This first-ever HeForShe Report tells the story of the 10 Corporate IMPACT Champions:
- AccorHotels
- Barclays Koç
- Holding McKinsey & Company
- PwC
- Schneider Electric
- Tupperware Brands
- Unilever
- Vodafone
This group of 10 companies spans 10 industries and employs more than a million people in 190 countries around the world. Their approaches to women’s empowerment are unique and collectively comprehensive, with programs ranging from skill building for farmers to mentorship for c-suite executives. Despite the diversity of their business models, they face common challenges around gender equality, and have made a common commitment to its achievement.
Through HeForShe, they have committed to accelerate progress towards parity in their workforce and throughout their footprints, reporting on progress as they do so. In this first year, companies have focused on implementation. Over the years to come, these 10 companies will work together, testing innovative approaches and sharing proven practices across the group. To establish a baseline against which future progress will be measured, companies agreed to report the representation of women across four roles, described in detail on page 14.
The data disclosure is a critical output of year one, and a bold approach to coordinated and transparent gender reporting across industries. Like their peers across the private sector, these companies have made strides towards overall gender balance: 39.7% of their employees are women.
This is representative of broader business trends; according to the World Bank, women represent approximately 40% of the labour force and hold an increasing share of all university degrees.
Despite overall progress, the retention and promotion of women into senior leadership remains a core challenge for these companies, with women holding just over one in four senior leadership (26.7%) and Board positions (28.6%).
These figures also echo global trends: today, women hold 19.2% of Board seats across S&P 500 companies, and the global average is stalled at 17.0%.
Senior leadership benchmarks are harder to come by, but recent research in the United States estimates that women hold between 23.0 and 27.0% of the types of roles measured by these 10 companies: key leaders and decision makers comprising approximately the top six per cent of employees by role.
Download the full HeforShe Parity Report
View our Knowledge Bank searchable database for other reports, summaries and statistics on gender diversity, leadership and related topics.
