Diversity and Gender Equality Initiatives at Coca-Cola: A Comprehensive Analysis
Coca-Cola Company is the leading non-alcoholic beverage producer. It has more than
500 world-class brands, which it offers to people in more than 200 nations across the world
(Coca-Cola, 2017). Among these brands include Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Minute Maid, and Dasani. In recent years, Coca-Cola has added non-sugar sweetened drinks in its product portfolio due to increased health concerns revolving around sweetened beverages. The company has hundreds of bottling partners globally. It produces and sells syrups and concentrates to them.
Subsequently, these partners brand the beverage, market, package, and distribute it to the customers and consumers.
Diversity Overview
The Coca-Cola Company has multiple diversity policies, procedures, and initiatives. From a business and organizational standpoint, diversity refers to the practice of including all individuals from different cultural, social, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, and racial backgrounds (Tan, 2019). Diversity promotes increased innovation, creativity, and productivity in an individual organization. Following this knowledge, business organizations globally have adopted diversity programs to ensure their employees feel included. Among these companies include Coca-Cola. This company strives to foster a diverse and inclusive culture through its core values of leadership, equality, and fairness. To ensure inclusivity in its work setting, the Coca-Cola Company has created multiple monitoring and reporting programs.
Among these programs include the compensation fairness initiative (The Coca Cola Company,
2021). This program analyzes the company’s associate’s base pay each year to ensure fairness when contrasted to similarly situated workers. Besides, it conducts an annual quantitative evaluation of incentives and merit awards to identify issues and differences that warrant a change. Some of these issues that this program eliminates include employee compensation based on gender and race. For example, paying men more than women. Coca-Cola also has a talent management fairness initiative geared towards increasing inclusivity during talent acquisition (The Coca-Cola Company, 2021). Here, the company ensures equal recruitment and selection of employees irrespective of gender, race, religion, and socioeconomic background.
In 2015, Coca Cola joined more than 400 companies to support marriage equality (Coca Cola, 2017). The Coca-Cola company did this because some laws that prohibited same-sex marriage limited businesses ‘ ability to acquire and retain a talented and diverse workforce. By 2030, Coca-Cola aspires to be 50% led by women worldwide (The Coca-Cola Company, 2020). The company also has a non-discrimination policy, which discourages workplace discrimination based on race, sex, nationality, religion, gender, and political opinion. To address diversity throughout the company, Coca-Cola has created a Global Women’s Leadership Council, made of resourceful female executives. This council develops and recommends initiatives geared towards increasing diversity.
Literature Review on Gender Equality in Workplace
According to Falk & Hermle (2018), women are fundamental to the world’s overall shared achievement. In their cross-sectional study, Falk & Hermle (2018) argue that it is thus vital for companies such as Coca-Cola Company to set goals enabling economic empowerment for both genders. Besides providing women entrepreneurs with mentorship networks, they should provide them with business training skills and other critical financial assets and services. Correspondingly, Falk & Hermle (2018) argue that for prominent companies to achieve women empowerment and equality, they should invest in sizable portions prompting overall organization development. Gender equality and empowerment, as further analyzed by the authors mentioned above, benefits not only female and male employees but also prompts higher productivity and job satisfaction levels and lower job turnover rates.
On the other hand, Dashper (2019), while challenging gendered rhetorics’ success, further argues that women in the workplace profoundly experience gender inequality. On most occasions, as noted in his research, gender inequality in the workplace is vivid through the set organization structures, practices, processes, and decision-making procedures. As one of the complex fundamentals in the organization, gender inequality is further viewed through salaries acquisition, with men being paid more than women and considered the forefront of the decision-making process. Indeed, Dashper (2019) agrees that women in the workplace are not only left out in policies and decision-making processes. Gender inequality is rampant in the workplace and further witnessed during the organization training, hiring, promotion and payment. Thus, Dashper (2019) emphasizes that it is critical to have gender discrimination elimination models reciprocating the nature of gender inequality. Any form of discrimination in the workplace should be eliminated, which in the long run necessitates benevolent and hostile sexism.
Gupta et al., (2019), in their qualitative research, argues that for firms such as Coca-Cola Company to promote gender equality, they should consider key remedies. As noted by the authors mentioned above, gender equality in organizations is profoundly achieved via in-depth outcomes and opportunities for both men and women. Correspondingly, Gupta et al., (2019) agree that achieving gender equality in firms means enabling both men and women employees to enjoy and access equal resources, rewards, and opportunities. Consecutively, it means providing equal and comparable payment and value and eliminating all obstacles that prevent equal opportunity participation for both men and women in the workforce. Also, Gupta et al., (2019) argue that to promote gender equality in the workplace, top-most managerial and leadership personnel should eradicate all types of discrimination, facilitating gender biases. Besides that, as noted by the others mentioned above, gender equality efficiently matters in the workplace. Other than improving economic growth and national productivity, it increases the firm’s performance, retains and attracts new talents, and prompts its reputation.
Consecutively, on matters dealing with workplace gender equality measures, Subašić et al., (2018) outline the top fueling elements promoting gender inequality. Among the major factors include benevolent and hostile sexism. As noted by Subašić et al., (2018), the two affect individual discrimination in the workplace. Thus to solve causes of benevolent and hostile sexism in the workplace, Subašić et al., (2018) argue that it is critical to hire more women in the workforce and even further appreciate the recruitment efforts for marginalized persons as Hispanic people. Also, it is vital to eliminate all gender pay gaps and during organization training and seminars to have more women employees mentoring men. When women mentor men mean breaking the barriers associated with gender equality in the workplace. The process also allows men employees to learn more about the various leadership and working styles promoted by women leaders.
Company Analysis
Like other businesses, the Coca-Cola Company faces various workplace challenges that impact its employees and business operations. Most of these challenges revolve around the safety and health of its employees, equality, child labor, and corruption. The Coca-Cola Company addresses employee safety and health challenges by conducting supply chain governance audits and health and safety workshops on its manufacturing and distribution settings to identify accidents and injury risks (Coca-Cola, 2017). Early identification of these risks aid in timely mitigation and management. The company also addresses issues associated with equality through its diversity policy, which recommends equal recruitment, fair compensation, and equal work opportunities regardless of race, gender, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation. On the other hand, the company addresses child labor-associated challenges through its human rights policy, which prohibits child labor practices in its supply chain system. Besides, Coca-Cola tackles corruption issues through its anti-bribery policy, which lays down guiding principles on conducting business ethically and fairly.
References
Coca Cola. (2017). The Coca-Cola Company’s Human Rights Report 2016-2017. The Coca-Cola
Company: Refresh the World. Make a Difference. https://www.cocacolacompany.com/content/dam/journey/us/en/responsible-business/shared-future/human-rights-report-2016-2017-tccc.pdf.
Dashper, K. (2019). Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace. Gender, Work & Organization, 26(4), 541-557. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12262
Falk, A., & Hermle, J. (2018). Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality. Science, 362(6412). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aas9899
Gupta, G. R., Oommen, N., Grown, C., Conn, K., Hawkes, S., Shawar, Y. R., … & Equality, G. (2019). Gender equality and gender norms: framing the opportunities for health. The Lancet, 393(10190), 2550-2562. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(19)30651-8
Subašić, E., Hardacre, S., Elton, B., Branscombe, N. R., Ryan, M. K., & Reynolds, K. J. (2018). “We for She”: Mobilising men and women to act in solidarity for gender equality. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21(5), 707-724. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430218763272
Tan, T. Q. (2019). Principles of inclusion, diversity, access, and equity. The Journal of infectious
diseases, 220(Supplement_2), S30-S32.
The Coca-Cola Company. (2020). 2020 Business & Environmental, Social and Governance
The Coca-Cola Company. (2021). Workplace fairness. https://www.cocacolacompany.com/shared-future/diversity-and-inclusion/workplace-fairness.
