Target 5.1: End discrimination against women and girls
End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Discrimination against women is addressed primarily through law and enforcement. Employers' pay, promotion and harassment practices, however, are where much discrimination is experienced, so corporate conduct is a genuine secondary lever. Arjuna Capital's gender pay gap proposals at nine financial firms in 2018 led Citi to become the first US bank to disclose and commit to closing its gap. By 2019 Arjuna was asking 12 financial and technology companies to report median gender pay gaps. The World Bank notes that only 35 of 98 economies with equal-pay laws have pay-transparency or enforcement measures, a gap corporate disclosure can partly fill. Owners help at the margin. Governments must still legislate and enforce.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
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
- Citi Is First U.S. Bank To Respond To Shareholder Pressure To Close Gender Pay Gap, Arjuna Capital via PR Newswire, 2018-01-15
- New Developments in Shareholders' Gender Pay Gap Proposals, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (Willis Towers Watson), 2019
- New Data Show Massive, Wider-than-Expected Global Gender Gap (Women, Business and the Law 2024), World Bank, 2024-03-04
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Filed gender and racial pay gap proposals at large financial and technology companies from 2016 onward, first seeking adjusted equal pay data and then unadjusted median gender and racial pay gap disclosure.
2 campaigns on record
Disclose unadjusted global median gender and US racial pay gap data, which shows whether women have equal opportunity to reach high paying jobs rather than only equal pay for equal work.
Result: not stated in source
Pfizer committed to conduct a global gender pay gap analysis of both adjusted and unadjusted data and a US racial pay gap analysis in 2019, and the proposal there was withdrawn.
Gender Pay Scorecard for Equal Pay Day, CorpGov.net, 2019-04
Report the percentage pay gap between male and female employees across race and ethnicity, including base, bonus and equity compensation, the policies used to address the gap, the methodology, and quantitative reduction targets.
Result: not stated in source
Citigroup agreed to publish gender and ethnicity wage data and committed to closing its pay gap, the first US bank to respond to the campaign.
Related subjects on other maps
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 UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.