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Dear friends and supporters of WJI 2030,
Happy International Women’s Day.
On International Women’s Day, we celebrate women and girls everywhere.
The Gender Snapshot Report 2022 , launched by UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), highlights that at the current pace of progress, SDG 5—achieving gender equality—will not be met by 2030. Despite progress in reforming laws, closing gaps in legal protections and removing discriminatory laws could take up to 286 years based on the current rate of change.
Global challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, violent conflict, climate change, and the backlash against women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are further exacerbating gender disparities. Women’s representation in positions of power and decision-making remains below parity.
Nearly half way to the 2030 endpoint for the SDGs, the time to act and invest in women and girls is now. The case for supporting women’s empowerment is particularly strong in the jewellery industry. Women drive demand for a vast majority of the world’s jewellery. Furthermore, in the rapidly growing consumer movement, Millennial and now Gen Z women and girls are driving consumer decisions toward products and companies that act consciously and protect their supply chains.
The WJI 2030 is committed to accelerate SDG 5. The climate crisis is not “gender neutral”. Women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change, which amplifies existing gender inequalities and poses unique threats to their livelihoods, health, and safety. Across the world women depend more on, yet have less access to, natural resources. Implementing our 3 pillars on climate action, biodiversity, and inclusiveness is essential to the rights of women and girls.
We are proud of our partnership with UN Women on accelerating the Women’s Empowerment Principles Framework and piloting their gender responsive procurement tool with Monica Vinader, Swarovski, Gucci, Italpreziosi, Rosy Blue, Dimexon, Cartier, Rubel & Menasché, and Julie Sandlau.
We are calling on our industry leaders and stakeholders to join forces and accelerate efforts to make gender equality a reality for all. We hope you will enjoy the gender perspective from Susan Jacques (CEO and President, GIA), Cristina Villegas (Director Sustainable Markets PACT), Stefanie Cohen (Head of Sustainability, Swarovski), Eva von Alvensleben (Executive Director and Secretary General, The Fashion Pact).
We thank UN Women for their valuable input to WJI 2030 in sharing practical tools to help companies operationalize the gender agenda. We know that the origins of these challenges are structural and centuries old. Therefore, we need approaches and solutions that are systemic to achieve comprehensive and long-term results, leading to both structural, and cultural transformations.
This is our call for action, join the WEPs.
Marie-Claire Daveu,
Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of International Institutional Affairs of Kering
Cyrille Vigneron,
President & CEO Cartier International
Iris Van der Veken,
Executive Director & Secretary General Watch & Jewellery Initiative 2030
Most brands and consumers have no idea that about 90% of all mine labor worldwide is done by artisanal and small-scale miners, who are people using shovels, picks, and human strength to pull minerals from the earth. There are about 45 million ASM at work worldwide. Usually about one-third of a given country’s ASM workers are women, and sometimes it’s up to half. In terms of potential SDG impacts, working with ASM and working with women miners in particular can be a very powerful story of positive change. It’s common to find that women miners are the head of their household and that one miner’s income is supporting 5-7 children.
The challenges vary dramatically based on where the miner is located. With women miners, we tend to see them overlooked in training opportunities or in new government programs because people wrongly assume that women do not mine. So it can be a vicious cycle, where women already have the fewest resources, are overlooked in training opportunities, and are completely invisible to the jewelry industry. I’ve realized that if you do not start with women miners, they can become an afterthought. So the last few collaborations that I have led, I’ve started with women miners — with intention—so that the program ultimately reaches 50-50 gender parity. It takes more effort, but it’s been so worth it. Whole communities are changing before my eyes.
Over the past few years, Pact has worked with GIA, The Tiffany & Co. Foundation, The Brilliant Earth Foundation, The World Bank, and small, reform-minded studio jewelers to bring new opportunities to the hidden female workforce behind gem mining. These are programs such as gemology education and market skills trainings to help women miners understand their materials and command better prices using that new, expertly-taught knowledge. We also bring financial literacy and community-banking programs to gem mining communities to catalyze small businesses and income diversification. In Tanzania, we’ve been seeing women jointly start side-businesses focused on beekeeping, sisal farming, and chicken keeping. These activities help buffer communities against economic shocks and they stabilize household economics to help whole families. I remember that in one community, we learned that gem miners were skipping meals because they were so destitute. Our programs quickly turned that around. Those miners are now thriving.
ASM communities are filled with partnership opportunities for meaningful, lasting change. However, it is important to choose the right partner for this work. Pact, the Alliance for Responsible Mining, and Gem Legacy are all good choices. There are three ways that companies can responsibly ‘plug in’ to this work.
Women are central to the watch and jewellery industry – as consumers, designers, employees, and supply chain workers. They drive 90% of global demand for jewellery and make up around 70% of the workforce in jewellery manufacturing. At the same time, women in the industry commonly face adverse social and cultural norms and systemic constraints such as discriminatory laws or gaps in legal protection that hamper their advancement in both the workplace and marketplace. Emerging regulations to improve gender representation on the boards of listed companies in the EU or increased requirements for companies to report on DEI targets including gender promise a pathway forward, but business must play its part to advance gender equality.
At WJI 2030, women’s empowerment is key in our commitment to ensuring inclusive and responsible value chains. As an initiative, we support the Women’s Empowerment Principles and launched a partnership with UN Women to advance gender-responsive procurement through a pilot project. We will soon announce additional workstreams to support our members in promoting gender equality in their own operations and value chains. In the meantime, the following resources developed or curated by our partner BSR offer helpful guidance and inspiration for companies seeking to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in the industry:
As you know, our work at The Fashion Pact is directly linked to our common agenda based on a set of commitments across our three pillars Climate, Biodiversity and Oceans. We are conscious that environmental and social issues go together. We strive to ensure that the system change we want to bring is benefitting not only the environment but also the people working in that field.
Our general ambition is to encourage gender equality across our key stakeholders. Through projects we set up, we aim to work with consultancies, NGOs and conservation groups as well as cross-industry partners that support gender equality and diversity. For example, we are tracking this through our “Transforming the Fashion Sector with Nature Project”, a project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The GEF requires that we adhere to the “Gender Mainstreaming Plan” enabling us to track and monitor gender representation and activities throughout our work from staffing to committee make up, webinar and workshop attendees.
Finally, as a women-only team, The Fashion Pact Secretariat scores well! Globally there is still much to be done in terms of female representation at top leadership positions within fashion companies. When possible, we strive to highlight leading female voices from members in events & conferences.
Women’s empowerment and gender issues have become mainstream topics across industries. Companies have increased their commitment to gender diversity in the past few years. Yet, progress is slow. According to the BOF State of Fashion 2023, less than 25% of all CEO appointments in the fashion industry in 2021 were women. Women make up the majority of the garment workers across the supply chain (from cotton fields to stores). We know that the effects of climate change disproportionately impact women. It is therefore essential for women to have a seat at the table in all aspects of climate decision-making. Generally speaking, including gender issues in sustainability strategies is key.
Women’s empowerment is a cause close to my heart. I have experienced first-hand working in male-dominated fields, often being the only woman among a hundred consultants in my former life in a strategy consulting firm. Despite the progress in the past years in the fashion industry, much more needs to be done to achieve gender equality at every level of society and notably at work.
Today, more than ever I am conscious of the gender inequality at my level: in the fashion industry there are few women CEOs heading fashion companies. I aspire for more women in leadership positions in the fashion industry to ensure diversity of perspectives around the table. After all, the majority of fashion customers and audiences are women! In order for women to advance in leadership positions, we need to rethink our working systems, often not adapted to women. At The Fashion Pact we created a thriving environment enabling women to adapt and manage work-life balance.
Swarovski reports progress in achieving positive business practices for women, recognizing that it needs to proactively create networks to support women.
At Swarovski, we want to be recognized as a company that’s built on a foundation of equality and inclusivity. We aim to champion diversity and celebrate people’s individuality. This has been part of our DNA for many years and is fully embedded in our LUXignite strategy.
Equality, Diversity & Inclusion are one of our six most important focus areas within our Sustainability strategy that we are integrating into our business across the value chain, from how we design our products to how we produce them and how we market them.
Women make up 77% of our workforce and the majority of our customers, so we believe our business is especially well-placed to champion gender equality.
In 2018 we launched ‘The Future is Equal’ campaign to observe International Women’s Day and have run consecutive year on year campaigns to engage with our global workforce across office, retail and production on issues like breaking bias and local fundraising for women’s empowerment charities.
Swarovski was a very early signatory of the United Nations’ Women’s Empowerment Principles (UN WEP), a set of principles for business offering guidance on how to empower women in the workplace, marketplace and community. We became a signatory in 2014, and since 2017 we have been assessing ourselves biannually using the WEP’s Gender Gap Analysis Tool for businesses in order to track our progress. The good news is that we have improved in every assessment so far, showing our increasing focus and progress in fostering a positive business practice for women. But there is still a lot that we need and want to do to advance further. Some of our programmes are listed below…
Our WeShine programme (internal programme concentrating on EDI on our manufacturing sites) has been running since 2018 and focuses on working on the ground NGOs to overcome barriers that workers face in our production locations. Due to the high number of women in our production, the most prolific issues are centred around gender.
We worked with Raks Thai in 2019-2020 to improve financial literacy, understanding of sexual health, and provide support on gender equality issues in one of our production facilities in Thailand, and we are currently working on how we can roll out this programme globally. In 2022 we partnered with BSR in India and Vietnam to run tailored HER projects to empower and support female workers who are represented at the lowest tier in supply chains and often carry a dual burden to earn and care for the family. The programme supports them in health-related issues, increasing health awareness, and access to health services through sustainable workplace initiatives.
We have an established eLearning portfolio including eLearning modules covering unconscious bias, microaggressions and allyship. In 2018-2020, we partnered with the NeuroLeadership Institute carrying out global unconscious bias training sessions, to help employees understand how to stop bias from impacting their decisions, creating a more inclusive and diverse environment for all.
Our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are crucial to creating a sense of inclusion and belonging. ERGs are employee-led groups that contribute to fostering a more diverse and inclusive workplace. Participants are usually employees who feel connected by a mixture of shared interests, experiences, or backgrounds. We currently have ERGs focused on women’s empowerment, but also pride, disability and working parents across the world.
We have been running #IamRemarkable sessions across the business since 2019 to encourage underrepresented groups to recognize the power of self-promotion and boost confidence in the workplace and beyond. #IamRemarkable is a worldwide Google initiative.
Swarovski is a Lean In partner. We recognize that we need to proactively create networks to support women, and to foster connections across our workplaces, encouraging the exchange of ideas and inspiring confidence.
It is vital to understand the issues in order to develop meaningful programmes. The challenges are widespread and vary depending on the area of the business and the geography.
For example, in 2018 we partnered with BSR to conduct ground-breaking research exploring the role of women in the jewellery supply chain and the challenges they face to their wellbeing and career advancement. Some of the issues found included the lack of formal employment opportunities, a lack of women in leadership and female role models, low wages and poor working conditions, exposure to health and safety hazards and low levels of education increasing the risk of sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
While this work was focused primarily on the production and cutting/mining sector largely taking place in Asia, the challenges we face to achieve gender equality in other parts of the world and in our retail and office population are different.
In order to drive meaningful change, detailed analysis is required to understand the issues and address them in the right way – instead of just applying a watering can type solution or virtue signalling.
The WEPs is a very useful tool that allows us to assess ourselves and to use as a compass to guide further programmes.
In 2021 we published a number of commitments that focus not only on gender but are also related to progress in the broader Equality, Diversity & Inclusion area.
What one company can do is limited. We have neither endless resources nor funds. Action needs to happen across companies and industries. Much of what we have learned so far can be applied to other businesses and we need to join forces to make progress. I do hope that within WJI 2030 we can work further to understand in even greater detail the gender equality related issues we face and jointly develop programmes to resolve them.
I worked for many years in a large American consumer goods company and have now been at Swarovski for the past seven years. While a lot has been achieved, the challenges for gender equality are far from being resolved, even here in Europe. I am a working parent and this still often puts me in a situation of having to prioritise between work and family more than I would like. Expectations of men vs. women in relation to childcare are still far from equal, in some countries less and in some countries more so. Key enablers are equal parental leave policies and flex work arrangements – but also the company culture. My very personal hope for the future is that my children – no matter if boy or a girl – will take care of their kids equally, and that the topic of gender equality in the workplace will become much less of an issue.
The current state of affairs does not look good. According to UN Women, achieving full gender equality could take close to 300 years at the current rate of progress. This is a sobering finding and should provide us with an even stronger call to action. It is clear that without action, the erosion of the rights of women and girls will continue.
For really meaningful progress, the private and public sector will need to collaborate and place women and girls at the centre of all aspects of decision making, including through gender-responsive laws, policies, and budgeting. We need a truly multidimensional and multi-sectoral approach.
We are calling on our industry leaders and stakeholders to join forces and accelerate efforts to make gender equity a reality for all.
Sign the Women’s Empowerment Principles
The Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) are a set of principles offering guidance to business on how to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace and community. Established by UN Women and UN Global Compact, the WEPs are informed by international labour and human rights standards and grounded in the recognition that businesses have a stake in, and a responsibility for, gender equality and women’s empowerment.
All businesses stand to benefit from gender equality and women’s empowerment. The WEPs platform offers the private sector a global network of like-minded companies and guidance on advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace and community. Support for the seven Principles has gathered global momentum – thousands of companies worldwide are now WEPs champions – and therewithin also contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.
The WJI 2030 strongly urges you to become signatories of the WEPs and demonstrate your commitment to the gender equality dimensions of the 2030 agenda through leadership and commitment at the highest level of your company.
Joining the WEPs Network is Straightforward:
When filling out the application, under “WEPs sponsor/referral” please select “other” and write WJI 2030 as your source of referral.
WJI 2030 strongly believes in accelerating commitment and action in order to forward the 2030 agenda, and therefore kindly urge you to become a WEPs signatory and work collaboratively in multistakeholder networks to foster business practices that empower women.
ADDITIONAL TOOLS
Gender Gap Analysis Tool (WEPs Tool)
The Women’s Empowerment Principles Gender Gap Analysis Tool (WEPs Tool) is a business-driven tool designed to help companies from around the world assess gender equality performance across the workplace, marketplace, and community.
The WEPs Gender Gap Analysis Tool | WEPs
WEPs Gender Responsive Procurement Tool Guidance Note
The UN Women’s Empowerment Principles – Gender-Responsive Procurement (GRP) Assessment Tool allows companies to assess progress on their GRP policies and practices on gender-responsive procurement. This self-assessment tool is available to all WEPs signatories. Consisting of 31 questions, the tool identifies gaps and areas for improvement based on inputs provided by the company.
WEPs Gender responsive procurement tool guidance note | WEPs
Integrating Diversity, Inclusion, and Women’s Empowerment into Corporate Management
Read this case study to learn about how Timeline Consultancy leveraged its position to help client companies set up employee representative mechanisms with adequate participation of women through its consulting services.
Integrating Diversity, Inclusion and Women’s Empowerment into Corporate Management | WEPs
More tools: see here Resources | weps
More case studies: see here Case Study | weps