Equality Check: A platform aiming to accelerate gender equality at work
Women have long faced barriers in the workplace, as they fought for equality with their male colleagues. Those battles continue as women demand equal pay and representation at the highest levels. Equality Check platform aims to help companies close this gender gap.
Despite efforts to improve gender equality in the workplace, women still earn considerably less than their male counterparts and remain under-represented at senior level positions.
Indeed, the global pay gap between the sexes stood at 50% in 2020, according to the World Economic Forum. WEF estimates that with the current rate of progress, it will take 99.5 years to close the global gender gap.
Yet improving workplace equality also has its benefits for employers. McKinsey & Company’s Delivering Through Diversity report, for instance, found that companies with the strongest rates of gender diversity on their executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform on profitability and 27% more likely to have stronger value creation.
What is Equality Check and how it works
Aiming to accelerate equality in the workplace and close the gender pay gap, Isabelle Ringnes and Marie Sunde founded in 2018 Equality Check, a digital platform that allows employees to write anonymous reviews about their current or previous employers.
Like Glassdoor, the platform allows any employee to write a review about the company they work or have worked for by answering questions relating to work-life balance, discrimination, support from management and salaries. But unlike Glassdoor, the emphasis is very firmly on gender equality and diversity.
“By using Equality Check you are helping other people avoid pitfalls and showcase the workplaces that are truly wonderful places to work,” the Oslo-headquartered startup says in its website.
In an interview with Forbes back in 2019, Ringnes had said that “the world today is more transparent”. “People expect more information on issues such as diversity and equality in the workplace. Our platform provides an opportunity to see what employees are saying about the companies they work for.”
How can employers benefit?
Besides employees, who get inside information about companies that they’re interested in working for, employers can also benefit from becoming aware of how their employees feel about their workplace culture and act on improving diversity and inclusion.
Indeed, Equality Check provides employers with a means to assess their own progress in terms of promoting and maintaining progressive gender equality policies. The data crunched by the Equality Check platform can identify problem areas down to the level of teams within each organisation.
Founders argue that those who score well are rewarded by having a platform to attract the best talent from a diverse candidate pool. And taking a step further, the company has created tools to support employers who want to improve.
The challenge is to prove the utility of the platform to businesses that are open to improving their practices.
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