Catalyzing

For the past three years, Viveca Fairbanks-Henderson, Senior Director, Energy Optimization & Start-up Management, has slowly shared her career aspirations with her mentor, Alistair Hirst, Senior Vice President, Global Supply Chain. Their relationship began as part of the Kellogg Executive Cross-Cultural Mentoring Program (KECCMP), an initiative aimed at improving retention and further diversifying the company’s talent pipeline and just one of many programs instituted by Kellogg as part of its ongoing commitment to creating and sustaining an environment of inclusivity.

Genpact President and CEO NV “Tiger” Tyagarajan firmly believes a couple of things when it comes to gender diversity in a corporate setting. First, that diversity is a “secret sauce” in terms of adding value at all levels of an organization, and second, that it is the responsibility of a company’s senior leaders to champion diversity efforts. At Genpact, Tyagarajan has done just that, driving a suite of progressive practices and programs with the goal of achieving gender diversity, which Genpact defines simply as a workforce of 50% women. The company’s flagship program, Career 2.0—focused on recruiting and retaining mid-level women who have taken a career break—is among the most innovative. On being a champion for gender diversity, Tyagarajan had this to say: 

Avon is known as “the company for women,” and to this 131-year-old organization, it’s more than a slogan. Avon—which built its brand by giving women the opportunity to succeed on their own terms—today boasts a global workforce comprising 60% women. But even it is not immune to one of the most common corporate gender balance problems: a smaller proportion of women at the senior leadership level. While globally women constitute 41% of the director and above population, a position many organizations would envy, Avon is committed to raising the bar, most notably in its Latin American region where the decline in representation of women at the leadership level is steeper.

In 2017, Sodexo—provider of quality-of-life services to more than 75 million customers in 80 countries—set the ambitious goal of having 40% women at its senior leadership level by 2025. Choosing that particular target was no accident. It was influenced by a gender-balance study Sodexo conducted in 2014 among 50,000 managers across 100 entities.