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22 Shamistha Selvaratnam: Setting benchmarks for gender equality
Shownotes:
The past year has been brutal for women and gender equality - it has severely set back progress made in the last decade. And it is acknowledged that governments and the private sector will have to work twice as hard to reverse the trend. My guest this week Shamistha Selvaratnam speaks about the need for transformative change to achieve gender equality. She stresses on the need for companies to really shift their approach from avoiding gender-related impacts and disclosing what is necessary to meet legislative requirements to proactively addressing inequalities."
Shamistha is the Gender Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) an organisation established to measure and rank the 2,000 most influential companies globally on their contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These keystone companies spread across 74 countries with combined revenues of $43 trillion have a critical role to play in whether the SDGs are accomplished or not.
In this episode she speaks about her background; the work of the WBA; using data for insights and not as an endpoint; why companies need to stop focusing on only preventing harm to women to taking actions that have positive impact on women......
Listen to the full episode here 👇🏾
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396
Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts
👉🏾 Well, the world benchmarking Alliance also known as the WBA is a multi-stakeholder Alliance. So our work and vision has always centered around the sustainable development goals. We're very focused on building a movement to measure and incentivise business impact towards a sustainable future that works for everyone. And we believe urgent action is needed to put the world on a more sustainable path. And that business has a key role to play in driving this change. So it's in this context that we are focused on developing benchmarks, that measure and compare the performance of the 2000 most influential companies globally on the sustainable development goals and we make these benchmarks free and available for everyone. And we share them with a broad set of stakeholders, including investors. And in doing so what we're aiming to do is to create a system that recognises leadership, but also creates accountability for those companies that continue to lag behind. And our movement is very much so grounded in our Alliance of over 200 organisations. So our allies represent a large mix of voices aligned with the universality of the sustainable development goals. And together, one of the key transformations that we see there is a need for, is a social transformation and to contribute to that being brought about, we are focused on transforming the role of business in society to ensure that businesses respect human rights. Provide and promote decent work and act ethically.
👉🏾 So perhaps it's useful to tell you a little bit about myself and what led me to doing work in the gender area at the WBA. I am the Gender Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance. And as you can probably hear from my accent, I am Australian born and raised. My parents migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka over 30 years ago. And I've been very fortunate to travel to Sri Lanka a couple of times. And what has always struck me is how different my life is as a woman, purely due to the fact that I was born in a developed country.
👉🏾 The truth of the matter is that it's very likely that my life would be very different had I been born in Sri Lanka. And by being born in Australia, I've been afforded countless opportunities that women in Sri Lanka are not afforded. And a key one is the level of education that I received. And that is really what prompted me to ensure that I use the opportunities that I have had to drive change for the millions of women around the world that experience gender inequalities, be it facing violence and harassment, lack of access to health information, and services and poor, or non-existent maternity protection. And I've had the opportunity to visit the factories of apparel brands in Sri Lanka and witnessed the conditions that women endure to not even receive a wage that meets their basic needs. And these experiences have really led me to where I am today. Working with the private sector to drive change for women.
👉🏾 I commenced my career as a corporate lawyer, working with businesses to mainstream human rights on the corporate agenda. And that work really showed me the unique position that companies are in to have positive impacts on the lives of people. Very simply put, we cannot create a sustainable future for all if people are left behind and therefore we certainly cannot achieve a sustainable future by leaving behind women who make up half of the world's population. So that really led me to my work at WBA as the gender lead, where we work to ensure that the invisible women that are impacted by companies actions be it in the workplace or in the supply chain are made visible. And we do this by shining a light on corporate gender impacts and incentivising businesses to drive and promote gender equality and women's empowerment throughout their value chain.
👉🏾 So now more than ever, there is a need to close the global gender gap. And at WBA, we believe companies are uniquely positioned to do this as I was mentioning before. So we are developing a gender benchmark that is fully transparent, comprehensive, publicly available, and aligned with stakeholder expectations.
And what the benchmark does is that it measures corporate gender impacts and aims to accelerate company progress in closing the gender gap. It will enable all stakeholders from consumers and investors to employees and business leaders to make informed decisions and encourage stronger corporate action on gender equality and women's empowerment.
👉🏾 Our benchmark does a deep dive, looking at gender equality within the apparel sector. And we really thought that the apparel sector would be the ideal starting place to understand the complex web of issues that are affecting the achievement of gender equality. The apparel sector plays a critical role in driving gender equality as more than two-thirds of its around 60 to 75 million global workforce are women.
And the sector is characterised by substantial outsourcing to multiple levels of suppliers located in developing countries like Sri Lanka, as I mentioned before. And women in those countries often face legal gender discrimination, fewer workplace protections, and where those protections do exist weaker levels of enforcement. So we see that women tend to have fewer formal contracts and lower wages. Longer and more unpredictable working hours, and experience various forms of gender-based violence and harassment. So our benchmark really provides the roadmap for apparel companies to take action to address the gender inequalities that exist within their business.
👉🏾 So when we assess companies, we always set sort of guidelines in relation to each of the topics that we're assessing them on. So for example, when we think of a topic such as gender equality in leadership, one of the targets that we assess companies on is whether they have between 40% to 60% of women in leadership positions in their organisation. So we set targets like that across different areas that we assess, but then we also look at whether companies are setting those targets for themselves. Do they have targets in relation to the percentage of women they want in leadership or what their gender pay gap should look like? And we look at whether companies are taking actions to work towards those targets that they've set for themselves.
👉🏾 There can be no sustainable development without gender equality, there’s such a close link. Women comprise half of the world's population and gender equality and women's empowerment have been acknowledged as being central to the sustainable development goals with a whole sustainable development goal focused on this topic. So while there has been progress towards the realisation of equality of opportunities for women, we can see that much more remains to be done to ensure that women are guaranteed healthy lives, education, and full social and economic inclusion. And I think it's important to note the gender equality is not just the concern of half of the world's population.
👉🏾 It is a human right, and therefore is a concern for us all because no society can develop economically, politically or socially when half of its population is marginalised. And so it's critical that no one is left behind. If we want to create a sustainable future for everyone. And I think companies have such a critical role to play here because in the world of work, gender inequalities manifest in so many different ways. As I mentioned, we see women are underrepresented in leadership positions. They're paid less than their male colleagues. They participate less in the labour force and spend more time on things like unpaid care and domestic work. They face sexual harassment and gender-based violence. And we've seen that these inequalities have only been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, widening the gender gap
even further. But the business case for addressing and advancing gender equality is very clear. It has the potential to increase global growth by 13 trillion US dollars by 2030. And if we fail to take action, it has the ability to lower global growth by 1 trillion dollars by 2030. And as I said before now, more than ever, it is critical that we do take action to close the gender gap and really seize this opportunity that's in front of us, to work towards a just and equitable future for all, and therefore, a sustainable future.
👉🏾 So last year we published a report assessing the 36 most influential apparel companies globally on what they're doing to promote and drive gender equality. In order to determine the progress that's being made towards SDG five, the SDG that focuses on gender equality. And so I'll share a couple of our learnings. (USE) Firstly, we found that gender data is invisible. Our report revealed that current corporate disclosure around gender efforts is woefully insufficient. And as a result of this, gender inequalities within the business context are going all too often, unnoticed. Companies are disclosing less than 40% of the information that stakeholders expect to see.
👉🏾 That's both in terms of the quality and quantity of information that they're sharing. And this is the lack of transparency that is hindering progress towards the sustainable development goals. So to take some examples, we found that there is a lack of gender-disaggregated data disclosed by companies, including things like the gender composition of their workforce, their global gender pay gaps and the gender breakdown of key grievance data such as the number of grievances reported or remediated. And as a result of this invisible data, there are gaps in the knowledge and solutions needed in order to drive progress for women within the business world. And secondly, we learned that it's really time for companies to drive transformative change. The global pandemic has highlighted the importance and urgency of taking action for gender equality.
👉🏾 The UN issued a warning, highlighting the aggravated impacts of the pandemic for women already living on the economic margins. But from our research, we saw that not just any change is needed. Transformative change is vital to the achievement of gender equality. So companies really need to shift their approach from avoiding gender-related impacts and disclosing what is necessary to meet legislative requirements, to proactively addressing inequalities. And really good example of this is gender pay gap legislation. So from our research, we found that while 13 companies published gender pay gap information, where they're required to do so by legislation, only two companies publish their overall gender pay gap. And so companies need to really shift from focusing on preventing harm to women, to taking action that has positive impact on women.
👉🏾 I definitely agree that changes to the deadlines around reporting gender data. As we've seen with the UK legislation will certainly set back efforts towards getting businesses to report more and better quality gender data. And what we've seen from my research is that apparel companies tend to focus on complying with legislative requirements when it comes to disclosing gender data.
So for instance, as I mentioned before that there are only two companies that publish their overall global gender pay gap. However, 13 of the companies published gender pay gap information for their UK operations in accordance with the legislation that you were referencing. And this really highlights the important role that legislation plays in driving gender data disclosure by companies and therefore affecting change. However, we don't see companies going beyond these legislative requirements. For example, we found that no company discloses a strategy that they're taking or the active steps that they're taking to address any global pay gaps identified. So governments can really help raise the bar on corporate gender efforts, by requiring companies to publically report on gender impacts. But I think it's really important to note that companies can't wait for and should not rely on regulation from governments to determine what action they take to close the gender gap. They need to take the initiative to address issues that are key to gender equality and women's empowerment and go beyond compliance with such legislation.
👉🏾 I think the best place to start for a company that wants to drive gender equality is we've collecting sex-disaggregated data, to understand how their actions are impacting on women, across their value chain. And once they have that data, they should disclose it so they can be held accountable for their gender efforts, it's only once companies have the data, that they can make informed decisions to address the underlying issues and barriers to gender equality, that are present in their specific organisational context. And they can also incorporate a gender lens that accounts for women's unique needs and rights so that women can really thrive within the business world. And if companies fail to do so, they cannot truly understand the extent of the gender gap and to take targeted action to close it.
And from our research, we've seen that this has resulted in sporadic non-integrated action to address gender equality. When what we actually need to see companies doing is taking a strategic approach. So it all really starts with collecting and disclosing gender data. But I want to acknowledge that numbers alone will not solve gender inequalities.
👉🏾 They do not increase anyone's income or reduce the chances of discrimination. But data is really necessary to provide insights and shine a light on problems. So solutions can be identified. And when aiming to promote better outcomes for both genders, relying on instinct and what we hear from those around us, is really not good enough. Particularly in an area where there are such long-standing practices that need to be upturned, and blind spots that need to be revealed.
And so in such a world, the world that we live in, clear information is really our ally. We need this information as it empowers us to start new conversations, revisit and revise old strategies and in the end, make better decisions that lead to better outcomes for everyone.
👉🏾 Definitely thank you for that question. Intersectionality is such an important topic to discuss and going back to one of the points that you mentioned before and how sometimes gender equality can be siloed from sustainable development or one seen as more important than the other. It's the same when it comes to intersectionality we cannot view gender equality and racial and ethnic equality as siloed.
I guess an intersectional lens must be taken when looking at an organisation and seeing what steps need to be taken to address gaps. So when I say that companies need to be collecting sex-disaggregated data to understand the impact of the actions on women. They also need to be collecting data that's disaggregated by race and ethnicity.
👉🏾 To also understand the impact that the actions are having on people who come from different backgrounds and both those datasets shouldn't be separated or siloed from one another. They need to be viewed together. So you can see what impacts are you having for example, on women who come from different backgrounds and then what steps can be taken to address that? So I think it's really key that businesses do not take siloed approaches, to gender equality to racial equality, but also in relation to the other bases of discrimination, including age, as you mentioned, disability, sexual orientation, we really need a holistic approach to be taken.
👉🏾 That's a really interesting question because, from our research, we found that there is no leading apparel company that is setting the agenda on gender equality. We found that less than 11% of the publicly available information, that is out there displays leading practice by companies. So, what we really need to see is companies leading in taking action to address gender inequalities, rather than waiting to see what their peers are doing, and then following suit. If companies take the latter route, then as the World Economic Forum predicts, it will take around a hundred years to close the gender gap.
👉🏾 But I think something that's really important to note is that when we look at what companies are doing, we do see companies taking some action in different respects to drive gender equality. And so to highlight, I guess, some of those good practices at the corporate level, we found that some companies are going beyond just making a public commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment, and have established specific time-bound targets that they're working towards.
So for example, Kering has a target to reach gender balance and end the gender pay gap by 2025. We also found that a handful of companies have a global policy of offering at least 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. And that's something that's recommended by the international labour organisation.
👉🏾 So for example, Amazon offers 20 weeks of maternity leave to its employees. And then when looking at the supply chain, we found that also another handful of companies publish information signalling that they committed to gender equality and women's...
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5
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Shownotes:
The past year has been brutal for women and gender equality - it has severely set back progress made in the last decade. And it is acknowledged that governments and the private sector will have to work twice as hard to reverse the trend. My guest this week Shamistha Selvaratnam speaks about the need for transformative change to achieve gender equality. She stresses on the need for companies to really shift their approach from avoiding gender-related impacts and disclosing what is necessary to meet legislative requirements to proactively addressing inequalities."
Shamistha is the Gender Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) an organisation established to measure and rank the 2,000 most influential companies globally on their contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These keystone companies spread across 74 countries with combined revenues of $43 trillion have a critical role to play in whether the SDGs are accomplished or not.
In this episode she speaks about her background; the work of the WBA; using data for insights and not as an endpoint; why companies need to stop focusing on only preventing harm to women to taking actions that have positive impact on women......
Listen to the full episode here 👇🏾
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396
Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts
👉🏾 Well, the world benchmarking Alliance also known as the WBA is a multi-stakeholder Alliance. So our work and vision has always centered around the sustainable development goals. We're very focused on building a movement to measure and incentivise business impact towards a sustainable future that works for everyone. And we believe urgent action is needed to put the world on a more sustainable path. And that business has a key role to play in driving this change. So it's in this context that we are focused on developing benchmarks, that measure and compare the performance of the 2000 most influential companies globally on the sustainable development goals and we make these benchmarks free and available for everyone. And we share them with a broad set of stakeholders, including investors. And in doing so what we're aiming to do is to create a system that recognises leadership, but also creates accountability for those companies that continue to lag behind. And our movement is very much so grounded in our Alliance of over 200 organisations. So our allies represent a large mix of voices aligned with the universality of the sustainable development goals. And together, one of the key transformations that we see there is a need for, is a social transformation and to contribute to that being brought about, we are focused on transforming the role of business in society to ensure that businesses respect human rights. Provide and promote decent work and act ethically.
👉🏾 So perhaps it's useful to tell you a little bit about myself and what led me to doing work in the gender area at the WBA. I am the Gender Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance. And as you can probably hear from my accent, I am Australian born and raised. My parents migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka over 30 years ago. And I've been very fortunate to travel to Sri Lanka a couple of times. And what has always struck me is how different my life is as a woman, purely due to the fact that I was born in a developed country.
👉🏾 The truth of the matter is that it's very likely that my life would be very different had I been born in Sri Lanka. And by being born in Australia, I've been afforded countless opportunities that women in Sri Lanka are not afforded. And a key one is the level of education that I received. And that is really what prompted me to ensure that I use the opportunities that I have had to drive change for the millions of women around the world that experience gender inequalities, be it facing violence and harassment, lack of access to health information, and services and poor, or non-existent maternity protection. And I've had the opportunity to visit the factories of apparel brands in Sri Lanka and witnessed the conditions that women endure to not even receive a wage that meets their basic needs. And these experiences have really led me to where I am today. Working with the private sector to drive change for women.
👉🏾 I commenced my career as a corporate lawyer, working with businesses to mainstream human rights on the corporate agenda. And that work really showed me the unique position that companies are in to have positive impacts on the lives of people. Very simply put, we cannot create a sustainable future for all if people are left behind and therefore we certainly cannot achieve a sustainable future by leaving behind women who make up half of the world's population. So that really led me to my work at WBA as the gender lead, where we work to ensure that the invisible women that are impacted by companies actions be it in the workplace or in the supply chain are made visible. And we do this by shining a light on corporate gender impacts and incentivising businesses to drive and promote gender equality and women's empowerment throughout their value chain.
👉🏾 So now more than ever, there is a need to close the global gender gap. And at WBA, we believe companies are uniquely positioned to do this as I was mentioning before. So we are developing a gender benchmark that is fully transparent, comprehensive, publicly available, and aligned with stakeholder expectations.
And what the benchmark does is that it measures corporate gender impacts and aims to accelerate company progress in closing the gender gap. It will enable all stakeholders from consumers and investors to employees and business leaders to make informed decisions and encourage stronger corporate action on gender equality and women's empowerment.
👉🏾 Our benchmark does a deep dive, looking at gender equality within the apparel sector. And we really thought that the apparel sector would be the ideal starting place to understand the complex web of issues that are affecting the achievement of gender equality. The apparel sector plays a critical role in driving gender equality as more than two-thirds of its around 60 to 75 million global workforce are women.
And the sector is characterised by substantial outsourcing to multiple levels of suppliers located in developing countries like Sri Lanka, as I mentioned before. And women in those countries often face legal gender discrimination, fewer workplace protections, and where those protections do exist weaker levels of enforcement. So we see that women tend to have fewer formal contracts and lower wages. Longer and more unpredictable working hours, and experience various forms of gender-based violence and harassment. So our benchmark really provides the roadmap for apparel companies to take action to address the gender inequalities that exist within their business.
👉🏾 So when we assess companies, we always set sort of guidelines in relation to each of the topics that we're assessing them on. So for example, when we think of a topic such as gender equality in leadership, one of the targets that we assess companies on is whether they have between 40% to 60% of women in leadership positions in their organisation. So we set targets like that across different areas that we assess, but then we also look at whether companies are setting those targets for themselves. Do they have targets in relation to the percentage of women they want in leadership or what their gender pay gap should look like? And we look at whether companies are taking actions to work towards those targets that they've set for themselves.
👉🏾 There can be no sustainable development without gender equality, there’s such a close link. Women comprise half of the world's population and gender equality and women's empowerment have been acknowledged as being central to the sustainable development goals with a whole sustainable development goal focused on this topic. So while there has been progress towards the realisation of equality of opportunities for women, we can see that much more remains to be done to ensure that women are guaranteed healthy lives, education, and full social and economic inclusion. And I think it's important to note the gender equality is not just the concern of half of the world's population.
👉🏾 It is a human right, and therefore is a concern for us all because no society can develop economically, politically or socially when half of its population is marginalised. And so it's critical that no one is left behind. If we want to create a sustainable future for everyone. And I think companies have such a critical role to play here because in the world of work, gender inequalities manifest in so many different ways. As I mentioned, we see women are underrepresented in leadership positions. They're paid less than their male colleagues. They participate less in the labour force and spend more time on things like unpaid care and domestic work. They face sexual harassment and gender-based violence. And we've seen that these inequalities have only been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, widening the gender gap
even further. But the business case for addressing and advancing gender equality is very clear. It has the potential to increase global growth by 13 trillion US dollars by 2030. And if we fail to take action, it has the ability to lower global growth by 1 trillion dollars by 2030. And as I said before now, more than ever, it is critical that we do take action to close the gender gap and really seize this opportunity that's in front of us, to work towards a just and equitable future for all, and therefore, a sustainable future.
👉🏾 So last year we published a report assessing the 36 most influential apparel companies globally on what they're doing to promote and drive gender equality. In order to determine the progress that's being made towards SDG five, the SDG that focuses on gender equality. And so I'll share a couple of our learnings. (USE) Firstly, we found that gender data is invisible. Our report revealed that current corporate disclosure around gender efforts is woefully insufficient. And as a result of this, gender inequalities within the business context are going all too often, unnoticed. Companies are disclosing less than 40% of the information that stakeholders expect to see.
👉🏾 That's both in terms of the quality and quantity of information that they're sharing. And this is the lack of transparency that is hindering progress towards the sustainable development goals. So to take some examples, we found that there is a lack of gender-disaggregated data disclosed by companies, including things like the gender composition of their workforce, their global gender pay gaps and the gender breakdown of key grievance data such as the number of grievances reported or remediated. And as a result of this invisible data, there are gaps in the knowledge and solutions needed in order to drive progress for women within the business world. And secondly, we learned that it's really time for companies to drive transformative change. The global pandemic has highlighted the importance and urgency of taking action for gender equality.
👉🏾 The UN issued a warning, highlighting the aggravated impacts of the pandemic for women already living on the economic margins. But from our research, we saw that not just any change is needed. Transformative change is vital to the achievement of gender equality. So companies really need to shift their approach from avoiding gender-related impacts and disclosing what is necessary to meet legislative requirements, to proactively addressing inequalities. And really good example of this is gender pay gap legislation. So from our research, we found that while 13 companies published gender pay gap information, where they're required to do so by legislation, only two companies publish their overall gender pay gap. And so companies need to really shift from focusing on preventing harm to women, to taking action that has positive impact on women.
👉🏾 I definitely agree that changes to the deadlines around reporting gender data. As we've seen with the UK legislation will certainly set back efforts towards getting businesses to report more and better quality gender data. And what we've seen from my research is that apparel companies tend to focus on complying with legislative requirements when it comes to disclosing gender data.
So for instance, as I mentioned before that there are only two companies that publish their overall global gender pay gap. However, 13 of the companies published gender pay gap information for their UK operations in accordance with the legislation that you were referencing. And this really highlights the important role that legislation plays in driving gender data disclosure by companies and therefore affecting change. However, we don't see companies going beyond these legislative requirements. For example, we found that no company discloses a strategy that they're taking or the active steps that they're taking to address any global pay gaps identified. So governments can really help raise the bar on corporate gender efforts, by requiring companies to publically report on gender impacts. But I think it's really important to note that companies can't wait for and should not rely on regulation from governments to determine what action they take to close the gender gap. They need to take the initiative to address issues that are key to gender equality and women's empowerment and go beyond compliance with such legislation.
👉🏾 I think the best place to start for a company that wants to drive gender equality is we've collecting sex-disaggregated data, to understand how their actions are impacting on women, across their value chain. And once they have that data, they should disclose it so they can be held accountable for their gender efforts, it's only once companies have the data, that they can make informed decisions to address the underlying issues and barriers to gender equality, that are present in their specific organisational context. And they can also incorporate a gender lens that accounts for women's unique needs and rights so that women can really thrive within the business world. And if companies fail to do so, they cannot truly understand the extent of the gender gap and to take targeted action to close it.
And from our research, we've seen that this has resulted in sporadic non-integrated action to address gender equality. When what we actually need to see companies doing is taking a strategic approach. So it all really starts with collecting and disclosing gender data. But I want to acknowledge that numbers alone will not solve gender inequalities.
👉🏾 They do not increase anyone's income or reduce the chances of discrimination. But data is really necessary to provide insights and shine a light on problems. So solutions can be identified. And when aiming to promote better outcomes for both genders, relying on instinct and what we hear from those around us, is really not good enough. Particularly in an area where there are such long-standing practices that need to be upturned, and blind spots that need to be revealed.
And so in such a world, the world that we live in, clear information is really our ally. We need this information as it empowers us to start new conversations, revisit and revise old strategies and in the end, make better decisions that lead to better outcomes for everyone.
👉🏾 Definitely thank you for that question. Intersectionality is such an important topic to discuss and going back to one of the points that you mentioned before and how sometimes gender equality can be siloed from sustainable development or one seen as more important than the other. It's the same when it comes to intersectionality we cannot view gender equality and racial and ethnic equality as siloed.
I guess an intersectional lens must be taken when looking at an organisation and seeing what steps need to be taken to address gaps. So when I say that companies need to be collecting sex-disaggregated data to understand the impact of the actions on women. They also need to be collecting data that's disaggregated by race and ethnicity.
👉🏾 To also understand the impact that the actions are having on people who come from different backgrounds and both those datasets shouldn't be separated or siloed from one another. They need to be viewed together. So you can see what impacts are you having for example, on women who come from different backgrounds and then what steps can be taken to address that? So I think it's really key that businesses do not take siloed approaches, to gender equality to racial equality, but also in relation to the other bases of discrimination, including age, as you mentioned, disability, sexual orientation, we really need a holistic approach to be taken.
👉🏾 That's a really interesting question because, from our research, we found that there is no leading apparel company that is setting the agenda on gender equality. We found that less than 11% of the publicly available information, that is out there displays leading practice by companies. So, what we really need to see is companies leading in taking action to address gender inequalities, rather than waiting to see what their peers are doing, and then following suit. If companies take the latter route, then as the World Economic Forum predicts, it will take around a hundred years to close the gender gap.
👉🏾 But I think something that's really important to note is that when we look at what companies are doing, we do see companies taking some action in different respects to drive gender equality. And so to highlight, I guess, some of those good practices at the corporate level, we found that some companies are going beyond just making a public commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment, and have established specific time-bound targets that they're working towards.
So for example, Kering has a target to reach gender balance and end the gender pay gap by 2025. We also found that a handful of companies have a global policy of offering at least 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. And that's something that's recommended by the international labour organisation.
👉🏾 So for example, Amazon offers 20 weeks of maternity leave to its employees. And then when looking at the supply chain, we found that also another handful of companies publish information signalling that they committed to gender equality and women's...