Equileap — a not-for-profit organization dedicated to accelerating gender equality in the workplace — recognized that a global database assessing company performance could be used to speed change in a number of ways: by providing detailed information for investors to allocate their funds with an effective gender lens, to help companies understand how well or badly they perform on a global scale and to provide sound evidence for policy makers to guide them in creating new legislation.  

Equileap’s co-founders created a unique scorecard against which all aspects of a company’s performance, from the boardroom to the supply chain, could be measured. This methodology offers clear and detailed insights on which companies are successfully working towards greater gender parity. Companies are ranked on 19 criteria in the following categories: gender balance in the leadership and workforce; equal compensation and work/life balance; policies promoting gender equality; and commitment to transparency, and accountability. Equileap also tracks cases of gender-based violence and discrimination at work through an alarm bell methodology.   

Every year Equileap collects and updates data on over 3,000 public companies, using publicly available information, as reported by listed companies themselves in their most recent annual reports, sustainability reports, code of conducts, websites and other public filings. This data is becoming a cornerstone of the effort to increase workplace gender equity, and shows very clearly how far companies still have to travel to approach equity. Equileap’s data reveals an overall lack of transparency among public companies on their gender diversity. This matters because naming a problem openly is the first step on the path to being able to fix it. At the moment transparency is the exception rather than the rule, Equileap seeks to change this, so that gaps and progress can be better tracked.

In their most recent Gender Equality Global Report and Ranking, Equileap took a deep dive into the data of the top 1,000 companies from 23 developed countries. It found that only 28% of companies publish gender-segregated information on pay, and only 2.4% could show evidence of an overall gender pay gap of equal to or less than 3%. A number of additional companies claimed to have achieved gender pay parity, but did not provide enough detail or evidence to back this up, even when questioned. This makes verification impossible and raises questions about some claims. The companies that did report their gender pay figures also used a number of different, sometimes misleading methods. Equileap believes that for disclosure to be well understood and to have maximum impact, there needs to be a commonly adopted standard, which includes annual, public reporting of a company’s equal pay gap (gender-segregated pay in at least 3 different bands across the company, adjusted for factors such as pay, seniority or job title) as well the overall gender pay gap (an average of what all full time employed men in the company are paid versus an average of full time employed women) which measures whether women are occupying as many high paying jobs as men.