Anglo American leads the UK business community in promoting gender equality
01 May, 2012
Anglo American is the first company to commit to the United Nations Women/United Nations Global Compact Women’s Empowerment Principles at the UK launch, and has strengthened its resolve to increase gender diversity across its international operations and in its host communities.
Launched in the UK market yesterday evening, by the United Nations National Committee (UK), the Women’s Empowerment Principles are designed to help companies promote gender equality in the workplace and in the wider community.
The Principles are the result of a United Nations Women/United Nations Global Compact partnership, and provide companies with the guidelines to build new, or refine existing, policies and practices to redress gender imbalances in their workplaces and in their immediate communities. The seven Principles cover the importance of high-level, visible leadership; of using your core business to empower women in the community; to the critical role of monitoring and publicly reporting the progress to realise a more gender balanced workplace.
Cynthia Carroll, Chief Executive of Anglo American, who presented at the launch event, commented: "Anglo American is proud to become a signatory of the Women's Empowerment Principles and we are committed to using this framework to improve our existing diversity initiatives. We hope that by taking the lead, as being the first company to sign up to the Principles at the UK launch, we can encourage other companies to follow."
"Empowering women at all levels of society can improve health and education, raise family income, stimulate growth and lift communities out of poverty. Meaningful progress, however, can only be achieved through the combination of corporate leadership and a deliberate framework and, of course, well considered practical initiatives.
"In our industry, the mining industry, the female participation rate continues to be extremely low – we see significant room for improvement. We have been focussed on redressing this imbalance at our own operations, in our corporate offices, and across the broader mining sector. We have seen the percentage of women in our workforce steadily rise and today 15% of our overall workforce are women, up from 13% in 2009 and 22% of managers are women, up from 9% in 2006. At the Board level, we have also committed to increasing the representation of women, from 20% to 30%, by 2013."
"We look forward to our partnership with UN Women and to working with other international companies to develop the best approaches to tackle gender equality, and to delivering tangible results in this area," Ms Carroll added.