With the assistance of a new effort, organizations in Hong Kong and Asia will now be able to track their progress in implementing policies that promote women’s equality in the workplace.
The Women Workplace Index (WWI) launched earlier this week, making it the first of its type in Asia. The WWI will gather information from businesses on policies and procedures such as those prohibiting sexual harassment, maternity leave, and equal pay in an effort to create the largest database of such disclosures that is available to the general public. They will achieve this by employing a survey that they created in accordance with standards, including listing guidelines and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
In addition to serving as an accreditation scheme, the index would make the data freely accessible online and certify organizations according to the level of their disclosures.
The founder and CEO of WWI, Nicole Yuen, stated, “It’s not just about representation in management,” listing ongoing challenges such as sexual harassment, unconscious prejudices, caregiving obligations, and a lack of flexible work schedules.
“Workplaces that are friendly to women juggling work and caregiving duties are still not well developed.”
Some companies frequently restrict their monitoring of policies to tallying the number of women serving on boards and in the C-suite, as part of a larger corporate or environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework.
Yuen, who created WWI to assess gender diversity and the scope of organizations’ underlying policy, believes that doing so would be “too simplistic.” According to her, emphasizing disclosures encourages firms to share best practices and aids job searchers in making more informed decisions, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
According to Professor Virginia Harper Ho, a law professor at City University of Hong Kong who specializes in corporate governance and sustainability, WWI may provide value by enabling anyone to “access a consolidated pool of information that is all in one place, or that might not otherwise be public.”
