Photo by U.S. Embassy
By Luis Marquez
If a CEO had the opportunity to implement a simple strategy to increase return on equity (ROE) by 44% do you think she or he would do it? A study of 345 Latin American firms in six countries done by McKinsey and Company found that the ROE for firms with one or more women in their executive committees was 44% higher than those without women.
This week, IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno, addressing an audience of CEOs and corporate leaders from across the globe in the United Nations General Assembly, announced that the Inter-American Development Bank Group, through the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) and Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), the UN Global Compact, and UN Women will develop a gender equality diagnostic tool that will allow companies to benchmark themselves against their peers based on the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs). The WEPs have been signed by 1,187 CEOs and leaders of the private sector around the globe. The partnership to develop the tool also includes the Coca-Cola Company, Itaipu Binacional, the government of Germany, and the government of Japan.
If you cannot wait until the tool is developed to promote gender equality in your company, do not worry. Here are three things CEOs, company presidents, and any employee can do:
1. Take the panel pledge: President Moreno along with others this week took the pledge to do all they can within their respective institutions to avoid having only male speakers in panels at events and conferences. This can be done at other organizations by having concrete strategies to avoid male dominated panels.
2. Check your bias: We all have conscious and unconscious biases and we need to watch out for them. It is better to identify these biases and try to overcome them instead of pretending they do not exist.
3. Take a look at the WEPs website and look at the many examples of what companies in LAC and the world are doing to promote gender equality in the workplace, in corporate value chains, and in their communities. Like Sodexo Chile which has a strategy to have 40% of senior leaders in the company be women by 2025.