Paradigm for Parity® Coalition Makes Significant Strides on Three-Year Anniversary (Part 1)
In celebration of the third anniversary of the Paradigm for Parity® coalition, we applaud the 112 companies and CEOs who have signed our pledge to make cultural changes to close the gender gap in corporate leadership. Our coalition companies employ more than 6.1 million workers worldwide from 28 industries, including technology, health care, food service, retail and financial services.
In order to close the gender gap in corporate leadership, companies must enact significant changes to give all women the opportunity to succeed. We’ve developed a 5-Point Action Plan, a set of specific actions that, when concurrently implemented, guides companies on the steps they can take to elevate women of all races, cultures, and backgrounds.
To mark the Paradigm for Parity® coalition’s three-year anniversary, we asked our member companies to share progress on their journey to gender parity, discuss lessons learned and explain how they are putting the coalition’s 5-Point Action Plan into practice to ensure women and men have equal power, status and opportunity in the workplace. This is the first part of our two-part series, featuring how companies are putting Steps 1 and 2 of the Action Plan into practice.
Step 1: Minimize or Eliminating Unconscious Bias.
Celeste Warren, Vice President of Global Diversity & Inclusion Center of Excellence at Merck said: “At Merck, we understand the impact that unconscious biases can have on individuals, teams and organizations. We provided unconscious bias education initially to our executives and leaders in 2014 and then in 2016 we launched our Unconscious Bias Education Toolkit that helps all people managers navigate this issue and the unintended consequences of allowing biases to go unchecked. This toolkit, combined with other tools and resources helps us create and foster a diverse and inclusive workforce and workplace.”
Cynthia Bowman, Chief D&I and Talent Acquisition Officer at Bank of America said: “Minimizing or eliminating unconscious bias has been an important part of Bank of America’s commitment to building a diverse and inclusive culture. Since our initial launch, we sharpened our focus to drive inclusive behavior deep within the organization and have embedded managing bias through all of our programs reaching over 130,000 employees who attended inclusion program sessions. Our data indicates when a manager attends these sessions, in addition to higher employee engagement ratings, their teams also experience less voluntary attrition of female direct reports than managers who do not attend the program.”
Jen Betti, Head of Employee Experience, Inclusion, Diversity & Belonging at HERE Technologies said: “We’re inspired by the Paradigm for Parity® coalition’s mission to ensure more women are represented in corporate leadership positions. HERE Technologies is proud to join other forward-thinking organizations dedicated to addressing the gender gap. This past year, we have integrated blocking bias skills training into our performance management, leadership development and talent acquisition processes to combat conscious and unconscious biases that impact gender equity. It was important that we integrate system modifications and training into our internal programs as we know that stand alone unconscious bias training does not have an impact in how systems and processes need to be rebuilt.”
Elaine Doyle, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, North America at Diageo said: “In an effort to minimize or eliminate unconscious bias we have developed a five-tiered method for cultivating inclusion at Diageo, which has been embedded into our culture from the very first day of an employee’s career with us. These five inclusive habits are: Invite different ideas, Use active listening, Connect to others’ ideas, Work through misunderstandings and Speak up for others.”
Step 2: Significantly Increase the Number of Women in Senior Operating Roles.
Kim Ann Mink, Chairman, President & CEO at Innophos said: “We are honored to join our coalition partners in celebrating the Paradigm for Parity® coalition’s third anniversary! At Innophos, diversity and inclusion are fundamental to who we are and how we operate. As such, we are committed to supporting and furthering the important work that the coalition is doing to close the gender gap and ensure that all women have an equal voice and seat at the table. We are extremely proud to have significantly increased the number of women in senior operating roles over the past few years, achieving gender parity on our corporate Board of Directors in 2018, and an executive leadership team that is 43% female. Congratulations to the Paradigm for Parity® coalition!”
Elisa Bannon-Jones, Executive Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer at Frontier Communications said: “As we celebrate Paradigm for Parity’s third anniversary, Frontier Communications remains committed to the principles of gender equality and continues providing career opportunities for women that offer every opportunity to determine their future, develop their talents and earn a good living. Frontier has implemented a high-potential Succession Plan Program that uses a day-in-the-life assessment to measure employees on our Business Drivers. This program takes bias out of the succession planning process, enabling Frontier to evaluate talent on a level platform.”
Melanie Kennedy, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at American Water said: “As part of our succession planning, American Water tracks diversity (including gender, minorities, veterans, and disabled) to ensure that we have diverse representation in our plans. Over the past two years, 100% of succession plans have had diverse candidates (including women). The company also works to ensure that all of our leadership programs and development offerings have diverse candidates.
Rosanna Durruthy, Global Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at LinkedIn said: “LinkedIn is demonstrating great momentum in how we’re growing women in leadership as women are nearly 41% of our leadership — that constitutes a 56% increase over the last five years. We do this with programs like Women in Tech and our Women’s Initiative to ensure that we’re providing the tools of executive sponsorship, mentoring, and professional development to our workforce.”
