Why is Gender Equality Crucial in the Contemporary Workplace?
Employee Gender Diversity
The Impaakt Team
9 min Read Time | March 21st 2023
Key Takeaways
👉Note: Impact topics are a set of social and environmental impacts identified by the Impaakt Team to provide an additional layer of complex insight into measuring current impact. They range from general themes like Greenhouse Gas emissions and Job Creation to industry-specific topics such as Gentrification and Water Pollution. Check our Frameworks section for more information.
SDG Choice
Impact Category choice
Investment Leaders Group (ILG) theme:
SDG Choice
Impact Category choice
Investment Leaders Group (ILG) theme:
Get familiar with the 5 steps to get started as an Impaakt rater
Before building skills for a specific topic, make sure to read our Knowledge Center: Rating for Impaakt. This resource outlines the 5 steps necessary to get started as a rater and provides key information about our metrics. By going through this guide, you will ensure that you are well-informed to provide accurate ratings on any given topic.
How to rate the topic
Value
Due to the nature of the topic, Employee Gender Diversity can be either positive or negative. To assess the value of the company’s impact, think about how important gender equality in the workplace is for societies. This dimension is linked to the overall impact of empowerment or degradation of women.
How positive/negative do you consider impacts related to women empowerment, gender inequality, and gender discrimination to be? To decide whether the impact is positive or negative, ask yourself:
Does the representation fall within the ILO’s standards (a representation of 40-60% of either gender)?
Is it degrading women by keeping them concentrated in lower-level jobs with little to no presence in decision-making roles?
Is the company paying men and women the same for the same amount of work? How big is the gender pay gap at the company?
Does it offer opportunities to further enhance their skillset?
Does it discriminate against employees based on their gender?
The value is linked to the topic treated and not to the company’s specific impact. Thus, the value should hold some consistency across industries.
Severity
The severity is related to the company’s impact. It consists of three dimensions: Scale, Scope, and Irremediability.
Scale
Scale is related to the complexity and profundity of the impact described (i.e., it's related to the extent of the impact).
When deciding the scale, answer the following questions:
What is the proportion of women in leadership/decision-making roles?
Is there a glass ceiling effect (women concentrated in lower-level jobs with little to no presence in leadership roles)?
Are women paid equally compared to their male counterparts? If not, how significant is the pay gap?
Scope
The scope captures the range or extent of the company’s impact and it is related to the quantitative part of the analysis. For this topic, the scope is multi-dimensional and can be addressed from different angles considering what is disclosed in the analysis.
When deciding the scope, answer the following questions:
How vast is the company’s impact?
How many employees does it have?
How many women employees does the company have?
Irremediability
Irremediability evaluates the impact of the company over time (i.e., is linked to the duration of the impact described)
When deciding the irremediability, answer the following questions:
How much has the representation of women in the company’s workforce changed over the years?
Is the company putting in efforts to further empower women at different levels?
Does the company have clearly set goals to empower women in its workforce? Has it managed to achieve its previous goals?
Examples: exercise your knowledge
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