Another big company has thrown its hat into the gender-equality ring, this time with a very personal message to all of us from the company’s CEO.
In announcing his organization’s new commitment to grow the percentage of women it hires to at least 40 percent by 2017, Accenture Chairman and CEO Pierre Nanterme admits such a “commitment to inclusion and diversity starts at the top, and we empower all of our people — including our more than 130,000 women — to lead.”
In this video, Nanterme, makes the campaign highly personal by sharing his pride and feelings about his daughter, and her life and future.
Not only is Accenture making progress toward its hiring goal (in fiscal year 2015, ending Aug. 31, about 39 percent of the company’s more-than-100,000 new hires were women), it’s also stepping up processes to identify potential pay discrepancies, according to its public announcement about the initiative, “looking carefully at specific roles in each country [and being] proactive at all stages of an individual’s career.”
Gender equality has also been a key concern at Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker Intel. My latest post on that company’s efforts to build its ranks of minorities and women show some significant successes in the campaign since it was first announced in January by Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich.
Earlier, in May of 2014, Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, went public with his company’s diversity numbers in an effort not just to tout the transparency, but to fix the problems, as Editor David Shadovitz blogged about at the time.
As Nanterme says in the video as well as the company’s announcement, promoting and growing diversity is good for his business as well as the world his 15-year-old daughter will soon inherit.
“We create an environment where our people can be successful, both professionally and personally,” he says in the latter. “Quite simply, our diversity makes Accenture stronger, smarter and more innovative.”
I’m confident the same sentiment exists at Google and Intel, and probably at many organizations soon to follow in all three companies’ footsteps.
