Gender Equality
In shortfall: the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law 2024 finds women on average enjoy just 64 percent of the legal protections that men do once violence and childcare are counted. It also finds only about half of women participate in the workforce, versus nearly three quarters of men.
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Legal equality is written by legislatures. But much of the gender gap is lived inside workplaces, where pay, promotion, harassment and leadership are corporate conduct that owners already govern by vote. Arjuna Capital's campaign made Citi the first US bank to disclose and commit to closing its gender pay gap. About 78 percent of Microsoft shareholders backed a 2021 report on sexual-harassment policy effectiveness. The Thirty Percent Coalition's investor campaign influenced more than 500 public companies to appoint a woman director. As You Sow's Workplace Equity Scorecard rates Russell 1000 companies on 31 indicators of hiring, retention and promotion disclosure broken down by gender, race and ethnicity. After the Fifth Circuit vacated Nasdaq's board diversity rules in December 2024, shareholder voting became the main remaining lever on US corporate leadership composition. Employer policy also shapes the unpaid-care burden that the ILO estimates keeps 708 million women out of the labor force. Corporate lobbying is a documented obstacle where BusinessEurope has pushed to delay and weaken the EU Pay Transparency Directive. Parliaments, family law and social norms still control representation in public life and the legal core of the dimension. Owners supply a necessary input on economic gender equality while governments must also act.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- New Data Show Massive, Wider-than-Expected Global Gender Gap (Women, Business and the Law 2024), World Bank, 2024-03-04
- Citi Is First U.S. Bank To Respond To Shareholder Pressure To Close Gender Pay Gap, Arjuna Capital via PR Newswire, 2018-01-15
- Microsoft shareholders vote for the company to publish sexual-harassment report, in rare win for activists, CNBC, 2021-11-30
- Corporate Board Diversity: A Comment from Thirty Percent Coalition, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 2023-12-31
- Fifth Circuit Vacates SEC's Approval of Nasdaq Board Diversity Rules, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (Simpson Thacher & Bartlett), 2025-01-12
- Unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market, International Labour Organization, 2024-10-29
- Deregulation Demands Threaten the EU's Best Chance to Close the Gender Pay Gap, Social Europe, 2026-04-15
- As You Sow Racial Justice, Workplace Equity Scorecards Expand to Include Russell 1000 Companies, As You Sow, 2021-11-16
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Uses shareholder engagement to ask companies to disclose hiring, promotion and retention rates by gender and race plus EEO-1 data, and maintains a Workplace Equity Scorecard tracking that disclosure across thousands of listed companies.
Files proposals asking companies to report on sexual harassment handling and to disclose median gender and racial pay gaps, winning a 78 percent vote at Microsoft in 2021 and a 51 percent vote at Kroger in 2023.
Runs the Adopt a Company campaign in which institutional investors managing over 7 trillion dollars write to companies asking them to add women and people of color to their boards; 517 engaged companies had added at least one woman director by 2021.
4 campaigns on record
Report transparently on racial and gender pay gaps.
With Proxy Impact, UFCW 3000
Result: 51 percent in favor
Kroger's board opposed the proposal and its CEO said the company conducts internal pay equity analyses but did not commit to publishing them.
Commit to including women and people of color in every board candidate pool and reflect that commitment in governance documents.
Result: 127 companies appointed women to their boards that year; 517 companies engaged since 2012 had added at least one woman director
Transparently address sexual harassment claims through independent investigations and public reporting on the effectiveness of its policies.
Result: 78 percent in favor
Microsoft committed to a third-party independent assessment of its sexual harassment processes with public reporting, and agreed to publish median racial and gender pay gap data.
Pressed Citigroup, through a shareholder resolution and direct engagement, to disclose its median (unadjusted, company-wide) gender and racial pay gap rather than only a narrower 'equal pay for equal work' adjusted figure.
Result: On January 16, 2019, Citigroup became the first major U.S. bank to disclose median pay gap data: women earned 29% less than men and minorities earned 7% less than non-minority employees on an unadjusted, company-wide basis.
Citigroup committed to increasing female representation in mid-to-senior roles to 40% by 2021. Separately, per HR Dive, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Mastercard, Wells Fargo and Bank of New York Mellon each agreed to work on closing pay gaps for women and non-white employees following similar shareholder pressure from Arjuna Capital, though the sources retrieved do not give those banks' specific disclosure figures.
Citigroup reveals it pays women 29 percent less than men in unprecedented disclosure, CBS News
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Doughnut Economics's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.