{"id":20514,"date":"2021-08-17T17:21:59","date_gmt":"2021-08-17T21:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/company\/stories\/bloombergs-gender-equality-index-evolving-technology-to-meet-the-social-moment\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T11:21:41","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T16:21:41","slug":"bloombergs-gender-equality-index-evolving-technology-to-meet-the-social-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/company\/stories\/bloombergs-gender-equality-index-evolving-technology-to-meet-the-social-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloomberg’s Gender-Equality Index: Evolving Technology to Meet the Social Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \"Bloomberg\"Bloomberg\n
Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index logo<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n
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Rather than acting as a great equalizer, the COVID-19 pandemic has only widened the gap on existing social disparities. The effect on women in the workplace has been particularly dramatic.<\/p>\n

While women make up 39% of the global employment workforce, they have accounted for 54% of overall job losses in the past year, and their jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to the economic impact of COVID-19, according to McKinsey & Co<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since launching with an initial focus on the financial services sector<\/a> in 2016, Bloomberg\u2019s Gender-Equality Index (GEI) has evolved and expanded to become a comprehensive reporting framework for hundreds of firms globally<\/a> to voluntarily disclose their gender-related metrics on a variety of complex factors. The framework focuses on five core pillars; female leadership and talent pipeline, equal pay and gender pay parity, anti-sexual harassment policies, inclusive culture, and pro-women brand, which refers to a company\u2019s engagement with customers and the communities in which they operate.<\/p>\n

In a year when both companies and investors have sharpened their focus on ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) data, the GEI has never been more vital \u2014 or more widely participated in. In just a few years\u2019 time, the GEI has grown exponentially to include 380 companies across 11 sectors and 44 countries and regions across the globe. More broadly, more than 460 companies have voluntarily submitted their data to Bloomberg for index consideration.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n

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The companies participating in the GEI are truly international.<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n
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\u201cWe\u2019ve seen a tremendous increase in demand from the impact investment side to focus on ESG factors, and a significant shift in global assets towards impact investing,\u201d said GEI Product Manager Sabina Mehmood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe call to action from the Black Lives Matter movement made it more urgent,\u201d Mehmood added, particularly given the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on women of color in the workplace. \u201cSo how do we normalize the conversation around developing social strategies? The first step towards accountability is public reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a rapidly expanding number of participants and a broad cultural emphasis on social issues, the GEI was ready for its next phase of growth. Bloomberg\u2019s Engineering and Global Data teams have gone above and beyond in creating the Bloomberg Data Upload Portal (BDUP)<\/a>. For GEI participants, this system ensures a more seamless process for both the corporations to report their data and for the Bloomberg GEI team to analyze the information. The BDUP, which is available in 10 languages, is also enabling companies to contribute other information for use in additional Bloomberg data workflows.<\/p>\n

“A company representative visits the portal, where they sign up for an account. Once they’re approved, they can log in and see the whole survey, and can save it at any point,\u201d explains GEI data specialist Sophia Sung. \u201cOur team works closely with the companies during the GEI data submission period, and we regularly check in with them to see if they need any additional support along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previously, the GEI data collection process was done manually via Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. \u201cThat was obviously very labor intensive,\u201d said ESG Data Management Team Lead Lauren Cope. With the new data upload portal, \u201cAll of that has now been semi-automated, and we\u2019re able to tell companies ahead of time, as they\u2019re entering data, if we believe there\u2019s an error.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe comprehensive requirements of this project — from the internationalization of the UI to our need to deliver data across multiple internal systems and organizations — required our team to deploy several innovative tech stacks. For example, we were able to utilize Bloomberg Data Services (BBDS)<\/a> and our Data Technologies Pipeline (DTP) to collect all these data points in a standardized format using real-time data validations and an out-of-box event pipeline for downstream publishing,\u201d explains Shaopeng Zhang, an engineer with Bloomberg\u2019s Data Technologies team in Princeton. \u201cThis effort has made the GEI a much more robust and scalable product.\u201d<\/p>\n

For corporate participants, the portal allows them to easily save their place and come back; seek input from other team members who might have better access to certain aspects of their company\u2019s reporting data; and identify potential issues up front, with troubleshooting help from Bloomberg\u2019s Global Data team.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to make it easy to participate, easy to talk about, easy to integrate,\u201d Mehmood said. \u201cThe Bloomberg portal has been an enormous help in creating consistency. Everyone gets a status notification at every stage of the process, all our resources have been translated into 10 languages, and you can set up institutional accounts for additional users.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Under Mike Bloomberg\u2019s ethos that \u201cyou can\u2019t manage what you can\u2019t measure,\u201d the GEI portal enables a transparent, comprehensive scoring system that allows companies to track performance, benchmark themselves against peers, and identify potential areas for improvement.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \"The\"The\n
The GEI Score measures both level of disclosure of gender-related data, as well as distinguished performance via a data excellence component score. The data excellence component
\nscore is further broken down into scores for each of the GEI framework pillars, and includes corporate
\nperformance of its gender-data metrics against its industry peer group.<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n
\n \n

This scoring system gives users data that\u2019s essential both for making internal reassessments and for public-facing discussions of their company\u2019s gender parity efforts. \u201cIt arms you to go to your executive and say, \u2018We have a problem here, and this is why we should do something about it,\u2019\u201d Mehmood explained.<\/p>\n

The GEI and the data upload portal have proven to be a passion project for the Bloomberg team. \u201cIt\u2019s a tremendous internal effort,\u201d Mehmood said. \u201cTeams are excited to collaborate on it because everybody cares about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

That passion is already translating into plans for the future of the GEI and the data upload portal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe modeled it so that it works for this year with the understanding that next year, we\u2019re going to revisit the design to make it future-proof, so that every year, as we add more questions and expand the questionnaire, it\u2019s more flexible,\u201d said Technical Project Manager Yana Stoeva with Bloomberg\u2019s Global Data department\u2019s Technical Operations team.<\/p>\n

This technical flexibility sets Bloomberg up to continue fostering transparency across industries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the many social movements we saw gain momentum over the last year, we saw an increasing interest in the social aspects of ESG, and around diversity and inclusion in particular,\u201d Cope said. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping to ride that wave from a product development perspective in order to bring data for other factors to the forefront with investors, particularly around race and ethnicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cope added, \u201cIf you\u2019re already talking to an audience within a company that\u2019s responsible for D&I, they\u2019re likely to have other data as well, and we see a lot of benefit to engaging them on other topics that are front-of-mind for investors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cScaling and moving forward, gender is only the tip of the iceberg,\u201d said Mehmood.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n

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Companies that want to be considered for inclusion in the 2022 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index<\/a> can now submit their gender-related data via the Gender-Equality Index (GEI) Reporting Framework. The data submission period for consideration of inclusion in the 2022 GEI is open through September 30, 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A behind-the-scenes look at how Bloomberg’s Product, Engineering, and Global Data teams collaborated to build the Bloomberg Data Upload Portal (BDUP) to enable companies to report their data for the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":184,"featured_media":18658,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1466],"tags":[1746,49,42,1745,1471,1344,18,1500],"class_list":["post-20514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-at-bloomberg","tag-advancing-women","tag-gei","tag-gender","tag-gender-equality-index","tag-general","tag-inclusion","tag-women","tag-women-in-business"],"yoast_head":"\nBloomberg's Gender-Equality Index: Evolving Technology to Meet the Social Moment | Bloomberg LP<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Learn how Bloomberg's Product, Engineering, and Global Data teams collaborated to 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