Metro Trains: Gender equity in operational roles
Metro Trains identified a persistent gap: while its head office teams had improved gender representation over time, operational departments, particularly traditionally male-dominated roles such as train maintenance, continued to struggle to attract and retain female staff.
The challenge
Metro Trains had already used VR successfully for technical training and wanted to explore whether the same medium could work for soft-skills development, specifically, whether immersive learning could surface systemic bias, shift leadership mindsets and drive meaningful cultural change across the organisation.
What was built
People Tech Revolution, in collaboration with Grit Leadership, delivered three targeted VR training sessions using the Everyday Inclusion module from the PTR Library, the same module previously deployed with Etihad Airways:
- A Head Office Staff workshop, focused on broad DEIB awareness and strategies for continuous improvement.
- An Operational Leaders workshop, which tackled real barriers to recruiting and retaining women in hard-skill roles and examined the impact of systemic issues such as facility design and resource allocation.
- A Combined Leadership workshop, bringing together diverse perspectives to build a shared vision for inclusive practice across departments.
How it was delivered
The three workshops were run as a pilot, giving Metro Trains a structured way to test immersive learning against a problem that traditional DEIB efforts had struggled to shift. Rather than a single generic session, the program was split by audience, head office staff, operational leaders and a combined leadership group, so that each workshop could focus on the barriers most relevant to that group's part of the business.
Results
No participant counts or satisfaction figures have been published for this pilot, unlike PTR's Mater, Google, Mayo Clinic and Etihad engagements. The workshops surfaced several qualitative insights, as reported by PTR following the sessions. Systemic bias often proved unintentional: policies such as prioritising separate facilities for women, rather than equitable upgrades for all staff, could reinforce a sense of exclusion. Leadership awareness emerged as a key lever, with operational leaders acknowledging the subtle ways culture, policy and infrastructure shape staff experience and limit equity. Participants found the VR training realistic and engaging, and reported that it was effective in prompting new perspectives on the issue.
By placing leaders inside realistic scenarios rather than presenting policy alone, the pilot demonstrated that immersive learning can spark meaningful conversation even where traditional DEIB efforts had struggled to gain traction.
The pilot at a glance
Challenge, build and delivery, summarised from the case study above.
Head office gender representation had improved, but operational roles such as train maintenance still struggled to attract and retain women.
Three audience-specific VR workshops, Head Office Staff, Operational Leaders and Combined Leadership, using the Everyday Inclusion module from the PTR VR Library.
Run as a pilot split by audience, so each workshop could focus on the barriers most relevant to that group's part of the business.
Policies such as prioritising separate facilities for women, rather than equitable upgrades for all staff, could reinforce a sense of exclusion.
Operational leaders acknowledged the subtle ways culture, policy and infrastructure shape staff experience and limit equity.
Participants found the VR training realistic and engaging, and reported that it was effective in prompting new perspectives on the issue.
No participant counts or satisfaction figures have been published for this pilot; the outcomes above are qualitative, as reported by PTR following the sessions.
PTR and Grit Leadership ran three audience-specific VR pilot workshops for Metro Trains, testing whether immersive learning could surface the systemic bias behind low female representation in operational roles. No participant counts or satisfaction figures have been published for this pilot; the reported outcome is qualitative, not statistical.
