Workplace Equity Report

PROMOTING DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION THROUGH EDUCATIONAL SCORECARDS

As You Sow’s shareholder engagements related to the effective management of staff as a resource are informed by the data within the Workplace Equity Disclosure Scorecard. Companies are asked to release promotion, hiring/recruitment, and retention/turnover rates for employees, as well as two, or more, years of EEO-1 forms.

The release of the data is important from a transparency perspective and signals a company’s dedication to being able to source top talent, regardless of political headwinds. From a communications perspective we also recommend that companies place the data within a tailored narrative context specific to their organization, as to add additional details behind the numbers. The workplace equity data visualization tool tracks both released data and data that companies have committed to release.

Data related to workforce demographics helps investors, employees, and other external stakeholders understand if significant variances exist between a workforce composition that would reflect a meritocratic workplace versus one that may contain bias and discrimination which would diminish the effectiveness of the workforce.

BENCHMARKING METHODOLOGY, SCORING, AND KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

As You Sow, in collaboration with the consultancy Whistle Stop Capital, has examined the websites and sustainability reports for each company in the Large-Cap 3000 to determine their current levels of transparency. Corporate disclosures of the aforementioned data contributed to companies’ scores, all of which were identified on a binary yes/no.  That is, if a company releases the data set identified within the last five years, it receives all of the possible points for that set.  The weighting of each data set is a reflection of how important the information is from a transparency perspective, relative to an investors’ ability to understand the effectiveness of a corporate employee inclusion program.

Our researchers visit corporate websites, looking through company reporting, blogs, sustainability/corporate responsibility/ annual reports, public SEC filings, and career pages as well as the companies’ social media sites. It is possible that they missed some reporting, or that the company has shifted its reporting since our review. To inform us of corporate reporting not captured here, please send a note to [email protected].

Our findings are presented on As You Sow’s website using a data visualization tool that enables dynamic analysis and sorting. The data is updated each quarter, with a major update annually.

LEADERS: TOP 10

LAGGARDS: BOTTOM 10

QUARTERLY KEY FINDINGS

• Almost 90% of S&P500 companies release demographic data on their workforce in some form.

• More than half of S&P500 companies publicly share their EEO-1 report.

• Almost a quarter of S&P500 companies publicly share some form of mean and/or median pay gap data by gender and race.

• More than one-third of S&P500 companies share hiring rate data by gender.

• Of the inclusion factors (promotion, hiring, and retention rate data) hiring rate data by gender is the most reported on.

• The Industrials and Financial Services sectors contain the most companies publicly sharing EEO-1 report data.

• Companies were most likely to release hiring rates of their female employees. They were least likely to share data related to their Native American and Pacific Islander employees.

The Workplace Equity Disclosure Initiative has reviewed the Large-Cap 3000 constituent companies to identify which companies are currently releasing standardized, comparable and meaningful human capital data.

The intention of this initiative is to provide a public resource showing the current level of human capital disclosure from companies. Transparency and reporting, in and of itself, is an important best-practice to be celebrated. When a company releases meaningful data on its workforce composition alongside its rates of promotion, recruitment/hiring, and retention/ turnover of employees it illustrates a number of things to its stakeholders:

• It shows that it takes seriously that discrimination is a problem in corporate America, and that it is willing to do its part in addressing it openly;

• It illustrates the depth of its commitment to be accountable to its employees and to have the strongest possible workforce; and

• It provides data which allows investors and other stakeholders to assess and compare the effectiveness of its programs.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS AND SCORING RUBRIC

Data Visualization

Download Previous Reports

Diversity & Performance Report

2020 Webinar & Slides

Racial Justice Initiative

Research Fellows

Disclosure Statement