Ten of the world’s leading companies have released new workforce gender diversity figures, including details on leadership roles and board membership, in UN Women's inaugural HeForShe Parity Report.
The unprecedented disclosure was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where many of the firms’ heads gathered alongside Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson.
Last year at the 2015 UN Women session at Davos, UN Women unveiled the HeForShe IMPACT 10X10X10 initiative to galvanize momentum in advancing gender equality. HeForShe created the IMPACT 10X10X10 initiative to engage 10 key decision-makers in governments, corporations and universities around the world to drive change from the top.
The Corporate Impact Champions have made gender equality an institutional priority since they signed up, and the transparency displayed in Davos will help them measure commitments and inspire action from other employers. The report figures show that a large gap remains between the representation of women in the workforce at large, and in leadership positions. Although overall representation of women averaged 39.7 per cent across the 10 firms, the proportion of senior leadership roles held by women ranged from a low of 11 per cent to a high of only 33 per cent. While this group outperforms global averages, UN Women has set parity — as part of its gender equality drive for a 50-50 Planet by 2030 — as the goal and the individual company commitments reflect a variety of pathways to achieve this.
The group of 10 companies includes: AccorHotels, Barclays, Koç Holding, McKinsey & Company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Schneider Electric, Tupperware Brands, Twitter, Unilever and Vodafone.
“I salute the courage of this group to reveal their equality profiles and their evident dedication to make radical change. They lay bare in specific detail what we know to be the global norm – women are chronically under-represented in leadership roles and in formal employment overall. Through their experiences, we can identify and scale solutions to transform sectors, and eventually, achieve an equal world. They are shaping what corporate leadership looks like on this issue,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women.
The UN has made this type of partnership a key part of achieving its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which prioritizes gender equality as both a stand-alone goal and as an integral part of other goals. The transparency displayed in the announcement is therefore crucial for measuring progress.
Recognizing both the importance of this topic and the critical need for progress, IMPACT Champions have taken a bold stance on transparency. They have committed to periodically and publically share standard figures on gender representation.
Other findings from the report include:
• 40% of Tupperware’s Board and 61% of its new hires are women, bringing it the closest to parity on these measures out of the group.
• AccorHotels and Tupperware Brands have achieved board parity (between 40-60%) today. Across IMPACT Champions, women hold 28.6% of Board seats.
• Across all companies, women represent 39.9% of new hires. Four companies have achieved parity in their new hires: Barclays, PwC, Tupperware and Unilever.
