Ralph Lauren Is the Only Fashion Company Named for 2022 Gender Equality – WWD

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Work is a funny thing these days. For some, the priority is lower than the pre-pandemic. For many, it’s a battle between those who return to work and those who choose to stay away, or at least have the option. But for most people, it’s a place that has to offer more than just a paycheck and basic benefits to keep devoting such a significant portion of their lives to it.

Therefore, companies looking to maintain a successful and content workforce are finding new ways to serve them, especially when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion.

And some are doing better than others.

Parity.org recently released Only 43 companies made the list on the 2022 “Best Women in Progress” list, and only Ralph Lauren Corp. in fashion.

The non-profit organization called ParityLIST, whose efforts are focused on closing the gender and racial gap in corporate leadership, launched in 2020 to recognize organizations whose policies and practices benefit women rather than barriers in the workplace. It was for a long time.

“Equality in leadership is critical, but we know that representation alone is not enough — we must create conditions that are intentionally designed to support women’s ambition, well-being and freedom,” said Rosen Lynch, Ralph Lauren’s chief people officer and head of the Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation, in a statement.

In the year By 2020, Ralph Lauren has announced that it has reached its 2023 goal of equal gender representation between men and women at the level of vice president and above, ensuring that women hold 50 percent of positions in the company – and is committed to maintaining this. .

More broadly, women make up 48 percent of the workforce, according to Parity, yet the average executive team is 67 percent white men.

According to Parity’s 2022 list, 88 percent of companies regularly measure and report gender equality metrics, 86 percent report their gender equality values ​​to employees, 98 percent offer flexible working hours and 95 percent encourage men to take full parental leave.

Only 31 percent of the companies, however, have at least 50 percent women on their executive team — although that number is higher than the 21 percent of companies on ParityLIST last year. Efforts are somewhat moving in the right direction, with 91 percent of companies requiring employers to include at least one qualified female candidate for open executive roles.

Airbnb, Best Buy, Nasdaq and The Cloaks Company were included in the list of Best Companies for Women’s Advancement.

Benefits were a big part of the ranking.

“There were a variety of benefits from the companies that made our ParityLIST, but a few stood out in my mind,” Parity.org founder and CEO Kathryn Stickney told WWD. They will be paid. This means that men will not receive the same pay and promotional benefits as women who took full parental leave in the past because their father-to-be male partners only get to take a few days.

And, she added, “One company has established what they call core business hours. Employees are all required to work certain hours (based on their time zone), but can complete their remaining hours when it works best for them. This allows flexibility, especially for women, to attend doctor’s appointments, drop off their children from school, or attend to other caregiving responsibilities.

While there have been improvements in how the modern workforce works for women in it, there is still a long way to go to achieve equality, especially as men are still employed and move into senior positions at a higher rate than women.

“It’s a shame that the wage equality needle isn’t moving as fast as it should be right now. The average woman still earns 20 percent less than the average man — and it’s been that way for 15 years,” Stickney said, citing Pew Research. In the year Since Parity.org launched in 2017, the amount of money a woman earns for every dollar a man makes has increased by half a percent every year, and today it’s 84 cents on the man’s dollar, she said.

And none of this has helped with the epidemic’s impact on women in the workforce.

The National Women’s Law Center reported in March of this year that “as of February 2020, more than 1.1 million women were in the labor force as men returned to their pre-pandemic labor force levels.” As a result, many women – especially black women, Latinas, and other women of color – are still struggling to make ends meet.

So what should companies be doing now and next to go a long way in gender equality?

Stickney says it’s two things (the same two things many companies are forced to realize they need to do when it comes to racial representation): Make a public commitment and measure their progress.

“More companies should make a public commitment to interview qualified women for every open leadership position,” she said. “Companies have been making personal commitments for decades. A public commitment is different. It not only allows employees to demonstrate the company’s importance to diversity and equity, but also allows company leaders and managers to hold the company accountable for actively working toward equality.”

From there, it’s about recognition and accountability.

“You can’t fix what you can’t see,” Stickney said. “If companies want to fully understand where the barriers and opportunities are, they need to measure not just representation and pay, but the entire employee life cycle, from recruitment to attrition. When you start measuring, you’ll find all kinds of patterns that weren’t seen before. For example, women are more likely to leave an organization than men in their first five years of employment.” Are you leaving? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you have a problem.

“Or if you’re hiring more women than men at the entry level and more women than women at the executive level, you might have a pipeline problem when you’re looking for your high-potential employees to fill top jobs and you can only find men,” she added. You don’t know.”



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