A Guideline for Gender Equality Disclosure

2022-09-16GoldenBeeGoldenBee0

On August 9, 2022, a guideline for gender equality disclosure was officially released on the official website of UN Women. The Guideline is prepared by GoldenBee (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd. under WeEmpowerAsia project. It aims to provide targeted guidance for enterprises to disclose their progress of gender equality and promote enterprises to incorporate gender information into the current reporting procedures.

The guide released on UN Women website

Relatively low gender equality disclosure

“Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” is Goal 5 of the SDGs and alsoa premise to achieve all the Goals. Meanwhile, as the core issue of corporate social responsibility, gender equality has also been included in relevant indicators of the GRI Standards and Environmental, Social and Governance Reporting Guide (ESG Guide). However, under the existing reporting framework, there is still a lack of special guidance on gender equality information disclosure, and the disclosure rate of gender data in public corporate reports is still low. According to the GoldenBee Research on Corporate Gender Equality Disclosure in China, the disclosure rate of "gender equality" information in China's CSR report in 2020 was 24.68%, especially lacking the disclosure of specific performance indicator. The preparation of this Guide does not creat a new reporting system, but strengthens how to better disclose the progress related to gender equality and women empowerment under the most commonly used reporting framework, so as to facilitate the understanding and application of enterprises.

Targeted guidelines for disclosing gender equality progress

To foster business practices that empower women, UN Women and the UN Global Compact Office jointly launched the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) in 2010, guiding the promotion of gender equality and empower women in the workplace, marketplace and community. The Guideline framework is in line with WEPs Principles 1-6. Under each Principle, it first lists the concrete actions that enterprises may conduct to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. For each principle, it lists the indicators that directly referred to as “gender” and “gender equality” in the GRI Standards and ESG Guide. As gender equality is a cross-cutting topic, which can typically be involved in all aspects of sustainable development. This Guideline also selects other indicators that implicit but most relevant and makes brief notes to help enterprises better understand how gender relevant data can be reported under such indicators.

Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs)

Another achievement in promoting gender equality

With the help of the Guideline, enterprises can make more specific reporting on their own policies, initiatives, performance, plans and commitments to promote gender equality and women's empowerment, and improve the report transparency. This is advocated by WEPs’ Principle 7 "Measure and publicly report the progress to advocate gender equality", and is also an important move for enterprises to promote gender equality. It is hoped that the Guide can provide reference for more enterprises and further promote the implementation and practice of the 7 principles of WEPs in China.

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