is impossible to get there’, which is why it is important to have ‘successful role models’. Examples of female leadership that can be useful to other professionals, entrepreneurs and managers, and also to the new generations in fields such as university studies or vocational training.
Article published on 08/03/2022 in El Periódico de Aragón
