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How to demonstrate your company’s contribution to SDG 5: Gender Equality

Supply chain data can show how your company drives gender equality – including information on women in leadership roles, gender pay gaps, and differences in men and women’s working situations.

Many businesses want to demonstrate their commitment to social and environmental sustainability through supporting the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But showing progress against these global goals can be tricky.

Each SDG has several smaller Targets, to break down the wider Goal into more specific activities. For SDG 5 – Gender Equality – there are nine Targets. Companies can use gender data (data separated by male and female) from their operations and supply chain to demonstrate commitment, effort and improvement against many of these.

This insight came from our latest Sedex Community event on gender equality. Learn more about our Community here.

The power of data to drive gender equality

The right data, separated by gender, enables your business to identify and address issues affecting women.

  • Set and measure progress against gender equality goals
  • Identify the roles women play, and understand the differences between male and female workers’ experiences
  • Analyse root causes of workplace issues, whether they have a greater impact on women, and whether they are influenced by gender discrimination
  • Make informed decisions to actively manage issues, and understand whether actions taken are having a positive impact.

The first step is gathering gender data across your own operations and supply chain. Sedex’s self-assessment questionnaire captures information from work sites, while our Gender Data Report dashboard brings key metrics together to show the gender composition of your supply chain.

Click a target to learn which data helps your business show how they drive gender equality in the supply chain.

How Sedex can help

Our data-led tools and services enable your company to capture and store essential gender-disaggregated data, to analyse and report on women’s working situations in across your supply chain.

Contact us to learn more about our platform, work site data-gathering and assessment tools, and our Gender Data Report dashboard.

[1] Source: British Medical Journal, 2021

[1] See Promundo, p.9 (Action 6)