Ethical Partners was proud to be a signatory to the Share Action letter to the UK Financial Conduct Authority regarding the Consultation Paper on Diversity and Inclusion CP23/20 in December 2023. This follows our involvement as signatories of Share Actions Good Work Investor coalition, a group of global investors representing $4.2 trillion pounds in AUM, who support good workforce practices such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, including racial equity and ethnicity pay gap reporting.
This work directly aligns with Ethical Partners longstanding inclusion of racial diversity as a focus area within our proprietary in-house EPORA ESG integration investment processes, as well as our direct and active company engagements and wider advocacy activities regarding racial diversity and inclusion.
As part of this stewardship work, Ethical Partners has been asking ASX listed companies, through our direct company engagement as well as through market wide publications such as our Ethical Standards Reports, to disclose their racial and ethnic diversity statistics for the past several years. These engagements and advocacy have also asked for companies to go well beyond disclosures to properly resource, implement and disclose their internal programs to address racial and ethnic diversity.
This focus on racial inclusion has also involved our program of active and targeted engagements with ASX listed mining companies regarding the intersections between racism, sexual harassment and bullying in our extensive program of engagements on psychological safety post the Broderick Respect at Work report.
This current advocacy on Ethnic Pay Gap reporting also closely mirrors and extends our strong engagement focus with portfolio companies throughout 2023 on their gender pay gap reporting, and their preparation for the new mandatory reporting of this in the current year. Ethical Partners will continue this monitoring and company engagement on both the disclosures, and the portfolio companies’ actions to decrease their gender pay gap throughout 2024, as well as to raise awareness of this global investor advocacy for Ethnic Pay gap reporting. We also look forward to participating in further advocacy on Racial and Ethnic Diversity reporting in the ASX listed context as well.
Please find the full letter to the UK Financial Conduct Authority, which advocates for mandatory disclosures for larger employers, including disaggregated data by ethnicity categories, in the attachment linked below.
Share Actions Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting Investor Briefing and Toolkit can also be found here; https://shareaction.org/reports/ethnicity-pay-gap-toolkit
