Our approach to promoting diversity
For a decade, L’Oréal has been thinking about and working toward the creation of a diversity policy. It is founded on initiatives undertaken in three strategic areas: human resources, marketing and purchasing.
Diversity is an important issue for L’Oréal. It consists of recognizing, accepting, valuing differences and capitalizing on them to accelerate the company's growth. As the undertaking has multiple dimensions, L’Oréal prefers to talk about diversity in the plural. In this field as in others, the group started by taking initiatives, then measured the progress made to professionalize and extend the approach on an international scale.
For L’Oréal, measuring is an essential part of the approach, because it makes it possible to steer the policies being implemented in the area of diversity and to advance. To this extent the first Diversity Balance Sheet was created to measure our progress, only in France, covering the period between 2005 and 2010. The results were used to apply corrective actions and to set goals for the next 5 years, from 2010 to 2015, helping the group accelerate the deployment of Diversity worldwide.
The roll-out of Diversity Charters in different countries
The signing of the Ethics Charter in 2000 and of the Global Compact in 2003 were L’Oréal's first commitments to promoting non-discrimination and respect for individual differences. With the signing of the Diversity Charter in France in 2004, and action plan was defined, supported in 2006 by the creation of a global diversity network in the subsidiaries. Since then, several Diversity Charters have been signed in the European subsidiaries: Belgium (2007), Germany (2008), Spain (2009).
Over recent years, L’Oréal has stepped up its approach by being directly involved, alongside other partners, in the creation of national diversity charters. This has been the case in Italy, in collaboration with the Sodalitas association in 2009, in Sweden in 2010 and in Poland in 2012. This process continues and is growing.
In parallel, the group's commitment has spread in France to other dimensions of diversity, such as professional equality, parenthood, social background or even age: the creation of the Parent-Friendly Charter (2008), the "Plan Espoir Banlieues" (2008), and company agreements relating to the employment of Seniors (2009).
The Diversity Policy 2010-2015
L’Oréal's ambition is to become the recognized world leader in the management of diversity. This leadership ambition incites us, in order to be effective, to focus our policy on three strategic lines of action: human resources, marketing/communication and purchasing; working in priority on three issues: gender, disabilities and social and ethnic background. Defined in this way for the period 2010-2015, the group policy from now on involves all the subsidiaries. With a shared goal, it prioritizes action to facilitate a rapid and global deployment.
Main actions
- Diversifying our sources of recruitment to look for and acquire talents that represent greater cultural and social diversity.
- Reduce the difference in salaries between men and women to the point that they disappear.
- Nurture the emergence of talents of women at the top level of the organization.
- Enable and promote the employment of people with disabilities, in compliance with national laws or by going beyond them.
- Make L’Oréal products accessible to all consumers.
- Practice a responsible purchasing policy, especially one that acts against exclusion.
