Diversity in our workforce
At Experian, we respect, value and welcome diversity in our workforce, as well as within our customers, our suppliers and the global marketplace. We have a diverse workforce where talent thrives and where we continually seek to open up more career and development opportunities for all of our people.
We have comprehensive policies ensuring equal opportunities and fair treatment and examples of our policies can be found in our 2009 CR report.
We gather information specifically on gender, age and ethnic diversity and although our populations as a whole are broadly well balanced we recognise that some sections of our business are less representative. One of the 12 global strategic initiatives in our global HR policy is to increase diversity. We have started by targeting the senior management team, which is still dominated by white males, and have already made some progress.
Ethnic diversity
| Ethnicity: UK & Ireland |
|
|
|
| |
2007 |
2008 |
2009 |
| White - British |
87% |
86% |
84% |
| White - non British |
5% |
6% |
6% |
| Asian/ Asian British |
4% |
5% |
6% |
| Other |
4% |
3% |
4% |
In the UK, ethinicity data is available for 57% of employees (2009)
Comparison data from UK Office of National Satatistics, Population by Ethinic Group, 2001: 92% White, 4% Asian, 4% Other
| Ethnicity: North America |
|
|
|
| |
2007 |
2008 |
2009 |
| American Indian or Alaska Native |
0% |
1% |
1% |
| Asian |
15% |
14% |
14% |
| Black or African American |
7% |
6% |
5% |
| Hispanic or Latino |
70% |
72% |
73% |
| White (not Hispanic or LAtino) |
70% |
72% |
73% |
| Native Hawalian/ Other Pacific Islander |
0% |
0% |
0% |
| Two or more races |
0% |
0% |
0% |
In the US, ethinicity data is available for 98% of employees Comparison data from 2000 US Census: 75% White, 4% Asian, 13% Hispanic and 12% Balck (Figure dont't add to 100 due to the collection process in which people may respond in more then one category)
Where permitted under local legislation, we monitor the ethnic diversity of our people for the sole purpose of understanding how effectively our equal opportunities policies are working. They are asked to give this information on a voluntary basis. In the US most people take part, so we can show a workforce that is broadly reflective of the country’s national ethnic mix, with some small differences due to statistics. In the UK around half the people asked on their application form, give the information. We can say that of the people we know, the workforce is broadly reflective.
In the US we prepare annual Affirmative Action Plans for each location to identify any ethnicity that may be underutilised, while all vacancies in South Africa are designated an affirmative action category and preference is given to affirmative action candidates. South African legislation requires certain numbers to be employed in all occupational categories and we track these on a monthly basis to make sure we comply.
Serasa Experian has a policy of not collecting such data and in some parts of EMEA it is illegal to ask such questions of employees. This is the reason we are seeking ways of using non-employee volunteered information to help us assess our population’s ethnicity.
A different look at diversity
Using funds to support innovation for a strong social purpose (see our description of our CR strategy on these ‘Big Ideas’) we have been developing our Mosaic Origins product to help companies understand and manage the diversity of their people. Progressive companies collect this information by surveying employees, which is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons: it is expensive, quickly becomes out of date and often leads to a high rate of non-responders. This last is troublesome since the company never knows whether including the non-responders would have changed the profile significantly. Our Big Idea is to use the huge Mosaic Origins dataset to allow companies to infer the ethnic origin of their staff from data they already hold – their names. By combining both first and second name, the Mosaic software can estimate people’s ethnic origin with a very high degree of accuracy.
To try this new method, we applied it to our people in Nottingham with the results in the table below, which we can compare to the average ethnic mix of the Nottingham catchment. The Mosaic Origins data shows that we have a workforce very closely representative of our catchment. It also shows very close agreement with the data collected via the ‘conventional’ survey approach.
| | Staff numbers as calculated by Mosaic Origins | Staff numbers if Experian was typical of the Nottingham catchment | % | Percentages calculated by staff survey (for comparison) |
|---|
| White British | 1,437 | 1,425 | 84% | 84% |
|---|
| White - non British | 163 | 160 | 10% | 5% |
|---|
| Asian | 74 | 66 | 4% | 6% |
|---|
| Other | 30 | 53 | 2% | 4% |
|---|
| TOTAL (Nottingham staff) | 1,704 | 1,704 | | |
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