Deepens commitment with an additional US$3 million to support women entrepreneurs in its host countries in southern Afric

This International Women’s Day, De Beers Group is pleased to announce it has extended its global partnership with UN Women for a further five years. De Beers Group joins the newly-formed HeForShe Alliance and is committing to increasing the representation of women in technical and leadership roles within its business, as it works towards achieving gender parity across its workforce by 2030 as part of its Building Forever sustainability goals.

The HeForShe Alliance brings together leaders from across government, the corporate world and civil society to develop the largest set of scalable and sharable solutions for gender equality’s most pressing challenges. De Beers Group’s commitment is focused on overcoming some of the historic barriers to women entering and advancing in science and technology fields to foster a more diverse talent pipeline within its business.

The five-year commitment will see De Beers Group enhance talent development and succession programmes, extend training and awareness activities to encourage dialogue and challenge stereotypes, conduct regular reviews based on metrics and ongoing feedback, and enable access to STEM careers and education.

De Beers Group has been a UN Women partner since 2017 when it announced its initial commitment to accelerate the advancement of women across its organisation by achieving parity^[1] in the appointment of women and men into senior leadership by 2020. Having achieved this, with the appointment rate increasing from 22% to 40% over the three-year period, De Beers Group is now focused on achieving gender parity across its full workforce.

Since 2017, the representation of women in senior leadership overall within De Beers Group increased from 17% to 30%. The extended partnership announced today will play an important role in the company’s mission to achieving gender parity at all levels within the organisation.

Bruce Cleaver, CEO, De Beers Group and UN Women HeForShe Champion, said: “We are thrilled to be extending our partnership with UN Women for another five years and to be joining the newly-formed HeForShe Alliance. Achieving gender parity across our workforce is a business-critical priority for De Beers Group – not only is it the right thing to do, it’s the only way we will access the full talent pool and achieve our full potential. Now more than ever we have a societal imperative to keep working toward gender equality, as the Covid-19 pandemic has brought new challenges and we must work hard for sustainable change.”