A call to increase gender equity in the workplace.

Sophie Le Ray
4 min readSep 3, 2020

--

Why is gender equity needed more than ever to tackle world challenges.

According to the World Economic Forum, it will take another 99,5 years to close the gender gap.

This statement was made before the COVID 19 crisis!

If skepticism is creeping in your mind when hearing again and again about “what should be done” to close the gender gap at work, you are in good company.

So, we decided to act on it before this sentiment settles into apathy.

Our goal is to establish a global unbiased source of information about gender equity in the workplace.

The right time is now

The COVID 19 crisis seems like it is leading the world into an accelerated paradigm shift.

What a better moment in time than this post pandemic era, when the definition of the workplace is being challenged, businesses are pivoting, lockdown leads us into questioning many aspects of our lives, to transform boldly the current gender status quo.

Information is power.

The power to choose a company you can grow with, one that doesn’t pay lip service to gender equity but genuinely strives to reach it.

The power to bring your skills and talent to an organisation where you are heard, seen and understood.

What is the current status of gender equity in the workplace? Factually.

We think the first step is to know “where we are” today, that is what the corporate world currently looks like when it comes to gender parity.

In that regard, individual opinions may (and should!) vary when assessing the commitment of a given employer to gender parity or when describing the culture of a given firm.

This can be a source of confusion for a company outsider, and practically hampers the valuable efforts of many existing mission-driven initiatives that rely exclusively on crowdsourced aggregated opinions.

However, we believe it is possible to reach a broad consensus based on reliable data and actual quantifiable results achieved by an employer.

For that reason, we have prioritized the collection of publicly available employer-level data, to establish an objective diagnosis on the state of gender inequality within each specific firm.

Our (not so) secret sauce

Like many social enterprises, EVE List is standing on the shoulders of giants.

The data we seek to use has already been patiently collected and stored by firms themselves, by government organizations, by nonprofits and social businesses, by research institutions or by professional data providers.

Our added value is to bring it all in one place and our aim is to then present the most accurate and educated view to the EVE List community, thus assisting those who wish to make well-informed decisions about their career.

So we can then connect YOU with the most fruitful career opportunities possible worldwide.

A call to collective intelligence

This being said, as EVE community grows it is our intention to use crowdsourced data and integrate it in our analysis, recognizing it as a very powerful tool to measure the difference between reality and insiders’ perception.

We want to do this transparently and highlight the respective contributions of public official data and crowdsourced data when presenting our educated view on the state of gender parity within a company.

We welcome your contribution, whether it is in the form of donation, data, feedback, adding a new company, jobs, leading an AMA.

Momentum matters

Last but not least, we want our data to be “alive”, by which we mean continuously and organically enhanced.

For example, there will be instances where our data only pertains to a specific region of the world, because of differences in corporate governance standards and regulation.

We will strive for the “highest common denominator”, encouraging firms and/or governments in other regions to match the level of transparency prevailing in leading regions.

For more on our methodology, we invite you to visit here and check out regularly our blog section.

Additionally, the EVE List community will comprise both users and reviewers

The former will candidly suggest ideas on how to enrich our datasets to further inform women on their career choices, while the latter will help us fix possible inaccuracies in our data.

We need your help to reach this goal: all of you have a part of the information required to run an accurate scorecard.

You also know someone who has access to elements you don’t have, whether it is a colleague, or your HR department, so we encourage you to take part.

Forward/respond to this questionnaire so together, we transform the workplace.

Visit Become a contributor for more information on how you can support us.

We are all EVE.

EVE list is a not for profit organisation, registered in France (Association loi 1901). Our mission success depends on your contribution, the time and efforts volunteered by our team. Visit our website : www.evelist.org

--

--

Sophie Le Ray
Sophie Le Ray

Written by Sophie Le Ray

0 Followers

Author, experienced business facilitator in emerging markets. Co founder of EVE list, a social enterprise measuring the state of gender equity in the workplace.