By Geeta Aiyer, president and founder of Boston Common Asset Management
“Exclusion and harm on the basis of gender are so pervasive as to be invisible, normalised, and ignored.”
This was the opening sentence in my 2021 piece, Making Gender Visible. Three years later, gender-based inequity, violence, and harassment remain intransigently woven into commerce, economics, and social systems.
As attempts to undo the progress of recent decades are mounting at the political level, many companies are changing course by either slowing or abandoning efforts designed to aid the transition to a more inclusive economy. The result is a persistent, enormous gender gap, with gender parity still 131 years away.
Until now, gender has not received adequate priority and has been largely confined to a single data point under workplace diversity efforts. While workplace-focused efforts that call for advancements like enhanced disclosure and board diversity are vital to supporting the infrastructure necessary to evolve toward gender equality in corporate environments, lasting change will require more comprehensive gender prioritisation across corporate value chains.
Public equity investors have a unique opportunity to motivate companies to design for inclusion and create genuinely inclusive systems within their organisations and throughout their value chains. Engaged investors must activate their voice with critical questions and essential tactics to motivate companies to adopt gender-specific approaches using an integrated, full value chain approach.
Underpinning this approach is the understanding that a corporate strategy that prioritises inclusive gender governance can positively impact each aspect of a company’s value chain.
For example, workplace operations impact a company’s leaders and employees via gender representation, benefits, compensation, health, safety and well-being. Likewise, supply chain practices can positively impact business relationships between tier-1 suppliers and beyond, with participants in the product and services marketplaces being directly impacted by how and what a company designs, develops, and disseminates.
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Since gender-driven harms broadly impact industries worldwide, investors need to target industry-focused engagements, starting with those that have the highest risk of gender bias – pharmaceuticals, apparel, technology, and finance.
In finance, for example, investors need to focus on representation, gender targets, and metrics, inquiring about the degree to which companies consult with marginalised communities and customers to inform their approaches to inclusive finance, responsible lending and product design.
In a broad range of industries, responsible corporate decision-making can mitigate exploitative supply chains, harmful marketing practices and unsafe workplaces, all unpriced externalities justified in the name of delivering strong returns to investors. These externalities are far from being ‘priced in’ to a company’s financials, and yet, they relentlessly persist – and indeed incur – societal costs when left unchecked. One needn’t look further than the recent Coronavirus pandemic to see the persistence and societal costs of gender bias.
As investors who believe in the power of active ownership to advance social change, we acknowledge our opportunity to use our collective voice on behalf of individuals forced to navigate faulty, unjust systems. We must strive to understand the obstacles women encounter across the value chain by going beyond simply counting the number of women in the workplace.
Instead, we must address and shed light on the many obstacles and exploitative systems found throughout corporate value chains, like the shortcomings of social audits, and the risk of Gender-Based Violence and Harassment (GBVH) faced by women farm workers, to name just two.
We believe a full value chain approach is required to systematically dismantle gender bias and motivate companies to consider gender as a critical factor in decision-making in workforce diversity efforts, supply chain partnerships, product development, marketing and community interactions.
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