International Women‘s Day is celebrated on March 8th every year to acknowledge the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women worldwide. It is a day to celebrate women and promote female empowerment. At Steensen Varming, we participate in this global celebration by introducing some of the strong women who contribute to the success of our global team.
Starting with Michelle, Michelle has been with Steensen Varming since 2007 and has held various roles within the company eventually growing into an HR role. Michelle was the first person in her family to earn a degree in the early 2000s, but her background lies in anthropology, sociology and British neolithic archaeology. At the time, she had no idea her journey would take her to where she is today and over the years Michelle has added various HR qualifications to her impressive list of studies.
One of Michelle’s biggest female inspirations belongs to the Steensen Varming family, a former business manager and Michelle’s first female boss at the company – Michelle admired her pragmatic approach to management and mentoring and has since used the experience as inspiration in her own work.
With engineering being a traditionally male-dominated industry, we asked Michelle how she thinks we can encourage more women to pursue a career in engineering? Michelle believes gender stereotypes have much to do with exposure during early years and that increased exposure to women in engineering roles might spark an interest within young girls and women. She continues to say Steensen Varming wants to help in creating this exposure by actively involving our female engineers in mentoring activities, both within and outside of the organisation.
Michelle further emphasized the importance of flexibility. Flexibility to support women’s career transitions as well as encouraging men to be more flexible and share responsibilities that are often female led. To help push these changes forward, Steensen Varming has policies and procedures that are updated on a regular basis, offering flexibility, and continuously improving the company to create an inclusive work environment.
Being in an HR role, Michelle’s work largely focuses on implementing positive changes and educating our team in present-day scenarios but looking to the future. Michelle hopes the work she does contributes to creating permanent positive changes in the workplace including the generations of women to come.
