Mirvac tops global leadership in gender equality

The property developer has managed to hold its gender pay gap at zero for the past six years.

Mirvac chief executive Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz. Photographer: Adam Yip

Australian property company Mirvac has been ranked number one in the world for gender equality among a field of almost 4,000 publicly listed companies valued at over $US2bn.

These companies represent 102 million employees globally.

The Equileap Global Report on Gender Equity in 2022 also finds that Australian companies have outperformed their peers. Twenty-three Australian companies rank in the top 100.

Transurban sits in 8th place, Medibank at 11th, Viva Energy 12th and BHP at 19th position.

“It’s been a labour of love for many years: gender equity, diversity and inclusion” Mirvac CEO Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz tells The Australian. “Mirvac had come second by a small margin twice before. This year, we are first by a margin of 5 per cent, so it’s a significant achievement.”

Equileap, based in the Netherlands, was the first organisation to formally measure gender equality in the global workplace. Nineteen criteria are used in the rankings including gender balance across the workforce, the gender pay gap and policies on paid parental leave and sexual harassment.

Norwegian financial group DNB and the UK’s National Grid took second and third place.

In its fifth Equileap annual report CEO Diana van Maadijk noted that the global corporate sector was still far from where it should be and that some of the findings were still shocking.

“Of the almost 4000 companies we researched this year, just 18 have achieved gender balance at all levels of their workforce and only 19 have closed their gender pay gap,” she said.

Mirvac has managed to hold its gender pay gap at zero for the past six years. Equileap defines a zero pay gap as publishing a mean, unadjusted gender pay gap of 3 per cent or less, overall or in bands.

Lloyd-Hurwitz says the gender pay gap is insidious because it often slides when management take their eye off the issue. “You need the data. When you shine a light on the data, that’s how you can maintain the standard.”

The report finds that only 17 per cent of the companies globally publish their gender pay gap, and less than 1 per cent have actually closed their pay gap. The difference between countries are stark: in Spain 92 per cent of companies publish gender pay data; in the US 92 per cent of companies do not.

Four of Mirvac’s nine member board directors are women, including diversity champion Sam Mostyn who is also a director on the Transurban board. And women are prominent in the C-suite.

“I believe we are the only company in the top 200 ASX with both a female CEO and chief financial officer,” Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz said.

Diana van Maadijk notes that women at the top of the 4,000 surveyed companies are still very rare. The report finds only 5 per cent have a female CEO, 13 per cent have a female CFO and 7 per cent have a female chair.

And only 18 companies globally achieve 40-60 per cent of women at all levels – board, executive, management and the broader workforce.

At Mirvac, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz favours targets over quotas.

She insists that recruitment agencies guarantee 50 per cent of candidates for all positions of level five and up are women. (Level five is three levels down from the C-suite.)

“I say to them: if you can’t find any field site engineers, look harder,” she said.

Australia’s overrepresentation in the top 20 and top 100 has been credited to the 2012 Workplace Gender Equality Act but Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz says Australia’s values are also different.

“Gender equity is similar to sustainability. On any sustainable index Australian companies perform well. I think there is a progressive element to Australian corporate life that plays into this” she says.

Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz agrees that Australia sometimes sells itself short. “I do think we are very critical of corporate effort here. This report demonstrates real progress, not the whole job done by any means, and the battle is far from over but it is good progress. We still have sexual violence, sexual harassment and bullying endemic in organisations in Australia and we need to keep working at that.”

Mirvac offers a standard 20 weeks of paid parental leave and four weeks paid partner leave, and pays superannuation on periods of unpaid leave. It also provides support for any employees affected by domestic violence.

Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz says a strategy instrumental in raising female participation for Mirvac has been flexibility in work hours and work location. “And it is flexibility for everyone, not just working mothers,” she stressed.

Even before Covid-19 struck, she says over 75 per cent of the workforce were on some form of flexible work. Learnings from the pandemic are built into a new flexibility charter and Mirvac is broadening its diversity and inclusion strategy. Lloyd-Hurwitz argues this not only creates a strongly engaged workforce but has a huge positive impact on productivity levels.

In the February half-year result Mirvac reported a net profit of $565m, up 44 per cent from a year earlier, a result that was not lost on the Equileap CEO Diana van Maadijk as she congratulated the Australian property developer.

“As studies continue to highlight the links between performance improvements and gender equality, Mirvac’s recent announcement of a rise in net profits comes as no surprise to us,” she said.

Looking forward, both the EU and the US are developing rules and regulations for greater gender diversity transparency.

Ms Van Maadijk says another boost comes from gender lens investing that has grown almost ten-fold in the last five years to $US6bn.

“Everything is amplified around ESG,” said Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz of the money flowing into diversity. “If you have a strong performance on ESG as a company, you are now getting a different level of interest from investors and gender equity falls into that ESG bucket.”

Originally published as Mirvac tops global leadership in gender equality