Diversity

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to equality of treatment and opportunity for all employees.

We work with organisations such as Jobcentre Plus, Outreach and Remploy to promote our work opportunities to a diverse audience. We employ a growing number of people for whom English is not their first language. We provide recognised language training through our learning centres.

In North America almost half of our workforce are women, many of whom drive our yellow school buses on a part-time basis. In the UK our employees (particularly the drivers) tend to be male: recruiting more women to the UK workforce remains a challenge. Our individual operating companies have used a number of initiatives to attract female recruits. First ScotRail deployed female drivers to front their recruitment campaigns, leading to a small increase in the number of women recruited. We continue to work with Transport for London to deliver their goal of doubling the number of women in the bus industry by 2012.

This year we joined Opportunity Now, a membership organisation that wants to ensure inclusiveness for women. As members, we have taken part in a self-assessment benchmarking exercise against other member organisations. We will use this process to develop our understanding of best practice and to examine ways of improving the representation of women in the UK workforce in particular.

We conduct ongoing training on diversity and discrimination in the workforce. In North America we conducted discrimination/harassment/hostile work environment training with approximately 3,700 managers at the end of 2008 and we will re-run the training this year.

In the UK managerial staff are provided with training in the effective management of bullying and harassment, and diversity in the workplace.

In UK Rail we only have comprehensive ethnic analyses of our First Capital Connect franchise.