CEOs went quiet about equality during Covid

Until the pandemic hit, companies were becoming more willing to open up about the diversity of their workforce. But even those that embraced transparency went shy on the topic when Covid hit. That suggests they have something to hide when it comes to how they managed staff during the health crisis.
A record 173 companies, with a combined market value of $13 trillion, submitted data on their employment practices to the most recent Workforce Disclosure Initiative (WDI) survey, which covers 2020. The project, led by London-based governance campaigner ShareAction, gathers information from major corporations on behalf of 66 investment institutions, including Amundi SA, JP Morgan Asset Management and Schroders Plc. These investors are expected to engage with boards to drive up employment standards globally.
Some of the survey must be answered publicly. But for the most part, companies participating can elect for responses to stay within the WDI investment group. And they were quick to tick that box this time around, with only 65% of responses made public when given the choice. For 2019, that figure was 85%. The sudden reversal in transparency was especially sharp when the questions related to diversity and inclusion, wage levels and pay gaps, and supply-chain transparency.
Of course, the responses still go confidentially to the investment managers in the WDI, who can hold the companies accountable for their answers. And ShareAction says it has gathered more data than ever, largely due to more detailed submissions on supply chains — an area where responses have been historically poor.
But you can see why a lot of companies wanted to keep their individual answers out of the public domain. ShareAction aggregates the results, and these showed no change in the average level of data provided on pay gaps. Some 97% of respondents broke down their leadership by gender, but only 39% did so by race or ethnicity. True, there are legal prohibitions on collecting this data in some jurisdictions, but 43 companies still provided no data when they could have done so.
Responses on the gender and ethnicity breakdown of internal hires — a metric that assesses progress throughout the firm — were low, too. And just over half of companies didn’t reveal the number of discrimination and harassment incidents staff had reported, while 61% wouldn’t say how many such episodes were resolved. Reporting on how human-rights grievances were remedied was also weak. As for the actual data itself, information-technology companies performed particularly poorly on pay inequality, with a gender pay gap of 32% and ethnicity pay gap of 59% — respectively nearly twice and 2.5 times the average.
These findings add to existing evidence that the corporate sector as a whole placed less emphasis on workplace equality in the pandemic. But they also reinforce the value of measuring workforce composition. Companies with more than 30% female representation on boards were more likely to resolve discrimination and harassment incidents than those with less, for example.

—Bloomberg