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On International Women’s Day, Strong Recommendations to the Business Community to Advance Women’s Empowerment and Inclusion

8 Mar 2010

United Nations, New York — The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the UN Global Compact (UNGC) today called on the business community to implement recruitment and retention practices that advance women’s empowerment and inclusion and urged them to proactively appoint women as managers, executives and board members.

United Nations, New York — The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the UN Global Compact (UNGC) today called on the business community to implement recruitment and retention practices that advance women’s empowerment and inclusion and urged them to proactively appoint women as managers, executives and board members. The call for action is part of the Women’s Empowerment Principles – Equality Means Business, seven steps for companies to take to empower women in the workplace. The Principles will be launched tomorrow at a day-long conference with international business leaders organized by UNIFEM and UNGC.

 

Women continue to be vastly under-represented in top positions and on boards — their numbers have been increasing only very slowly over the last decade. In the United Kingdom, for example, the BBC reported that in 2009, only 10 percent of directors of the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 firms were women. That number, according to the Cranfield Female FTSE Report, has moved only five percentage points in ten years. To move the dial, Women’s Empowerment Principle 1 urges company leaders to make gender equality a top priority.

 

“The Women’s Empowerment Principles are subtitled Equality Means Business because the full participation of women benefits business and, indeed, all of us,” said Georg Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact. “Informed by leading businesses’ policies and practices from different sectors and around the world, the Principles offer a practical approach to advance women, and point the way to a future that is both more prosperous and more fair for everyone.”

 

A recently published McKinsey white paper, The Business of Empowering Women, informed by a global survey of 2,300 senior private sector executives, reports that companies that are already focusing their efforts on women are reporting measurable business benefits. One-third of those surveyed said their investments in women already resulted in greater profits and another third said their investments would soon show profit.

 

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Source:UNIFEM