Genesis Energy has become a better place for women to work.

The power company joined the growing number of New Zealand businesses who have been awarded the GenderTick.

The YWCA's Gender Tick is only awarded to companies which achieve across five key indicators, including gender inclusive culture, flexibility and leave, women in leadership, gender pay equality and ensuring a safe workplace.

"We are proud to receive this accreditation, and have worked hard to be strong advocates for diversity and inclusion as part of our wider company strategy," said Nicola Richardson of Genesis.

"Genesis has increased its female leadership to 40%, the wider workforce to 44%, and three
of our eight board members are female."

Other companies awarded the GenderTick include Lion, Air New Zealand, Coca-Cola Amatil, Fonterra, SkyCity, Auckland Council, Kiwibank and Meridian Energy.

Genesis is also a member of Global Women which has a diversity goal of 40:40:20 diversity (40% male, 40% female, 20% either gender) across the entire workforce.

"We believe that a diverse workforce is a high performance workforce," Richardson said.

"It is vital to bringing fresh perspectives to decision making, and developing the innovative solutions our customers demand."

In the last 18 months, Genesis has launched a number of health and wellbeing
programmes to further boost its gender and ethnic representation.

Flexible work hours to allow all employees to balance work and life commitments have also been introduced.

The company has introduced its 'Minding the Gap' policy to enable fairness and gender pay
equity.

The pay gap between men and women doing the same or comparable work is 1.6%.

Genesis has introduced changes and reviews that will see this continue to narrow in the future.

The company has also ended the industry practice of asking new hires for their previous salary details.

This removes bias and the possibility of 'importing' pay gaps from other organisations, which disproportionately affected women and minorities.

Dr Kaisa Wilson from GenderTick said the certification was "power validation" of the work Genesis had done to make the workplace fair for all genders.