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General Motors Ranked Top Company Globally For Gender Equality

When Mary Barra took the reigns as CEO of General Motors, she ignited a cultural shift at the automaker. Years later, her work has been recognized. GM was named the number one company in the world for gender equality.

The report comes from Equileap, based in London, England, and Amsterdam. The company, formed in 2016, looks at a variety of criteria when producing its top companies. This year, GM bumped cosmetics maker L’Oreal from the top spot.

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“We have seen organizations making great strides toward improved gender equality in the past 12 months,” said Equileap CEO Diana van Maasdijk. She added the companies named in the study are still an exception to the norm. “There is a long way to go until we reach the goal of true global equality in the workplace for everyone,” she added.

Equileap looked at 3,000 companies based in 23 companies to compile its rankings. With 19 criteria, the firm began sorting through the thousands of companies. Criteria included equal pay, work flexibility, gender equality in leadership, policies promoting gender equality and commitment, transparency, and accountability.

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GM topped the list and criteria because of its equal split in the boardroom. Of the largest 20 companies in the United States, GM is the only company that has both a female CEO and and an equal number of men and women on its board of directors. However, this past June, GM added Devin Wenig, president and CEO of eBay, to the board, which turned the split to 6 men and 5 women. The move was completed after the study, however.

The automaker has also named Dhivya Suryadevara as its next CFO, which the firm also said was a positive step in gender equality.

Additionally, GM was one of only two companies globally that has pay equality in the top, middle and lower employment bands. The firm found no evidence of a gender pay gap across the company. GM also offers flexible work locations and has put new measures in place to protect women from sexual harassment in the workplace.

Former GM Authority staff writer.

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Comments

  1. Great work, GM, Great work, Ms Barra. Ms Barra ranks as the first and only CEO to come from HR who actually used HR properly.

    For the bloviated folks out there (and yes, I mean bloviated women as well, like you Hillary, famous for employing only men in your upper campaign team, as Donna Brazile wrote in her analysis of Hillary’s campaign), forget your rants that are fomenting in your heads right now, and instead do some research. Look up the profitability record and the safety record of GM since Barra’s appointment. Then, look at Corvette development (through C7 to C8), Silverado development (which has beaten the F150 thoroughly for years now), her drive to get Cadillac out of its Livery no matter what the reactionaries say. These examples show Barra’s work is as good for men as it is for women. It’s been great work, period.

    And more than anything else, Barra’s work, and the work of every GM employee since her appointment, has been the best GM has had to show for 50 years at the very least. She ranks easily alongside Durant and Sloan.

    Make America Great Again? Yes! Thanks Mary Barra, thanks all the employees of GM, women and men together.

    Reply
  2. I think you could have praised Barra without cutting down Hillary. There are lots of great women out there succeeding in what has been mostly a man’s world.

    Reply
    1. Uh huh, no thanks to Hillary. Read Brazile’s book. Hillary’s campaign “deciders”, the folks who made the policy decisions, were all men. Hypocrisy, massively, and it’s what lost 2016 to the freakshow.

      Reply

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