Gender Balance: our key to success

At Sodexo, we remain strongly committed to advancing gender equality. As a world leader in Quality of Life services, we foster an open, inclusive culture where everyone can thrive. Our global gender balance strategy is a key driver in ensuring that both women and men have equal access to growth and opportunities in our workplace. And we are investing in a number of initiatives to accelerate the advancement of women and spark progress towards gender equality globally. Why? Because when women are empowered, we’re all empowered. And achieving gender equality drives our performance and is critical to reaching a Better Tomorrow for our employees, our clients and consumers, and the communities we serve.

At Sodexo, we carry out a wide range of initiatives to achieve our commitments:  

Sodexo is committed to building a better tomorrow for everyone, which is why we developed the Better Tomorrow 2025 commitments. One of the three focus areas of Better Tomorrow is gender equality. Our research shows that gender balanced teams perform better, and so we are working to have women represent at least 40 percent of our leaders by 2025. This important goal won’t be met overnight, so we have established a gender strategy to help us to do this.

SoTogether, the advisory board for gender equality

The cornerstone of Sodexo’s gender strategy is SoTogether (formerly SWIFt), an advisory board dedicated to promoting women's advancement. The advisory board is made up of 28 women and 7 men from 17 nationalities who are dedicated to ensuring better gender balance at all levels of the organisation. Its objectives are clear:

1. Reach 40% women among Senior Leaders by 2025

2. Increase the number of women in talent pipeline

3. Increase the gender balance in management teams

4. Increase the number of women in operations

5. Create a culture of inclusion
    

We're making every day International Women's Day

Can you imagine that it will take 217 years to achieve gender equality in the world? 217 years...

This is what the World Economic Forum forecasts. And data shows that the gender gap is widening every day.

At Sodexo, we can do better. We can improve Quality of Life for everyone, faster, because empowering women empowers us all.

As one International Women's Day a year isn't enough, the purpose of this year is to press for progress, this is why “We're making every day International Women's Day”.

International Women's Day (IWD) is traditionally a day dedicated to the celebration of the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.

Celebrated each 8 March worldwide, IWD is the opportunity to showcase the great work we are doing with our gender balance commitments as well as strengthen our visibility and notoriety as a global brand.