UN Women continues to support gender equality in the private sector

The involvement of human resource management professionals is of particular importance for the introduction and effective implementation of solutions supporting the empowerment of women in the private sector. To this end, UN Women works closely with relevant departments of companies that are signatories to the United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), sharing modern approaches with them and thus helping the private sector to implement international best practices in terms of human resource policies.

One such initiative was the training series “Human Capital Reporting for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in accordance with the ISO 30414 Standard”, which was attended by more than 50 human resource management professionals over the past year.

ISO 30414 is an important international standard. It helps organizations produce structured, transparent reporting on human capital and helps businesses better measure and evaluate the effectiveness of human resource management. During the training, participants were introduced to the ISO 30414 standard and received information about those HR metrics that are particularly relevant to supporting gender equality and women’s empowerment in companies. Human resource management specialists discussed such issues as the mechanisms and initiatives needed for women’s empowerment, the principle of diversity, equality and inclusion, internationally recognized HR metrics and the role that HR specialists play.

It is noteworthy that the initiative also envisaged facilitating the implementation of relevant metrics in companies after the training. In particular, business organizations adopted detailed methodological tools of the ISO 30414 standard, including selecting and introducing new metrics that assess gender equality, staff diversity and equal opportunities. In addition, specific recommendations were developed to improve existing internal documentation on gender equality—for example, internal regulations, ethics codes and complaints mechanisms.

Among the companies was Nexia Georgia, which is a local firm of one of the top 10 international auditing and consulting companies, Nexia International. Nexia Georgia has been a WEPs signatory since 2022, and gender equality and women’s support are one of its strategic directions.

“Our involvement in the initiative has allowed us to see more clearly the company’s needs in terms of human resource management and plan further steps to improve the work process,” says Elene Smagliuki, Head of the Human Resource Management Department at Nexia Georgia. “It is important for us to share the standards and approaches that we have encountered during and after the training course. We hope to use the knowledge and experience we have gained effectively.”

The trainings and subsequent consultations were conducted by experts from EVA, a consulting company that is also a WEPs signatory. EVA is the first Georgian consulting company to have the right to implement or conduct audits of the ISO 30414 standard and officially represent international certification bodies.

The UN Women initiative promotes the integration of modern gender-sensitive approaches into the country’s private sector personnel policy documents, supports the implementation of relevant projects, and creates the basis for further institutional changes that will help women’s economic empowerment and ensure equal opportunities in the workplace. UN Women will continue to work with the business sector in this direction in 2025.

The initiative was implemented within the framework of the Women’s Economic Empowerment component of the UN Women project “Good Governance for Gender Equality in Georgia”, which is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).