Launching Denmark's first Diversity Barometer with EQUALIS
When it comes to discussing diversity and inclusion in business, the conversation is sometimes challenged by the lack of a shared common understanding of what D&I actually means.
Disparate datapoints mean it can be hard for us to gain an overview of where things are at – some will focus on differences in the amount of parental leave taken by male and female employees; others will look at the gender pay gap; others still will hone in on inequalities in career progression. All are important aspects – but these attributes alone don’t give us the full picture. To overcome these issues and ensure a common knowledge base from which we can discuss problems and solutions, the think tank EQUALIS decided to collate all the relevant dimensions relating to diversity and inclusion in the Danish labour market in just one tool. This work gave rise to the Diversity Barometer, allowing us to understand on which metrics organisations are doing well, and where improvement is needed.
Pulling in data from three million people, the barometer charts the employment inequalities between men and women in Denmark. The first of its kind, the barometer was the brainchild of gender equality think tank EQUALIS, which wanted to both benchmark where the country was at and monitor progress when it came to equity in the workplace.
EQUALIS teamed up with Deloitte Denmark and some of the country’s leading gender researchers, and we were part of the official launch on 8 February 2023, held at the University of Copenhagen.
What does the barometer say?
The Diversity Barometer monitors the degree of gender equality based on 22 diversity indicators across five key themes: career and education; working environment; labour market attachment; responsibility and management; and income and assets.
Deloitte Denmark's team of economists and statisticians then used technical calculations to give each theme a score between minus five and five, showing the level of under- or overrepresentation, and in so doing creating a comprehensive barometer.
And the results were unexpected: across all five dimensions, there are remarkable challenges related to diversity and inclusion in the Danish labour market.
The barometer shows that women are more likely to care for children than men and struggle more with stress and illness. Meanwhile, men are far more represented in management roles and academia, while a man's net worth is significantly higher than a woman's. And, after just the first year of work, men’s earnings start to increase faster than those of women.
These challenges are formidable. But having the Diversity Barometer now means that the Danish society as well as individual organisations have a solid data-driven foundation which will allow them to make efforts in areas where focus is needed, with the bonus that it is easy to measure progress in relation to the benchmark proved by this year’s barometer insights.
EQUALIS aims to issue an updated version of the barometer annually, and in Deloitte Denmark, we will be supporting them in this work as a partner all the way. There is an ambition to expand the tool by adding further dimensions, such as ethnicity, as well as company-level data, such as geography, company size and industries, to the barometer by 2024.
Source: The Diversity Barometer
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