Become a change maker with UN Women’s Principles for Empowerment (WEP)
- Dec 10, 2024
- 4 min read
On Tuesday November 12th the professional network, The Gallery Seoul, had a special session in partnership with Hyundai Motor Company learning about the UN Women’s Principles for Empowerment (WEP). To set the scene, the event started with the welcoming speech of Haein Kim, Chief HR Officer of Hyundai Motor Company, sharing the company’s initiatives to promote diversity and advance gender equality within Hyundai Motor’s global network. After this Ahjung Lee, External Relations Specialist from UN Women, gave an inspirational speech about the principles, why they are important and how they can be applied.
Diversity in the workplace is by now a recognised agenda. Thus, it is something most modern leaders will be conscious about. However, it can also be a difficult and sensitive topic to approach. How do we start working with this? Or how do we align the many different local initiatives under one framework?
The Women’s Empowerment Principles offers an easy framework to start working more strategically within the diversity agenda, and to date, more than 10.000 companies worldwide form a global network intent on unlocking resources and knowledge sharing to work with the principles. This is why the event was relevant, expanding the toolbox of the Gallery’s members and the leaders at Hyundai Motors. After the workshop Hyundai Motor Company announced they were to join the WEP as an official partner leading the way for other Korean companies Read more here.
This article will briefly share The Gallery’s perspective on what WEP is and how you can start an important conversation in your organisation on possibly taking them onboard.
What are the WEP?
The principles were established by UN Women and UN Global Compact, the WEPs are a set of principles offering guidance to businesses on how to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace and community. Working with the principles functions as a multiplier for action and progress.
The foundation for the principles are that people (and organisations) need knowledge and necessary tools to become a change maker and with WEP, UN Women will provide just that.
Further, an important point in working with diversity is there will always be a difference in perception. This makes it particularly difficult as we might not be seeing the same world even though we are talking about the same topic. This requires a new form of conversation in many different layers of the organisation. WEP will help you with this 360 degrees perspective on your organisation. At the same time WEP leaves room for local solutions within a global strategy.
The seven principles look like this:
In the interests of brevity we will not discuss the principles in detail here but they are explained very well on the website and can be further explored in partnership with UN Women. However a quick scanning list developed by UN Women Centre of Excellence in Seoul can help you start the conversation and ask questions of your organization:
The company has a strategy or plan to integrate the values of gender equality and women’s empowerment into its vision, plans and organizational culture, supported by leadership commitment
The company has specific measures to ensure that all women and men are treated equally in its HR practices (i.e. recruitment, performance evaluation, wages, compensation etc.)
The company has mechanisms to periodically monitor and discuss whether the ratio of employees being promoted or leaving the company is skewed toward a certain gender
The company has policies or programs in place for supporting employees who are parents or caregivers, as necessitated through their life-cycle
The company has internal policies and procedures to prevent and respond to all forms of violence and sexual harassment in the workplace
The company undertakes internal activities to promote employees understanding of gender equality and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
In the process of product/service development and supply chain management, the company considers the needs and representation of women, and strives to avoid reproducing negative gender stereotypes in their marketing/PR materials and strategies
The company seeks to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in the community through its CSR, donation, and/or partnership activities
The company has a mechanism in place to monitor, share and refine implementation of the measures #1-8, at least once a year
You are to answer “yes”, “no” or “not sure” to these, giving you an idea of whether more could be done and it is perhaps clear that leadership commitment both internally and publicly is key. This is a standard the organisation can be held to by partners, customers, employees, press and investors.
During the workshop many concrete and inspiring examples were shared on bringing the principles to life in different industries, company sizes and countries. This varied from having a neutral interviewer in all recruiting panels, shifting the procedure of asking for paternity leave, making remote work possible for pre-school parents etc. Many of them are minor changes but have great impact. And that is the beauty of working with WEP: getting access to all this knowledge and ideas combined with a conversation framework for your organisation will unlock where you as a leader could make similar changes and explore what happens. Step one is understanding where the knots are hidden in your organisation and then start working together on relieving them.
As the diversity agenda becomes more nuanced to not only focus on women, we are convinced the conversation and the tools easily could be translated into other groups within the workplace and as such help you with your broader diversity agenda. The questions you should ask yourself will be the same.
We hope this awakens a curiosity for you to learn more about WEP and maybe even start the conversation at your organisation. When you do remember the difference in perspective, biases are often hidden, thus if you don’t think you need it - you probably do…
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Read more about WEP here: https://www.weps.org/
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