“Women make up 69% of our workforce and we are looking at the gender pay gap for equivalent jobs across the entire company.”
Margaret Johnston-Clarke, L’Oréal’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, also spoke at the round table on “investing from a woman’s perspective”.
How does L’Oréal avoid the bias and the glass ceiling that can hold women back from progressing in their careers?
We have been monitoring this for 20 years in all the countries where the Group operates, which allows us to pinpoint any hurdles. We have implemented concrete measures, such as analysing pay gaps, which we have been doing since 2007 in France, and for a few years globally. We have put tools in place to prevent these gaps, because, despite what we thought, there were disparities. This has enabled us to identify and rectify them. Women make up 69% of our workforce and we are of course aiming for equal pay for equivalent jobs across the entire company.
As an example, for L’Oréal in France, the median pay gap has been reduced to zero since 2019. Our efforts were recognised in 2022 by the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index (GEI), for the fifth consecutive year.
To help us measure and move forward more quickly, we also use third-party certifications such as GEEIS and EDGE. L’Oréal head office and our subsidiaries in more than 30 countries work with these organisations. This lets us establish a roadmap to target any inequalities between women and men.
Currently, women account for almost 60% of our global brand directors, around 49% of our expatriate executives and more than 55% of our key positions around the world.
