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Tracking & Measuring Diversity

BCG partners with organizations to create or turbocharge their diversity and inclusion initiatives—bringing ready-made tools and extensive expertise to the table. We have broad experience working with companies to identify the right metrics and goals so that they can drive change.

How do you know if your company is making progress on gender diversity? Nadjia Yousif discusses five areas where tracking metrics and data will help leaders know if they're making wins—or falling short.

Measuring What Matters

Using BCG’s Diversity and Inclusion Assessment for Leadership tool, we are able to benchmark data against industry and geography, leveraging our existing database of more than 25,000 responses from across the globe. This enables companies to identify the right targets and goals—and the right metrics to track.

We also have a robust, proven framework for identifying which metrics matter when it comes to diversity.

Companies need to focus on five primary areas:

  1. Pay. Ensure that men and women in the same roles are earning the same pay. Even if pay is fair, perceptions count; companies should survey employees to make sure they believe that pay levels are equitable for men and women.
  2. Recruitment. Attracting a strong pipeline of women is critical—especially in industries that have historically had trouble bringing in women, such as industrial goods and the tech sector.
  3. Retention. Companies need to know the percentage of women and men at each level of seniority, and they need to track the attrition rate at each level in order to find out where the ladder is broken.
  4. Advancement. In addition to monitoring the representation of women at the top, companies need to measure the percentage promoted each year as a share of the total cohort and compare that with the promotion rates of men. (Keep in mind that the challenge of advancement is unrelated to women’s ambition levels.)
  5. Representation. Make sure that women who do make it to the top are not concentrated in administrative roles, such as HR or marketing, but are fairly represented in operational units.
Measuring What Matters in Gender Diversity

Building Customized Scorecards

BCG delivers best-in-class scorecards, based on real-world experience and customized to specific needs. These form the basis of robust forward tracking to ensure progress is made and embedded. Scorecards can also form a strong part of communications strategies in order to build buy-in across the organization.

  • We leverage the data baseline to build clear, user-friendly, scorecards that are integrated into existing governance processes and leadership cadence.
  • We customize these by business unit, geography, and/or cohort.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion