Gender equality: the new pillar of the Colombian Sustainability Award for Good Labor Practices

Bogota - Since its launch in 2018, the Colombian Sustainability Award for Good Labor Practices has become an international benchmark for highlighting good HR and sustainability practices in enterprises as well as public, private, non-profit and academic organizations. It includes criteria from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), OECD and ILO.

The number of enterprises and organizations evaluated by the Award has been increasing over the years. In its first year, 108 organizations participated and in 2019, the Committee evaluated 120. In 2020, the 178 applications received represented more than 280 000 workers and for the first time, included an assessment on aspects of gender equality.

This was achieved thanks to a collaboration with ILO’s SCORE Program in Colombia that provided technical assistance to mainstream gender equality in the Model of Excellence for Sustainability in Good Labor Practices developed by ACRIP and the Centro RS.

The result, thanks to the assistance provided by the ILO in incorporating the parameters of SCORE Training’s gender equality module (MIG SCORE), is a platform capable of carrying out a transparent and objective evaluation of eleven aspects of HR management.

For Bertha Lucia Carolina Trevisi Fuentes, National Coordinator of the ILO SCORE Program, "the inclusion of the MIG SCORE perspective and elements in the Award’s criteria is a contribution of the ILO towards generating awareness of gender equality, making visible the relationship between equal opportunities, treatment and participation of women and men in the world of work, decent work and sustainability".

In other words, it helps to strengthen the relationships between economic growth and social justice.

Carolina Trevisi, National Coordinator of the ILO SCORE Program in Colombia

MIG SCORE has gained worldwide recognition for its innovative qualities, one of which is the alignment with ILO’s Standards, including the most recent Convention 190 about violence and harassment in the world of work, in addition to the good practices derived from SCORE Training in relation to workplace cooperation, productivity increase, and continuous improvement.

During the alignment process between the MES+BPL and MIG SCORE, the expert panel included almost 80 percent of the questions from MIG SCORE’s enterprise survey. In the words of Erick Pichot, executive director of the Centro RS, "the world and the new generations are eager for these barriers to cease to exist. MIG SCORE has been a valuable technical input in terms of research and cooperation put to service of this Award".

Labor productivity is related to good labor practices and business sustainability. Worker protection, work-life balance, gender equality in finding and keeping a job, fair remuneration and support for staff experiencing domestic violence are some of the good practices highlighted by the ILO's Bureau for Employers' Activities (ACT/EMP).

Thanks to the inclusion of gender equality within the Colombian Sustainability Award for Good Labor Practices, the Inter-American Federation of Human Management Associations (FIDAGH), present in 13 Latin American countries, plans to adopt the MES+BPL model (including the MIG SCORE parameters) as the central axis for the presentation of its annual award in 2021. This demonstrates that the effort between these three entities - Centro RS, ACRIP and ILO SCORE - constitutes a guideline to continue working towards gender equality in the world of work.

For more information about MIG SCORE, we invite you to visit the following links:
Web page: www.scorecolombia.org
Facebook: facebook.com/SCOREColombia
YouTube OIT Americas: https://www.youtube.com/user/OITamericas
YouTube Score and MIG SCORE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcwhS-tRn4f3XO2npcZpPKQ/videos