Broadband providers Openreach part of Telecomms giant BT have announced that they to actively seek to encourage more women into its organisation.

Openreach, a new part of BT, was created on January 11 2006 to provide installation and maintenance services on behalf of Britain's communications providers (CPs).

Openreach services, supports and maintain the wiring, fibres and connections which link millions of homes and businesses in Britain to the networks of CPs. It was created to treat every communications provider in an even-handed way. Buzzword: ‘Equivalence.’

As part of the BT Group, and employing 33,000 staff, of which 25,000 of those are field engineers are on the road, employment flexibility policies is crucial.

Most of the engineers were under the BT umbrella originally, but moved to the Openreach title which meant a massive shift in HR.

Did You Know… · Openreach's access network is 120 million kilometres long and so could stretch around the globe 3,000 times

· This network covers 30 million customer lines from approx 6,000 local exchanges

· 300 million telephone calls are made across this network every day

· 350 million internet connections are made across this network every day

· Openreach’s 25,000 engineers work down 200,000 manholes and up more than 2.5 million poles