22 Shamistha Selvaratnam: Setting benchmarks for gender equality

Shownotes: 

The past year has been brutal for women and gender equality - it has severely set back progress made in the last decade. And it is acknowledged that governments and the private sector will have to work twice as hard to reverse the trend. My guest this week Shamistha Selvaratnam speaks about the need for transformative change to achieve gender equality. She stresses on the need for companies to really shift their approach from avoiding gender-related impacts and disclosing what is necessary to meet legislative requirements to proactively addressing inequalities."

Shamistha is the Gender Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) an organisation established to measure and rank the 2,000 most influential companies globally on their contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These keystone companies spread across 74 countries with combined revenues of $43 trillion have a critical role to play in whether the SDGs are accomplished or not. 

In this episode she speaks about her background; the work of the WBA; using data for insights and not as an endpoint; why companies need to stop focusing on only preventing harm to women to taking actions that have positive impact on women...... 

Listen to the full episode here 👇🏾

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396

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👉🏾 Well, the world benchmarking Alliance also known as the WBA is a multi-stakeholder Alliance. So our work and vision has always centered around the sustainable development goals. We're very focused on building a movement to measure and incentivise business impact towards a sustainable future that works for everyone. And we believe urgent action is needed to put the world on a more sustainable path. And that business has a key role to play in driving this change. So it's in this context that we are focused on developing benchmarks, that measure and compare the performance of the 2000 most influential companies globally on the sustainable development goals and we make these benchmarks free and available for everyone. And we share them with a broad set of stakeholders, including investors. And in doing so what we're aiming to do is to create a system that recognises leadership, but also creates accountability for those companies that continue to lag behind. And our movement is very much so grounded in our Alliance of over 200 organisations. So our allies represent a large mix of voices aligned with the universality of the sustainable development goals. And together, one of the key transformations that we see there is a need for, is a social transformation and to contribute to that being brought about, we are focused on transforming the role of business in society to ensure that businesses respect human rights. Provide and promote decent work and act ethically. 

👉🏾 So perhaps it's useful to tell you a little bit about myself and what led me to doing work in the gender area at the WBA. I am the Gender Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance. And as you can probably hear from my accent, I am Australian born and raised. My parents migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka over 30 years ago. And I've been very fortunate to travel to Sri Lanka a couple of times. And what has always struck me is how different my life is as a woman, purely due to the fact that I was born in a developed country. 

👉🏾 The truth of the matter is that it's very likely that my life would be very different had I been born in Sri Lanka. And by being born in Australia, I've been afforded countless opportunities that women in Sri Lanka are not afforded. And a key one is the level of education that I received. And that is really what prompted me to ensure that I use the opportunities that I have had to drive change for the millions of women around the world that experience gender inequalities, be it facing violence and harassment, lack of access to health information, and services and poor, or non-existent maternity protection. And I've had the opportunity to visit the factories of apparel brands in Sri Lanka and witnessed the conditions that women endure to not even receive a wage that meets their basic needs. And these experiences have really led me to where I am today. Working with the private sector to drive change for women. 

👉🏾 I commenced my career as a corporate lawyer, working with businesses to mainstream human rights on the corporate agenda. And that work really showed me the unique position that companies are in to have positive impacts on the lives of people. Very simply put, we cannot create a sustainable future for all if people are left behind and therefore we certainly cannot achieve a sustainable future by leaving behind women who make up half of the world's population. So that really led me to my work at WBA as the gender lead, where we work to ensure that the invisible women that are impacted by companies actions be it in the workplace or in the supply chain are made visible. And we do this by shining a light on corporate gender impacts and incentivising businesses to drive and promote gender equality and women's empowerment throughout their value chain. 

👉🏾 So now more than ever, there is a need to close the global gender gap. And at WBA, we believe companies are uniquely positioned to do this as I was mentioning before. So we are developing a gender benchmark that is fully transparent, comprehensive, publicly available, and aligned with stakeholder expectations.

And what the benchmark does is that it measures corporate gender impacts and aims to accelerate company progress in closing the gender gap. It will enable all stakeholders from consumers and investors to employees and business leaders to make informed decisions and encourage stronger corporate action on gender equality and women's empowerment.

👉🏾 Our benchmark does a deep dive, looking at gender equality within the apparel sector. And we really thought that the apparel sector would be the ideal starting place to understand the complex web of issues that are affecting the achievement of gender equality. The apparel sector plays a critical role in driving gender equality as more than two-thirds of its around 60 to 75 million global workforce are women.

And the sector is characterised by substantial outsourcing to multiple levels of suppliers located in developing countries like Sri Lanka, as I mentioned before. And women in those countries often face legal gender discrimination, fewer workplace protections, and where those protections do exist weaker levels of enforcement. So we see that women tend to have fewer formal contracts and lower wages. Longer and more unpredictable working hours, and experience various forms of gender-based violence and harassment. So our benchmark really provides the roadmap for apparel companies to take action to address the gender inequalities that exist within their business. 

👉🏾 So when we assess companies, we always set sort of guidelines in relation to each of the topics that we're assessing them on. So for example, when we think of a topic such as gender equality in leadership, one of the targets that we assess companies on is whether they have between 40% to 60% of women in leadership positions in their organisation. So we set targets like that across different areas that we assess, but then we also look at whether companies are setting those targets for themselves. Do they have targets in relation to the percentage of women they want in leadership or what their gender pay gap should look like? And we look at whether companies are taking actions to work towards those targets that they've set for themselves. 

👉🏾 There can be no sustainable development without gender equality, there’s such a close link. Women comprise half of the world's population and gender equality and women's empowerment have been acknowledged as being central to the sustainable development goals with a whole sustainable development goal focused on this topic. So while there has been progress towards the realisation of equality of opportunities for women, we can see that much more remains to be done to ensure that women are guaranteed healthy lives, education, and full social and economic inclusion. And I think it's important to note the gender equality is not just the concern of half of the world's population.

👉🏾 It is a human right, and therefore is a concern for us all because no society can develop economically, politically or socially when half of its population is marginalised. And so it's critical that no one is left behind. If we want to create a sustainable future for everyone. And I think companies have such a critical role to play here because in the world of work, gender inequalities manifest in so many different ways. As I mentioned, we see women are underrepresented in leadership positions. They're paid less than their male colleagues. They participate less in the labour force and spend more time on things like unpaid care and domestic work. They face sexual harassment and gender-based violence. And we've seen that these inequalities have only been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, widening the gender gap 

even further. But the business case for addressing and advancing gender equality is very clear. It has the potential to increase global growth by 13 trillion US dollars by 2030. And if we fail to take action, it has the ability to lower global growth by 1 trillion dollars by 2030. And as I said before now, more than ever, it is critical that we do take action to close t