Call to Action: Ford
SHAREHOLDERS REQUEST that Ford Motor Company report to shareholders on the effectiveness of the Company's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The report should be done at reasonable expense, exclude proprietary information, and provide transparency on outcomes, using quantitative metrics for hiring, retention, and promotion of employees, including data by gender, race, and ethnicity.
There exists a robust link between workforce and management diversity and corporate performance. Ineffective workplace diversity and inclusion policies can entrench homogeneity, generating competitive and legal risks.
As a result, investors need quantitative, comparable data in order to understand the effectiveness of companies’ diversity and inclusion policies.
Unfortunately, Ford is lagging behind its peers with respect to such disclosures, resulting in the absence of comparable, consistent, and decision-useful data from which investors can draw meaningful conclusions. Additional disclosure is necessary.
McKinsey’s research indicates that companies with both gender and racial diversity in executive teams have an increased likelihood of above-average profitability. As it writes, “Companies in the top quartile for board-gender diversity are 27 percent more likely to outperform financially than those in the bottom quartile. Similarly, companies in the top quartile for ethnically diverse boards are 13 percent more likely to outperform than those in the bottom quartile.”
World Economic Forum research shows that companies with above-average diversity scores drive 45 percent average revenue from innovation, while companies with below-average diversity scores drive only 26 percent of average revenue from innovation.
A survey of almost 13,000 enterprises in 70 countries produced by the International Labor Organization finding that “businesses with genuine gender diversity, particularly at senior level, perform better, including seeing significant profit increases… More than 57 percent of respondents agreed that gender diversity initiatives improved business outcomes.”