Gender IDEAL Research Report Appendix: Using Data to Advance Workplace Norms on Gender
1. Assessment Methodology and Scoring
a. Gender IDEAL Platform Tools
Our platform is built around the Gender IDEAL Assessment - a comprehensive framework that covers eight topics related to gender equitable workplace practices, policies and perceptions. Data collected via the Gender IDEAL Assessment are used in benchmarking reports for workplaces and for research focused on advancing progress on gender equity.
For workplaces, the Gender IDEAL Platform helps advance toward the Gender IDEAL Goals through a 3-step, repeatable process.
These steps are:
All workplaces can pursue these three steps by leveraging the tools we’ve made publicly available on our platform.
a. Gender IDEAL Assessment
The assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of the factors that third-party research indicates will generate positive long-term outcomes on gender equity, equality and leadership opportunities. The assessment establishes a best-in-class standard and is intentionally aspirational; this is not a compliance or minimum-performance oriented framework. It is tailored depending on a workplace’s size, worker status and maturity. An organization typically sees approximately 125 questions divided across eight Topic Areas.
Assessment data covers demographic and employee metrics, performance targets and metrics, and questions about policies. As much as possible, topics are evaluated by considering inputs → policies/actions/activities → outputs that will inform longer-term outcomes. Question are intended to evaluate how a workplace is focused on eliminating bias, including unconscious bias (raising awareness of individuals' biases), behavioral inclusion (how to mitigate unconscious bias through behavior shifting, particularly as it relates to interviews, mentoring, performance management), and structural bias (reshaping structures and processes to eliminate bias).
Topics Areas:
Why They Matter
Vision & Commitment
A clear commitment and vision - articulated, affirmed and continuously reinforced by C-Suite leadership at an organization - is one of the most important indicators of an organization's success on its journey toward becoming a more equitable workplace. This section evaluates the clarity and depth of commitment and vision within an organization.
Leadership Demographics
Leadership equality is measured by the diversity of workers across all levels of the organization and its governance team. This section measures current progress on gender-equity - considering race, ability and orientation- across a whole organization, including management, senior leadership and boards. It also evaluates whether gender composition reflects the community in which it is based and whether and what targets for future improvement have been established.
Recruitment, Promotion & Pipeline
Rooting out pipeline and promotion bias around gender equity is critical. This section evaluates whether best practices are being applied regarding hiring and promotion system and trainings, performance review best practices, pipeline cultivation, and establishing targets in workforce training.
Compensation
& Pay Equity
Pay equity and evaluation of workers' whole compensation packages is one of the most measurable and impactful aspects of gender inequality. This section evaluates whether a Pay Equity study has been conducted, the thoroughness of the study, the results of the study, and how improvements will be measured and reported.
Benefits & Policies
Policies and benefits that have a focus on ensuring equity for all genders can ensure that all workers are supported throughout their careers. Benefits and policies evaluated here cover reproductive health, paid-leave, flexible work schedules, child-care options, sexual harassment policies and complaint policies and protections.
Inclusion, Training, Culture & Community
Workplace climate sets an important tone regarding whether and how an organization values gender equity. This section evaluates how an organization proactively seeks feedback from workers, how it establishes norms and expectations from and for all employees through a variety of programs and training.
Customers, Contractor & Suppliers
Considering gender in the design and marketing of products and services can have a big impact on consumers. Policies and standards about gender equity can impact supply chains. This section focuses on gender in product and service design, marketing, contract labor and supply chain management.
Legal Compliance
In addition to the data, practices and policies captured above, this section ensures a workplace is compliant with labor laws that have an impact on gender. In addition, information regarding current or recent litigation is captured.
b. Gender IDEAL Assessment Development
The assessment is designed to help workplaces achieve the long-term vision of the Gender IDEAL goals. The assessment is designed to be:
Educational
As a free publicly-available tool, the assessment can be used by any workplace as a simple diagnostic and resource hub. For each topic area, we have identified relevant resources to support understanding of the issue and to start action steps towards improving assessment scores, including relevant research, practitioner examples and case studies to enable workplaces to understand why each of these practices and metrics matter and to gain insight into how they might integrate them into their own organization. The assessment is typically completed by someone who sits in a Human Resources/People/ Diversity & Inclusion role, though results should be shared with the whole organization.
Comprehensive
The Gender IDEAL assessment is a holistic evaluation of the factors that determine positive long-term outcomes on gender equity, equality and leadership opportunities. Equity focuses on ensuring a level-playing field and access, equality ensures fairness and fair treatment of employees and opportunity focuses on the ability to advance.
Tailored
The assessment is customized based on a workplace’s size (measured by number of workers and full-time equivalents), worker status (salary, hourly or both), and maturity (years in operation, a proxy of cultural development and entrenchment). These criteria inform which individual questions a company will see. Specific responses to questions also impact what additional questions are seen. For example, if a company has not performed a compensation/pay equity analysis, subsequent questions evaluating the scope of analysis and results of analysis will not appear.
The current version of the assessment is designed for organizations that are based in the United States. Sector-specific content and additional geographies will be added to future versions of the assessment. While all pilot companies completed the same version of the assessment and manually inputted their data, our goal is to build a flexible data platform that provides a seamless user experience, capturing and verifying data through multiple sources including HR management systems and from publicly available information.
Aspirational
The Gender IDEAL Assessment covers topics and individual policies, practices and data that map directly to the vision articulated by the Gender IDEAL goals.
The assessment is deliberately aspirational, designed to identify a range of actionable improvements through both absolute performance and comparative benchmark data. Only a few workplaces perform well across all Topic Areas and many organizations respond No or N/A to number of questions. Our goal is to engage all workplaces to consider and implement changes - big and small - with the acknowledgement that there is always a possibility for continuous improvement on the journey toward being Gender IDEAL.
Informed by best-in-class practitioner and academic-led research
The Gender IDEAL Assessment was developed using a research-focused, multi-stakeholder process. The Gender IDEAL team relied on evidenced-based research to distill learnings on key activities, policies, behaviors that have had a demonstrated positive impact on organizations’ equity and equality work. Distilling this research created the framework for the Gender IDEAL assessment and informed the topics, key practices and individual questions that are included.
We have mapped the Gender IDEAL Assessment to current frameworks including the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles, Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index, HRC Corporate Equality Index, Equileap’s Framework, the Edge Certification process and B Lab’s SDG Action Manager for SDG5. Mappings indicated alignment in approach and topics covered, though the Gender IDEAL Assessment focuses on practices that can impact workplace culture more than other frameworks.
The assessment was designed with input from the following content experts:
Lori Mackenzie [Stanford VMWare Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab]
Alicia Agnew, HR Director [The Cru]
Jennifer McKaig, I&D Consultant
Dorothy Kalksma, I&D Consultant
Chiara Condi, I&D Consultant
Hensley Evans [ZS Associates]
Dan Osusky and Courtney Morrisette [B Lab]
Jessica MacFarlane, Aya Taveras, and Rebecca Willett [Perceptions Institute]
We are grateful for the time and expertise this esteemed group contributed to this project.
Evolves over time
Our goal is to maintain consistency of data for benchmarking and research purposes while ensuring the standards evolve based on new research and user feedback. The assessment framework will be updated annually to integrate feedback from experts, feedback from companies that take the assessment, and what the data itself shows. For example, if a significant majority of organizations answer a question in the affirmative, we will re-evaluate whether that question should remain or whether a more nuanced or advanced framing of that question should be used instead.
Data Verification
During the pilot study, there was no independent verification of data. Workplaces were asked to complete the assessment based on the best available data they had and to skip questions for which they did not have accurate responses. Going forward, data verification will be integrated into the process. Verification can include a review with the assessment-taker and written affirmation of accuracy of responses provided via partnership with third-party verifiers.
Longitudinal Data
Organizations are encouraged to update their Gender IDEAL Assessment on an annual basis but can choose the exact timeline for providing updated performance data. When a workplace provides updated information, their historic data will be used to measure performance changes over time. Longitudinal data will also help to inform Gender IDEAL’s stepped-approach methodology of sequencing recommended actions as our understanding of what changes to prioritize becomes more sophisticated by performance data over time.
c. Scoring Methodology
The Gender IDEAL Assessment is scored out of 100 possible points. Points are allocated across Topic Areas as shown in the table below. These weightings were determined based on relative significance of each topic covered - as informed by evidence-based research - and length and breadth of practices included in each Topic Area. Weightings by Topic Area are consistent across all versions of the assessment.
Topics
Weighting
Vision & Commitment = 10
Leadership Demographics = 7.5
Recruitment, Promotion and Pipeline = 15
Compensation & Pay Equity = 15
Benefits & Policies = 20
Inclusion, Training, Culture & Community = 20
Customers, Contractor & Suppliers = 10
Legal Compliance = 2.5
Total = 100
Within a Topic Area, each question is assigned a percentage of the total possible points for that Topic. The sum of all weighted questions in a Topic Area is 100%. Some questions are unweighted if they collect numeric data or were included for research purposes.
For each weighted question, answer options were assigned a percentage of credit value. Yes /No answers have a 100% /0% scoring rubric, single-pick questions have percentages assigned based on the relative complexity of the response options and multi-pick questions have response percentages that can be summed to earn full-credit for the question.
Pilot companies’ performance was weighted using the same scoring structure because they completed the same version of the assessment. As customized assessments (based on size, status and maturity) are launched, question-level weightings will differ depending on the version of the assessment completed.
While a score of 100 is achievable, the Gender IDEAL Assessment is intended to be an aspirational vision for gender equity. Relative performance against benchmark peers provides insight on current performance; pilot organizations scores ranged from ten to 50.
The scoring methodology will be updated through the same process and on the same timeline as the assessment standards. Our goal is to maintain scoring consistency and comparability across Topic Areas as updated versions of the Assessment are released.
d. Benchmark Methodology
Using comparative performance informed by benchmarking against peer groups allows for recognition of strengths and a deeper understanding of which improvements should be prioritized. As our data universe grows, we will provide highly-segmented benchmarks for the most relevant comparison groups. Benchmarks can be segmented based on industry (based on NAICS code classification), organization size (number of employees), geography (region, state and city), workforce type (majority salaried workers, majority hourly workers, or split), and organization maturity (years of operation since incorporation).
Based on the sample size of our research pilot - 24 organizations - we have created four industry benchmark groups. The four benchmarks include:
A general benchmark - All pilot organizations included in this benchmark, so the sample size is 24. This benchmark was also applied in Benchmark & Recommendation Reports for organizations that were not in an industry group.
Technology - Eight (8) organizations were included in the technology benchmark. Workplaces represented a number of sub-sectors, including fin-tech and software.
Financial Services - Seven (7) organizations were included in the financial services benchmark. Those workplaces represented private-equity, venture capital and financial advisory services.
Non-profit - Five (5) organizations were included in the non-profit benchmark. Those workplaces represented a diverse range of social-sector organizations with some focusing on local community impact and others having a global-service footprint.
When an organization has updated their assessment, their prior data is retired from the benchmark dataset and replaced with the new results. Benchmarks can include data from any organization that has completed the assessment in the past three years; after three years if no updated assessment has been submitted, a company’s data is retired and removed from all benchmarks.
Benchmark scores segmented by Industry, a full copy of the assessment and Recommendations can be downloaded in a .pdf of the Appendix