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Includes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI/EDI), or inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA), or justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI), or diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), and other acronyms; freedom from discrimination; freedom of opinion and expression; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; right to privacy; respect for group rights (such as the rights of Indigenous Peoples); cultural leave; respect for protections for persons with disabilities, children, women and girls, persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities, migrant workers, LGTBQIA2S+, older workers, and other groups; and a workforce representative of broader society.
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Companies need to take action on eliminating discrimination and make conscious efforts to ensure that their workforce feels respected and included within their organisation. Anchored in research, our Respectful, Equitable, and Inclusive Workplaces: A Getting Started Guide summarises our work in the EDI Leading Practices: A Guide for Companies and aims to support your company as it begins or revisits an inclusive workplace strategy. It helps build a foundational understanding of the issue and provides clarity on the work ahead.
Workplace equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is a complex and rapidly evolving space, and increasingly, companies are interested in understanding how to meaningfully advance EDI in their organisations. To help them do so, we consulted EDI research and guidance, reviewed practices of over 100 companies, and sought input from practitioners across a range of industries and geographies. Our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Leading Practices Guide offers a comprehensive framework with practices, case studies, and resources to help organisations embed EDI into their strategy, structures, and culture.
The International Labour Organization's tools and resources for business on non-discrimination and equality provides guidance that will help you support equity related to gender, age, HIV/AIDS status, and disabilities, as well as understanding the rights of Indigenous and tribal peoples.
This report, completed by researchers led by Stephanie Creary at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explores the relationships between workplace culture and business outcomes. It presents results from the U.S Distributed Workforce Sample, which serve as a foundation for informing managerial action on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and provides key findings and recommendations for middle managers responsible for implementing related initiatives. If you or our organisation are new to effecting DEI-related change, this research may help you to fine-tune the focus of your actions.
This paper from the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) can help you and your team develop the competencies needed to build a more diverse and inclusive workforce. The guide lays out a set of 15 diversity and inclusion competencies that are categorised into three spheres of influence: “within myself," “within my team," and “within my organisation, workplace, or community." Each competency outlines the performance criteria required to demonstrate competence. In addition, foundational knowledge underpinning each competency is identified, and brief examples of what the competency might look like in practice are provided. This resource is most relevant to HR and DEI practitioners, especially in areas where the workforce increasingly consists of immigrants.
The Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) has created a range of reports, resources, and toolkits to help you with advancing equity and challenging racism in the workplace. These resources include leadership and workplace guides that focus on creating inclusive and safe spaces, as well as step-by-step toolkits that explain how to navigate race in the workplace and develop a diversity and inclusion strategy. Although much of the CCDI's content is written from a Canadian context, most of their insights and lessons are universally relevant.
This report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) explores some of the key DEI challenges faced by companies from WBCSD's Future of Work working group. It presents the case for focusing on and advancing DEI in the workplace; explores solutions that the companies in WBCSD's working group have implemented in their pursuit of leadership in this space, with a specific focus on identifying and sharing practical approaches to building more progressive workplaces; and explores emergent leading DEI practices and some of the factors that enabled successful mainstreaming.
This short report is a good introduction to inequality, and can help you to better understand the responsibility and opportunity that your business has to support positive change. Developed by the Business Commission to Tack Inequality, the report explains how inequality is an urgent systemic risk for business, highlights the case for business action, and presents a six-part agenda for action.
This flexible toolkit from BSR can help you better manage migrant worker issues across diverse business contexts. It is based on a three-step framework for developing a comprehensive migrant worker orientation program. This framework includes understanding the key issues and risks affecting employers and workers in your business context; finding a credible, independent external organisations to support the development of the orientation program; and building capacity within operations by educating workers on their rights and available grievance mechanisms. This highly practical toolkit offers relevant standards, examples, checklists, questions, and recommended actions for each step, and will be most useful to supply chain practitioners and facility managers.
This primer provides a helpful high-level summary of diversity and inclusion that will benefit executives, board members, and other business leaders. It explains the present-day context of diversity and inclusion, both within the workforce and in senior leadership roles; and highlights both the risks of inaction and the opportunities provided by advancing DEI, such as by improving hiring practices, advancing managerial accountability, and creating and supporting employee resource groups.
This article from HBR that will help you gather data needed to track your organisation’s progress towards managing your people fairly, based on merit. Grounded in the author’s first hand experience, it proposes seven key metrics spanning the employee life cycle. These are: attrition, performance, promotions, leadership pipeline, employment pipeline, pay equity, and inclusion. The measurement framework provided will be most useful to HR departments within organisations committed to addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
This annual report from CDP provides a snapshot that can help you to better understand how the world's largest companies are progressing on their environmental commitments and what this means for their financial performance. It draws on data disclosed through CDP and reveals the levers that business leaders are pulling to improve performance and take advantage of environmental opportunities, such as linking executive pay to environmental performance, engaging with value chain partners, and developing and embedding robust processes for managing environmental dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities. This report will be especially beneficial to sustainability professionals and senior leaders.
Racial Equity Tools has compiled a vast library of resources that can help you to understand and advance racial equity within your organisation. The library is arranged into four broad "themes," including fundamentals, such as core concepts, the history of racism and movements, data, and resources; planning that examines key issues, such as economic security and language justice; acting to find strategies and advocate for ending structural racism and advancing social change; and evaluating progress and results.
Just Capital's Corporate Equity Tracker provides a way for people to easily access and view the racial equity commitments and actions taken by organisations. Once on the website, users will have the ability to sort their searches based on the company, industry, number of employees, or policies.
Adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007 by a majority of 144 states in favour, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples establishes a universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of the Indigenous peoples of the world, and elaborates on existing human rights standards and fundamental freedoms. The declaration provides a trajectory for advancing lasting reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and it should be used to inform any statements, policies, or practices related to Indigenous Peoples that your organisation is developing and implementing.
This resource from PolicyLink provides a roadmap that can help companies understand and address the intended and unintended consequences of their products, policies, and practices on people of colour. The guide seeks to advance racial equity by providing key recommendations across three domains of corporate influence: within the company, within relevant communities, and at the societal level. It also includes profiles of companies whose work is advancing equity in these three spaces. This guide is a good starting point for leaders and agents of change who want to advance their business from simply "not racist" to deliberately and credibly "anti-racist."
This guide from B Lab can help your business adopt anti-racist business practices. The first section introduces the role of business in tackling racism, and the second section highlights actions you can take using examples from the B Corporation community. It includes recruiting and hiring practices, understanding the history of systemic racism and unconscious bias, and practicing allyship. The insights provided will be most beneficial to Human Resource practitioners.
This guide from the Centre for Community Organizations will help you spark conversations about oppressive culture in your organisation. It describes five dimensions of white supremacy culture that fuel exploitative behaviours and decision-making. These include the narrow view of perfectionist culture; paternalism; the practice of concentrating - and refusing to share - power; defending the status quo; and avoiding the discomfort of confronting racism. This resource also features practical guidance on how to counter white supremacy culture. This guide will be most useful to change managers, sustainability professionals, and HR practitioners seeking to positively influence the underlying cultural frameworks that guide decision-making.
White supremacy culture can manifest in subtle ways within the workplace, such as through perfectionism, defensiveness, paternalism, and individualism. This primer will help you to understand and better identify problematic attitudes and behaviours, and to proactively build a more inclusive, collaborative, and supportive environment.
The physical, emotional, and economic safety of Black Americans is constantly threatened by the participants and beneficiaries of systemic racism. This article, written by JUST Capital, presents a list of concrete and actionable steps that people within organizations can take to address systemic racism and support the physical, emotional, and economic safety and security of Black Americans. Five primary actions are presented, including supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement; providing a safe and supportive work environment; assessing the workforce; examining practices; and conscientious recruitment.
Action is the key difference between being not racist and being anti-racist. This article can help leaders to reimagine their approach to developing a fully inclusive culture. Adapted from the book Anti-Racist Leadership, this article introduces 7 proactive steps that can help you to get started in rooting out discrimination and advancing equity in the workplace.
Established by the UN Global Compact and UN Women, The Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) serve as guidelines that will help your leaders, HR professionals, and change agents to promote gender equality and empowerment in the workplace. Adopting these principles involves six main stages: Consider, Sign, Activate, Engage, Sustain, and Report. Towards helping you understand and progress through these stages, the WEPs has created a comprehensive brochure that features tools, examples, insights, and other resources.
This comprehensive report from the World Economic Forum can help you understand the current state of gender parity and its evolution over time. The first part benchmarks the gender gap, including performance by income level and region, progress over time, and the speed of progress. The second part explores trends and pathways shaping the future of parity, such as those relating to corporate leadership and career pathways, technology and capital, and policy frameworks and political leadership. This guide will be most useful to senior leaders and HR professionals interested in understanding and challenging gender inequity within their business and beyond.
Drawing from more than 100 data sources, this annual report from UN Women and UN DESA provides a comprehensive analysis of gender equality progress across the Sustainable Development Goals, and can help you to better understand how the world is failing to achieve gender equality. It highlights trends in extreme poverty, food insecurity, violence, and more, and explains how the vulnerability of women and girls will be exacerbated by climate change. In particular, the 2025 edition warns that if current trends continue, the world will reach 2030 with 351 million women and girls still living in extreme poverty, and that the Sustainable Development Goals - especially SDG 5 - will be missed. It also explains that if we choose to invest even in just one concrete action on closing the gender digital divide, 343.5 million women and girls globally could benefit, lifting 30 million women and girls out of poverty and generating a USD 1.5 trillion windfall in global GDP by 2030.
The report advocates for (and provides recommendations for) an integrated, holistic approach to advancing gender equality, such as by ensuring women and girls can reap the economic benefits of the digital revolution; investing in social protection and high-quality public services to address women's poverty; adopting, implementing, and funding legislation to end violence against women and girls; and more. This report will be of particular benefit to sustainability and strategy professionals who want to better align their company's positions, goals, and actions with the work that much be done to advance gender equality globally.
This library from UN Women provides briefs, manuals, guides, discussion papers, case studies, and more on a wide range of topics relating to gender equality and the empowerment of women, including economic empowerment, ending violence against women and girls, employment, leadership and political participation, and more.
This guide from BSR provides a framework for the implementation of good working conditions, and in particular for women. It explores the topic of mainstreaming gender equality, and especially within codes of conduct, and introduces nine principles that will help you to integrate gender equality considerations into the standards you use both internally and within your supply chain. Each principle features a summary, case studies, and recommended revisions and opportunities for leadership.
This resource from the International Labour Organisation provides an approachable introduction to the gender gap in the labour force, relating to employment rates, wages, available opportunities, and more. This is a good primer for helping executives and senior leaders to better understand the persistent challenges and barriers that women face, the pressures they face to conform to gender role expectations, and their employment-related preferences.
This free tool will help you to strengthen policies and processes that advance LGBTIQ+ inclusivity and tackle discrimination within the workplace. lt uses a gap analysis methodology and questionnaire to provide recommendations based on the maturity of your journey.
This guide was created to support rights-affirming interactions between companies and a wide range of stakeholders, and it is a good starting point for businesses looking to review or establish policies and practices that respect and promote the human rights of LGBTI people. It provides five concrete steps, examples of best practices, case studies, and other practical guidance to companies on how to respect and support the rights of LGBTI people in the workplace, marketplace, and community. The standards are grounded in existing international human rights law and align with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
This toolkit from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation can help you to make your company safer for and more inclusive of transgender persons. It covers a range of policies and practices you can apply to improve inclusivity in your organisation’s day-to-day operations, including best practices for navigating gender inclusion in gendered spaces; proactive gender transition guidelines; inclusive healthcare coverage; and addressing organisational culture through training and education. There is also an extensive section reserved for examples that illustrate the everyday realities of transgender inclusion. The guidance will be especially useful to Human Resource departments and any roles responsible for championing and advancing diversity and inclusion.
Pressure is mounting on businesses to pursue social equity and to address and reduce disparity in opportunities within the workplace, but many companies struggle to identify and prevent the causes. This research note from the International Labour Organization can help you to better understand unconscious gender bias and the barriers it creates for women’s career advancement, as well as how to mitigate and overcome the effects. The report explores how such bias manifests in the workplace and includes methods, metrics, and training tips for addressing the issue.
This document will help you to begin setting credible goals around gender equality in the workplace. It introduces high-level steps, such as establishing baselines, and includes examples of the philosophy and process behind conceiving and delivering upon such gender equality-related targets.
Although this document focuses on setting targets for gender equality within the context of retail banking, the principles and examples are broadly applicable.
This resource from the ILO and UN Women can help you to promote gender equality in your workplace. It focuses on five key areas where companies can contribute: achievement of equal pay for work of equal value, prevention and elimination of violence and harassment, creating a harmonious work-life balance for both women and men equal representation of women in business and management roles, and investment in a future of work that works for women. Each section highlights key international labour standards, guiding principles for companies, and illustrative practices.
This comprehensive toolkit from the UN Global Compact was created to help you advance gender equality, diversity, and inclusion within your organisation.
The toolkit is divided into three sections. The first features a consultation report that provides qualitative and quantitative data on the gendered impacts of the pandemic, explains the challenges women in the workplace are navigating, and hightlights how other identity factors - such as race, age, and immigration status - can further complicate their professional ambitions and experience in the workplace. The second section features reminders and tips for building capacity for gender equality work and ensuring that more women (or members of other equity-deserving groups) rise to hold leadership roles. The final section features a series of case studies of organisations responding to the challenges and barriers identified by women and non-binary individuals in the consultation sessions.
Since 2015, McKinsey & Company has conducted annual studies on the state of women in corporate America. This report consolidates these findings to provide insights into workplace gender diversity trends and solutions. It is divided into three sections: the first explores women's experiences, including key trends; the second explores representation within the corporate pipeline, the seeming state of decline in corporate commitments to advance women, and best practices at high-performing companies; and the third features solutions for better ensuring fairness of opportunity and creating and promoting an inclusive culture.. This resource will be most useful to HR teams.
This new report from BSR is a practical resource for financial institutions and anyone seeking to engage them on reproductive and LGBTQI+ rights in the US context. The report explores the rollbacks of human rights protections across the US; explains how financial institutions may impact abortion and LGBTQI+ rights (specifically discussing data practices, handling of law enforcement requests, lobbying efforts, inequitable provision of financial services, and other potential impacts); highlights the material risks that result from failing to respect reproductive and LGBTQI+ rights; and provides a 5-step principles-based approach (and case studies) for navigating compliance with the law while respecting human rights.
Although created for financial institutions, the topic is relevant to organisations in all sectors, and much of the content is industry agnostic.
Human rights work remains a high-risk activity around the globe. Threats and violence against human rights defenders (HRD) have increased, as well as judicial harassment and criminalisation. This annual report from ProtectDefenders.eu explains the challenging contexts in which human rights defenders endeavour to build resilience in communities and the workplace. It explains the mechanisms and strategy that permeate ProtectDefenders.eu's work; highlights notable (and concerning) patterns of oppression, populism, and violence facing civil society; and highlights regional and national shifts impacting human rights defenders' initiatives. It also explains programmes in action that your business can support.
This new report from BSR is a practical resource for financial institutions and anyone seeking to engage them on reproductive and LGBTQI+ rights in the US context. The report explores the rollbacks of human rights protections across the US; explains how financial institutions may impact abortion and LGBTQI+ rights (specifically discussing data practices, handling of law enforcement requests, lobbying efforts, inequitable provision of financial services, and other potential impacts); highlights the material risks that result from failing to respect reproductive and LGBTQI+ rights; and provides a 5-step principles-based approach (and case studies) for navigating compliance with the law while respecting human rights.
Although created for financial institutions, the topic is relevant to organisations in all sectors, and much of the content is industry agnostic.
This global benchmarking project measures how laws, regulations, and policies shape women’s economic opportunities and private sector development across 190 economies. Their interactive map allows you to explore data on legal frameworks, supportive frameworks, and enforcement perceptions at the economy level for ten topics relating to women's working lives, including safety, mobility, work, pay, marriage, childcare, entrepreneurship, assets, and pension. WBL also produces a comprehensive report, which highlights where legal gender gaps exist and persist; introduces new measurements to track global progress toward legal gender equality; and updates data for the aforementioned topics relevant for women’s participation in the economy. This resource will be especially helpful for change agents tasked with creating opportunities to support equity of economic opportunities for women, such as by designing job-focused interventions and driving or supporting private sector reform.
This report from Rights CoLab can help you better conceptualise diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and how it can be measured. Based on a study of 21 DEI frameworks, the report outlines a methodology and shares insights on common themes found across the frameworks. It also examines the different groups that are targeted as beneficiaries of DEI efforts, highlighting how existing frameworks continue to overlook those at greatest risk of exploitation, and provides recommendations for addressing these gaps. This resource will be most useful to change agents, HR professionals, and supply chain managers.
This comprehensive guide from Oxfam can help you understand how to reframe your language to be more inclusive. It takes a critical look at language and how it can be used to empower new narratives and challenge problematic ideas. The guide explores a range of themes, including the power of language; feminist principles for language use; disability, physical, and mental health; gender justice, sexual diversity, and women’s rights; migrations; and race, power, and decolonisation. For each theme it provides examples of how you can put inclusive language into practice in writing and day-to-day conversation. This resource may be especially useful to communications specialists and HR teams that can use it to inform employee onboarding and training.
This article from B The Change can help you understand how you can be an ally to marginalised groups. It outlines five individual level actions you can take to create an environment of acceptance in your workplace and beyond. These actions are: understand your privilege; listen, empathise, and learn; amplify marginalised voices; support local communities; and speak up and act. This guidance is widely applicable, and will especially benefit change agents working in organisations that have recognised and voiced the need to improve inclusivity.
This article explores how a lack of trust between older and younger workers contributes to a culture of resentment that sows division and impacts productivity. It offers a four-part framework to help you manage an age-diverse team and better integrate their skills, knowledge, and networks. This framework includes identifying assumptions, adjusting your lens, taking advantage of differences, and embracing mutual learning.
Employers often overlook the candidacy of people with neurological conditions, despite the extraordinary skills they may bring to the workplace. This article explains the benefits of pursuing and accommodating neurodivergent talent, and explores why companies often fail to recruit and support these peoples. It also highlights HR programs and efforts to access neurodiverse talent, including the use of non-interview assessment processes, setting up support systems, and scaling and mainstreaming neurodiversity programs.
This roadmap published by the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) can help you understand the benefits of recruiting persons with criminal records – an inclusive practice known as Second Chance Hiring (SCH). The roadmap is grounded in three pillars: business and employer education; identifying the right community-based organisations and re-entry partners; and workforce development for Second Chance employees. This tool will be most useful to HR teams interested in developing more inclusive hiring practices.
This guide by The Danish Institute for Human Rights can help you address human rights risks in your downstream value chain. This includes how your product or service is used by customers and end-users; the working conditions in your distribution network; and end-of-life impacts. The guide explains downstream value chains and their importance, potential human rights issues, and how companies can address them. It also provides a series of seven case studies demonstrating downstream human rights due diligence in practice. These insights and examples will be most useful to sustainability, logistics, and supply chain management teams.
ILO Convention No. 190 (C190) is the first international treaty to recognise the right of everyone to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence and harassment. Although it is intended for national governments to implement, its adoption has implications for business sustainability. The core principles and accompanying video series will be particularly useful for sustainability, legal, and compliance professionals tasked with preventing and addressing violence and harassment in the workplace.
This collection of best practices assembled by Disability:IN can help you to better understand how to advance disability inclusion in your organisation. The collection features over 170 practices from companies participating in the Disability Equality Index (DEI). It showcases leading examples and promising practices that all companies can learn from, regardless of how far along they are in their disability inclusion journey. These practices are grouped into eight categories: culture, leadership, enterprise-wide access, employment practices, community engagement, supplier diversity, global operations, and getting started with disability inclusion. This resource will be most useful to HR practitioners.
This handbook from Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education) will help you understand how your organisation can improve education, training, and employment for young people with disabilities. It begins with an overview of disability inclusion. Then it lays out the multiple overlapping ways businesses interact with persons with disabilities and the actions they can take to support inclusion. Next, it shows how to foster an inclusive workplace and provide disability-inclusive education and training. Lastly, it highlights the opportunity for business to serve unmet needs of the large consumer base that is made up of persons with disabilities. This resource will be most useful to HR professionals and anyone seeking to advance disability inclusion.
This article can help you to better understand opposition to DEI policies. It explains that three types of perceived threat can explain advantaged groups' opposition to DEI policies: resource threat, or concern about losing access to outcomes and opportunities; symbolic threat, or concern about the introduction of new values, culture, and expectations; and ingroup morality threat, or concern about their group's role in perpetuating inequality. This resource will be particularly beneficial to sustainability practitioners and HR professionals.
This comprehensive guide from the HeForShe Alliance has created this resource to help you foster an inclusive environment within the workplace and support men to be allies in pursuit of equality. Rooted in the transforming patriarchal masculinities (TPM) approach, the toolkit encourages men to respectfully disrupt social and institutional structures that privilege men and offers a set of tools, strategies, and insights for building collaborative allyship practices that make a workplace more inclusive. The toolkit is divided into three key steps to support organisations at any stage of their male allyship journey: introducing male allies, developing an active network of male allies, and supporting male allies to make lasting change. The toolkit also offers practical case studies from HeForShe Alliance members that share practical strategies, successful initiatives, and lessons learned in promoting gender equality and supporting male allies. This guide will benefit employees at all levels within organisations, but especially those who seek to deepen their understanding of gender issues and their broader societal impacts.