Zomato to increase women staff in its delivery services

New Delhi : Online food ordering platform Zomato on Friday announced that it will be increasing the number of women staffs in its delivery services to 10 per cent by the end of this year. In a blog on its website, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal said at present only about 0.5 per cent of its delivery partners are women.

“Today, we are taking our first step towards increasing the participation of women delivery partners in our fleet. To begin with, we have set ourselves a goal of reaching 10 percent participation by the end of 2021 starting with Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune,” he wrote.

Zomato has always aimed at being an "inclusive workplace", he said, "So far, our inclusive workplace initiatives haven’t taken into consideration the fact that only about 0.5 per cent of our delivery partners are women."

He mentioned that it will not be easy to implement the process as employing women is not just targeting more women employees. Several policies will need to be changed during the process to retain more women employees.

In order to achieve the goal of 10 per cent women participation in the three pilot cities, he said the company is working on four key initiatives of access to safety-related education and tools; contactless deliveries by default; extended support from its restaurant partners and SOS button and dedicated support.

Elaborating further, he said, “We are adding self-defense training to our onboarding process which will be mandatory for all women delivery partners to attend. In addition to our first-aid kits, all women delivery partners will be equipped with a handy hygiene and safety kit,” Goyal wrote.