Set Public Goals

Unilever announced in March 2020 that it had met its global goal of reaching gender parity, or a 50-50 split, in its managerial roles. Unilever set the goal in 2010, when the representation of women was 38%. In addition to company-wide public goals, Unilever sets more granular internal goals for every market and function, which are reviewed and tracked by the Unilever Leadership Executive every month and reported to the Global Diversity Board three times a year. Presenting such actionable information to leaders helped to improve awareness of DEI and spark more thoughtful decision-making around hiring, promotion, and retention.¹

The Gender Proportionality Aspiration (GPA) is an ambitious policy that allows tech companies to introduce an outcome goal of reaching gender proportionality at all levels in five years. While this goal is not a number, it is a very specific target to increase gender balance in tech.

The GPA¹ stipulates the ratio of women to men at any level in a company should be at least proportionate to the ratio of women to men in the level below.

The GPA directs companies to use all means at their disposal – promotion, external hiring, internal (lateral) hiring, and retention – to reach this goal for all levels. We expect that an industry-wide commitment to the GPA will substantially help diversify the tech sector.²

Why GPA?

• Intentionally gender-neutral. It reinforces the message that DEI is for everyone. Regardless of which gender is the majority, it encourages leaders to move toward gender balance.
• Minimizes legal risk. Goals are not focused on women.
• Holistic approach to attracting, promoting, and retaining talent. Instead of just focusing on hiring and the pipeline problem, it incentivizes development of in-house talent.
• Simple concept. People are more likely to change their behavior when it is made easy, attractive, social, and timely (EAST). GPA is simple to grasp and easy to implement and track because it relies on a simple count of the fraction of women and men at each level.
• Setting a company-wide, collective goal is an important step forward. Social norms are a powerful driver of behavioral change.
• It meets leaders and teams where they are, and bases goals on current status. Indeed, some might argue GPA is too gradual in its approach, but the model highlights the huge strides that can be made using this approach over a five-year period.

The five-year GPA should be viewed as a first step. As progress is made and women’s representation numbers increase, the initial goal should be updated and/or expanded. Future DEI efforts must build on this initial goal while continuing to raise the bar so that all teams always have something challenging, specific, yet realistic to work toward. The scientific evidence is clear that feedback, monitoring and public accountability are key ingredients of goal attainment.