When companies focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), many often start with gender – after all, women make up a large proportion of the workforce. But do companies only focus on gender within DEI? What do companies mean by DEI more broadly? A new report, by non-profit Rights CoLab, seeks to provide more clarity on what metrics companies use to measure performance on DEI, by examining 21 influential and publicly available corporate reporting frameworks.
Not all DEI metrics ask for information about specific groups of people, but when they do, gender is the most common, asked by 22% of all the general frameworks. But gender is followed closely by race or ethnicity, asked by 20% of the frameworks. 5% of the frameworks specify both gender and race, capturing the experiences of women of color that are often missing. The report explains why gender may be the most common target group that reporting frameworks focus on, “Many companies already report on gender because the issue of women’s workforce inequality has sustained global attention and funding, leading to legislation around gender pay equity in several jurisdictions.”
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The focus on gender, within DEI, is more prevalent in some regions over others. According to the report, “Several Europe-based interviewees told us that race does not get the attention in the European context that gender does.” Gender pay gap disclosures are mandatory for larger companies in Europe, whereas there are still legal stumbling blocks to create data on race and ethnicity in multiple European countries, including some of the larger economies such as France and Germany. In May 2022, the European Parliament decided by majority that European Union companies with at least 50 employees (instead of 250 as originally proposed) will be required to disclose on any gender pay gap.
When companies focus on gender within DEI, they are primarily concerned with diversity – such as percentage of women in senior management as recorded by MSCI World Womens Leadership Index, or in the workforce more broadly. But these types of diversity metrics, while straightforward, mask some of the deeper issues women face at the workplace. “Women can’t just be a simple metric, whether you have more women in your workforce,” says Joanne Bauer, Co-Founder of Rights Co-Lab and lead author of the report.
There are two nuances within gender diversity that companies often do not capture, relating to job security and decision-making power. “One issue relates to the representation of women within companies’ contingent workforce, who are part time or gig workers. Grasping the security of their employment seems to be missing among these corporate reporting frameworks,” says Bauer, given that research has shown that job insecurity impacts women more than men, especially women of color and women who are pregnant.
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Moreover, even if there are women in senior management positions, they may not actually have the decision-making power—phenomena often described as tokenism. “We found this nuance in only one of the frameworks in the report’s sample, addressed by a metric of whether women in senior positions are in key profit and loss positions,” says Bauer, referring to the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Gender Benchmark.
As the topic of DEI gains traction, companies are increasingly being asked to report against more metrics, as well as more granular ones, which may eventually capture more nuances within gender diversity, as well as other dimensions of DEI.
