NewAfricanWoman Issue 49 - Flipbook - Page 17
SPECIAL FEATURE
The Women Business Collaborative agrees
that transparency is the foundation for positive
change, saying: “Transparent data is a powerful
accelerator of change, encouraging accountability, reinforcing trust, and empowering people
to advocate for themselves and others. Transparency is particularly impactful for diversity,
equity, and inclusion (DEI) and an answer to the
call for companies and organisations to focus
on equity, inclusivity The formulation of the GEI
score is weighted to reflect the importance of
data transparency, as 30% of the final score is
determined only by the level of disclosure of
gender-related data.
The other 70% of the GEI score is determined
by “data excellence,” which refers to the actual
content of the data given. The framework for
judging whether a company is successfully
increasing gender parity includes over 70 metrics,
each of which is allocated to one of five pillars:
1
2
3
4
5
Leadership & talent pipeline
Equal pay & gender pay parity
Inclusive culture
Anti-sexual harassment policies
External brand
Out of these five pillars, the nature and inclusivity of the company’s culture is weighted the
most heavily.
The goal of the GEI is simple. By releasing a list of
companies who are willing to share their genderrelated data, Bloomberg hopes to aid investors,
buyers, and prospective employees in choosing
a business with which to interact.
It’s becoming more common for anyone who
seeks to buy a product, find an employer, or
invest in a business to choose a company based
on its environmental, social, and governance
(ESG) data. Although gender equality is only
one component of a company’s ESG factors, the
Bloomberg index provides information for ESGconscious investors, buyers, and workers so that
they can make more informed choices.
Bloomberg’s Gender Reporting Framework describes its raison d’etre:
“Investors are waking up to the power of women.
The Bloomberg Terminal is the only place investors can find comprehensive, comparable information for individual data points related to
gender equality at publicly-held companies.”
By promoting themselves as companies that care
about these metrics, these businesses hope in
return to receive greater investor interest, attract
wider and better pools of talent, and appeal to
the ESG-conscious buyers.
| WOMEN & WORK
The 2023 index includes 484 companies that
span 11 sectors and 45 countries and regions.
What does the data say?
The information revealed by this index shows
that, whilst more companies every year are
committing to disclosing their gender-related
data and addressing gender inequality within
their company, progress for gender parity is
going slowly.
Out of the 484 companies in the index, only 8%
had a woman as the CEO, compared to 7.5%
in 2022.
In 2022, the World Economic Forum (WEF)
noted that the overall gender gap across the
domains of politics, work, health and education
will now take 132 years to reach full parity.
However, the number of companies who are
willing to attempt to address gender parity and
submit data to the GEI increases significantly
every year. The index began in 2016 with 26
companies and has grown significantly every
year since.
This year, 11% more companies submitted data to
Bloomberg GEI than last year.
The data that these companies provided demonstrated one clear pattern; whilst gender parity at
the bottom rung of a company had no statistical effect on the gender parity throughout, the
number of women at the top directly correlated
with the degree of gender parity in the rest of
the business.
By creating an index that
has cultivated a sense of
prestige, Bloomberg has
already proven this to be
true. It is now a status
symbol for a company to
be included in the GEI.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the presence of women
at the highest levels seems to drive gender parity
at all levels of a business. Corporations that have
a woman CEO have higher representation of
women at all levels, and companies whose board
is at least 30% women are also more likely to have
women executives.
The index also revealed that the GEI companies
are, on average, hiring more women than they are
losing, and 63% require a gender diverse slate of
candidates for management positions. ▶
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March 2023 New African Woman
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