Report of gender equality in luxury industry within CAC 40

This project aims to analyze the gender equality in the luxury industry within CAC 40. 2 related companies, Kering Group and LVMH, will be explained.

The luxury industry is once considered as a male-dominated industry although it mainly focused on women’s purchasing power. Males used to have dominated influence not only in creativity level but also in business operation level.

However, with the rising awareness of human rights, the society now encourages diversity to a great extent. The first metric value is designed to see whether the company has a diversity & inclusion policy to prevent discriminations on the grounds of age, gender, disability, etc. The answer is affirmative for both of them. Among all diversity policies within the two groups, gender equality has been stressed as it is written on the official website of Kering: “while Kering addresses the issue of diversity in all its aspects, particular emphasis is placed on advancing gender equality.”

We can learn that both Kering Group and LVMH have promoted gender equality-related programs or policies. For example, Kering has set up Kering foundation to combat violence against women. Also, in 2010 Kering launched its Leadership & Gender Diversity programme to promote the access of women to the top positions and, more generally, to distill a culture of gender equality within the Group.

Meanwhile, Gender equality is an integral part of LVMH’s corporate culture, too. The Recruitment Code of Conduct has been accompanied by the “Recruitment without Discrimination” training program rolled out across the Group. This training program has been mandatory for all human resource managers involved in recruiting since 2011. Besides, the LVMH group organized a series of in-house events around the world and reaffirmed its commitment to female leadership, on the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2016.

What mentioned before are just parts of the two groups gender equality policies, and they all point out that Kering Group and LVMH Group have tried to establish a gender equality atmosphere not only within the organization but also in the whole community. Following metrics will focus on the percentage of women in the total workforce, on board of directors, in executive committees, in management positions, etc. These metrics will help to figure out to what extent have the 2 Groups done to realize gender equality.

For Kering Group, there are 23230 female employees accounting for 58% of the total workforce. 64% of people on the company’s board of directors and 31% of people in Executive Committees are women. The CEO of the Group is Man, while 51% of management positions are filled by women.

LVMH Group has 99512 female employees in total. 74% of the total workforce are women, which is higher than Kering Group. 33.3% of people on the company’s board of directors and 10% of people in Executive Committees are women. The CEO of the Group is also a Man, while 64% of management positions are filled by women. 70.3% skilled jobs are filled by women.

Both two groups are doing well in gender equality as more than half of the employees are female within two categories. Also, more than half of management positions are held by women in both of the 2 Groups. Besides, the percentage of women in administrative/sales staff and production staff is respectively 82% and 56%.

However, the data show that there are some slight differences between the 2 Groups. LVMH appears to have a bottom-up approach as their percentage of women in the top position is much lower than the rate of women in the total workforce, women in management positions, women in administrative/sales staff and women in production staff. When it comes to Kering, we can find out that the gender equality is almost at all levels of the organization. The Percentage of women in top positions is even higher than women in the total workforce. So, we can conclude that women are facing fewer barriers in accessing to a senior management position in Kering than in LVMH.

So, in conclusion, we can learn that both of the two groups can be considered as having good performance in gender equality. However, Kering is doing better than LVMH since its gender quality is realized better at all levels of the organization. LVMH should continue its efforts to make progress. In general, the luxury industry within CAC 40 has achieved gender equality for the remarkable efforts Kering Group and LVMH Groups have done.

By Lu Han