Best Practices and Tools for Gender Equality

Women continually face barriers and obstacles to join and remain in the Mexican labor force. They suffer from discrimination, unconscious bias, and violence, leaving them with fewer opportunities to contribute to the formal workforce, despite often having the same skills as men. The time has come to provide opportunities for women to generate their own income on equal terms with men, as well as to redistribute household responsibilities and caretaking, which disproportionately are taken on by women.

A study from the International Labor Organization (ILO) states that women are less likely to participate in the labor market than men and are more likely to be unemployed in most parts of the world. In Mexico, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) published the update of the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE) in May 2021, reporting that the economic participation rate of women was 43.9 percent compared to 75.4 percent for men. Despite progress and commitments made to promote gender equality, a significant amount of progress needs to be made to ensure that women and men are treated equally in the workplace.

What Is the Private Sector Doing?

Gradually, the private sector has taken actions to help women reach their potential. For example, increasing access to childcare in the workplace has resulted in increased productivity and lower turnover and absenteeism rates. To encourage a more equitable distribution of household and childcare responsibilities, providing paternity leave encourages co-responsibilities between both parents and helps to reduce the gender inequality gap.  

BBVA: Diversity and Inclusion Council

Jacqueline Alvarez, secretary of the BBVA Diversity and Inclusion Council, said, “For us at BBVA Mx, supporting and promoting women is key. Diversity and inclusion are strategic levers for business transformation. That is why in September 2020, the Diversity and Inclusion Council was established; it is made up of 22 managers from different business areas and the objective of this council is to give strategy guidance and establish guidelines that promote a culture of respect for diversity, equality, non-discrimination, and labor inclusion. In 2021, women were given 39 percent of managerial promotions at BBVA. To promote inclusion, various enabling functions have been implemented, such as publishing inclusive vacancies and applying the Rooney rule, which ensures that 50 percent of women are on the finalist candidates list. We also trained our recruiting and business partner team on bias and created a diversity course for our hiring managers.

“On the other hand, we are also working to identify, prepare and develop female talent so that they have the opportunities and visibility they need, so that young and new talent can reach leadership positions within the company; this is being done by identifying potential talent through a transversal matrix tool, as well as providing mentoring programs focused on developing female talent.

“Finally, another of the initiatives that we developed in 2021 was to increase maternity and paternity leave by four weeks to be able to enjoy this great personal moment with one’s family; being an inclusive leave of absence, which considers all types of families, including those by adoption, heteroparental, homoparental and single parents. At the end of 2021, we managed to benefit more than 1,526 employees.”

Dragon Group: Growth Process for Women

Ana Paola Jimenez, director of Human Resources at Grupo Dragon, shared that they are concerned about generating value propositions for gender equality. The main inclusion initiatives that have been generated within the company are:

Greater opportunity for internal growth into managerial and leadership positions: currently 5.2 percent of women in Dragon Group occupy these positions and by late 2022 to early 2023 they want to increase that to 10 percent.

Another program being developed at non-executive level is the sharing of successful cases of growth within the company to empower and demonstrate that growth is possible and opportunities are open to all. They also join with other companies on International Women’s Day and share best practices with one another.

Luis Xavier Quijano, the general director, has a clear objective about how Dragon Group can be part of this growth process for women, which will allow them to continuously progress within the company.

Bimbo: “Circle of Leadership”

The Circle of Leadership program, designed by Grupo Bimbo, has been running since 2017, and is based on the Lean In methodology (Vayamos Adelante) developed by Sheryl Sandberg, currently the chief operating officer at Meta. This program seeks to promote mentoring and empowerment spaces for women in the company. The goal is to close gender gaps through skills development and is aimed at supervisors, junior managers and senior managers. In these leadership circles, women participate in training and discussion groups, exchange ideas and best practices, and carry out ideas and initiatives that they come up with together. Each of the participants has a managerial mentor from Grupo Bimbo; managerial mentors can be from any of the various countries where Grupo Bimbo operates. Arturo Corminas, head of the group's talent programs, tells us that since this program began, 25 mentors and 100 women have participated. In the same way, due to the positive results gained, this program has expanded to other countries where the group operates, including Argentina and Colombia.

A Tool to Help Companies Close the Gender Gap

The private sector can take advantage of existing tools and lessons learned to effectively address the gender gap in their workplaces. One such available resource is the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Gender Gap Analysis Tool, designed for the global business community to identify strengths and gaps in existing gender equality policies and practices as well as opportunities and resources for improvement. In accordance with the seven key principles established by UN Global Compact and UN Women to promote gender equality, the tool helps companies make informed decisions, set goals, and implement strategic actions.

Currently, around 3,500 companies nationwide have committed to moving forward in compliance with the Principles for the Empowerment of Women; 661 of them are Mexican.

If you would like to know more about these initiatives and tools, see the following websites:

1. BBVA Annual report page 107 https://www.bbva.mx/content/dam/public-web/mexico/documents/negocio-responsables/BBVA-IA2021_Final.pdf
2. Circle of Leadership.- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/grupobimbo_todosin-activity-6928459532721422336-QKZX/?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web
3. The Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Gender Gap Analysis Tool https://www.weps.org/about