4 January 2022
The Matmut insurance group has adopted a new company agreement addressing the employment of those in situations of disability and care giving. The agreement, which reinforces its inclusion policy, was unanimously signed by the employees’ representative organisations ( CFE-CGC, FO, CFDT, SN2A-CFTC and CGT). Covering the period 2022-2024, the text in particular provides for the hiring of at least 60 employees living with disability and establishes a system whereby care giving employees can access ‘working day...
14 October 2021
On 05 October, Spain’s department store chain El Corte Inglés announced that going forward all of its almost 81,000 employees worldwide would receive training on the best practices to adopt when interacting with people (customers and colleagues) with disabilities. This initiative comes eleven months after the signing of a framework agreement in November 2020 with the ONCE Foundation, which specializes in employing people with disabilities. ‘The aim of this training is so that we all know how to make their...
1 October 2021
The Research Centre for Women in Senior Management (Centro de Investigación de la Mujer en la Alta Dirección – CIMAD) has launched a platform that aims to increase the number of women in management positions as well as on company boards. Launched in partnership with several universities and three Mexican companies, the initiative is named the “network of female directors and experts in Mexico”. It comes at a time when Mexico ranks second-last among OECD countries for the number of women on boards of...
13 September 2021
Indian steel giant Tata Steel recently posted job vacancies for heavy earth moving machine operators in the eastern mining state of Jharkhand that were only open to transgender applicants. This positive discrimination initiative is part of a broader trend. In India, large corporations are beginning to implement more inclusive policies for people from the LGBT community.
26 July 2021
Only 9% of the 50 largest retailers in the US integrate diversity, equity and inclusion into their human resources policies, according to management consulting group Korn Ferry. While the proportion is low, the figure represents progress compared to two years ago, when essentially none of the largest retailers focused on DEI as part of their HR policies. Having been criticised for their lack of openness towards minorities (women, black people, people of Latino origin, those with disabilities, LGBT people, obese...
5 July 2021
On 23 June, the UK business of German industrial manufacturing group Siemens announced that as part of efforts to increase the number of women working in the engineering sector it has set a target of gender parity in its ‘Early Careers recruitment’, whereby it will look to attract an equal number of male and female candidates for training, internships or apprenticeships. The push by Siemens to promote a more gender-balanced workforce comes at a time when 80% of its 8,700 UK employees are male.
22 June 2021
Eight retail giants, including the John Lewis Partnership and Sainsbury’s supermarkets, have come together to found this landmark “Diversity in Retail” (DiR) network, which represents some nearly 400,000 employees, and which aims to create a group-based template in a bid to increase diversity and inclusion at all levels in the retail industry.
3 June 2021
In Frankfurt on 20 May during a meeting with investors on sustainable finance, leading German bank Deutsche Bank announced new and more ambitious goals to boost the proportion of female in management positions. From the bank’s global headcount of 84,659, (37,315 of which are employed domestically), 46.4% is currently female, and the bank is looking to augment the female percentage occupying middle management positions (Managing Directors, Directors and Vice Presidents) from 29% today to 35% by 2025. The bank has...
11 December 2020
The consumer goods giant Unilever has signed up to the Halo Code, the UK’s first black hair code, which aims to protect people with afros and other black hairstyles so they can go to work or to school with those hairstyles without fear of being judged. According to the activists that founded the code, and formed the Halo Collective, one in five black women feel societal pressure to straighten their hair for work. “Despite hair being a protected racial characteristic under the law [on discrimination], there is...
28 May 2020
On 27 May, the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) expressed concern that pressure on working mothers (employees) during lockdown could halt progress in reducing the gender pay gap. Throughout the crisis, mothers have significantly reduced their working hours to take care of their children and undertake household chores and in most cases are doing both at the same time. The IFS is warning both that this situation could perpetuate after the health crisis, and that mothers are also more likely to be...
