THE ROADMAP TO PURSUE GENDER EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Introduction

The Blueprint is a comprehensive, actionable roadmap designed to guide and assist organizations looking to improve workplace gender equality.

By using the Blueprint with guidance from the Roadmap, the private sector can achieve gender equality leadership.

Gender Equality Leadership: A workplace with gender equality at its core is inclusive, empowering, guarantees safety, wellbeing, and equality of opportunity, while ensuring that all employees are respected and valued.

A Roadmap for Gender Equality: Gender equality in the workplace can only be achieved when bold and visible leadership ensures an inclusive environment, documented by transparent and effective accountability measures. All three cornerstones – Leadership, Inclusion, and Transparency and Accountability – must exist and function together to support progressive action and ensure a workplace with gender equality at its core.

What Is the Blueprint?

The Blueprint for Gender Equality Leadership in the Canadian Private Sector is a comprehensive, actionable roadmap designed to guide and assist organizations and individuals that are looking to improve workplace gender equality, and to help those that want to acquire more information on the subject.

Embarking on a mission to improve gender equality can be overwhelming because inequality is a systemic issue encompassed within and impacted by all facets of a workplace. Every organization must start somewhere but identifying where to begin or how to go about it can be challenging. At the same time, organizations already pursuing gender equality can become complacent and risk overlooking specific areas where they are not making progress.

The Blueprint has been devised to reflect the fact that progress on different attributes will likely be uneven, but there are a number of ways – at the system and activity levels – in which organizations can speed up progress. To support the implementation of the Blueprint, a Maturity Model assessment tool has been created to help organizations identify opportunities for improvement, in addition to a collection of third-party resources that can help organizations further advance their efforts on specific attributes. In order to take full advantage of these tools, an organization must first recognize that the road to achieving gender equality takes time and bold action.

What Are the Advantages of Using the Blueprint?

Utilizing the Blueprint to accelerate gender equality progress in the workplace can provide organizations with the following benefits:

Gain greater organization-wide awareness about the ways gender inequality negatively impacts all individuals and solutions to address the issues
Obtain practical understanding of actions that Canadian companies have implemented to advance gender equality in their workplaces
Identify areas for improvement and corresponding ways to drive change
Increase knowledge of practices for collecting, measuring, evaluating, and reporting on gender equality data
Facilitate the creation and implementation of a gender equality strategy with practices and systems that ensure transparency and accountability
Create a corporate culture of inclusion where all individuals feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work

Who Is the Blueprint for?

The Blueprint has been created to appeal to all workplaces and workers in Canada’s private sector. Any organization should be able to find value in using these tools, no matter its size, industry, lifespan, business segments, staff location, type of workers retained, or how far advanced it is when it comes to achieving gender equality.

To support its usability, the Blueprint contains information that speaks directly to executive and senior leaders, middle management, different departments (e.g. human resources, legal, marketing, supply chain) and functions (e.g. hiring teams, occupational health and safety teams), those already engaged in gender equality initiatives, and those looking to learn more.

Since the Blueprint was developed to include wide-ranging information that would be relevant to many organizations, not everyone will find the same information applicable to their workplace to the same degree. Additionally, not every organization will have the same resources at their disposal. No gender equality journey takes the same shape and it can be tackled based on available resources; however, the cornerstones on which the Blueprint was developed – leadership, inclusion, and transparency and accountability – apply to all workplaces.

How to Use the Blueprint?

The Blueprint’s structure is governed by the three cornerstones of gender equality in the workplace – leadership, inclusion, and transparency and accountability.

These cornerstones include further segmentation by attributes and each attribute within the Roadmap follows a consistent structure:

Opening: General information on the subject and Canada-specific data or legislation.
Success Factors: Data-driven key actions that an organization must take in order to improve gender equality within the specific attribute. The success factors will also lay the foundation for effective further action when combined with the recommendations.
Recommendations: Actions based on evidence from frequently seen best practices that an organization should implement after addressing the success factors. Certain recommendations might be more relevant than others to your organization’s specific business activities.
Good Practices: Examples from the project’s participating companies or gender equality leaders that demonstrate effective policies, practices, and initiatives to advance gender equality.
Assessment Questions: Checklist questions to assess an organization’s status and progress related to a specific attribute. These questions comprise the basis of the Maturity Model.
Resource Table: Relevant third-party resources on a specific attribute. The tables include information about the type of source, its target area and audience, and a brief explanation of its purpose. The tables directly connect to the annotated resources at the end of the Blueprint.

The Blueprint, Maturity Model, and resources are intended for coordinated, cyclical use. Used together, these tools can guide and support the implementation and evaluation of a sustainable strategy that successfully advances gender equality in the workplace. Here is a quick overview of their intended use:

Consult the Blueprint, focusing on the Roadmap, first and foremost. It will provide a thorough overview of the cornerstones and different attributes that can impact gender equality in the workplace.
Once you have read the Blueprint, complete the Maturity Model questionnaire to assess your organization’s status in the Blueprint’s different attributes. Results will be visually displayed and can help you identify areas of improvement or success.
Once you have the Maturity Model results, revisit the Blueprint and utilize the resources to address gaps. The resources have been compiled from third parties and provide detailed information on how to improve performance on specific attributes.
Return to the Blueprint and Maturity Model to continue learning and retest progress as necessary.

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