The Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) are a joint initiative of UN Women and the UN Global Compact, and was launched on International Women’s Day in 2010. The WEPs comprise seven principles for business on how to empower women and achieve gender equality in the workplace, marketplace and community. The WEPs urge a systemic approach to embedding gender equality, and set out all the actions that businesses should take to achieve their gender equality goals. In 2015, the heads of state and governments of G7 countries stated their support for the WEPs and called on companies worldwide to integrate them into their activities in the G7 Leaders’ Declaration.

Since 2010, over 10,000 companies have signed the CEO Statement of Support for the WEPs, many of which are also Global Compact participants. By requiring that the CEO of signatories sign a Statement of Support, the issue of gender equality is raised to the highest level in the organisation. The WEPs have built a community of best practice for business by providing a platform to discuss challenging issues and share experiences and learnings with peers and relevant stakeholders.

The corresponding WEPs Gender Gap Analysis Tool is an anonymous, free, user-friendly tool that over 9,600 companies have taken to identify strengths, gaps and opportunities to improve their performance on gender equality. The WEPs tool is a key feature of the UN Global Compact Target Gender Equality accelerator programme. Encouragingly, 78% of companies that completed Target Gender Equality shared the WEPs Tool results with their company’s executive leadership team or board. In addition, 82% of companies that completed Target Gender Equality are planning to take the WEPs Gender Gap Analysis Tool on a regular basis to analyze their performance over time.

Since 2023, the UN Global Compact has been hosting country-level roundtables with companies, Governments, employers’ and workers’ organizations, civil society and UN partners to explore how to advance the living wage agenda at the national level. The first round of dialogues took place in nearly 20 countries* with the goal of galvanizing companies to engage in the living wage discussion at the national level and send a signal to policymakers to adopt living wage policies.

The living wage roundtables were made possible by the outcomes from the Think Lab on Living Wage (2022-2023), which brought together over 20 NGO and business participants to identify the needed steps to mainstream living wage practices, for all workers, across the business sector. These efforts further helped influence the International Labour Organization (ILO) to adopt its first agreement on Living Wage in 2024, which underlined living wage as an essential aspect of decent work and economic growth.

* Country Networks include Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Malaysia & Brunei, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Uruguay, United States and United Arab Emirates, along with a regional roundtable in Europe.

Although mindsets are shifting across the globe driven by demands from consumers, investors and workers, translating human rights policies into concrete goals, actions and business targets remains a challenge for businesses. Human Rights have been core to corporate commitments since our inception, as articulated in Principles 1 and 2 of the Ten Principles.

Since 2011, these principles have been operationalised by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the first global standard for preventing and mitigating negative human rights impacts from business activity. The UNGPs emphasize the distinct but shared responsibility of States and business to safeguard human rights in enterprise and the need to enable access to effective remedies. Businesses now have a clear framework of human rights due diligence to embed respect for human rights into their operations and value chains.

The introduction of the phrase ‘due diligence’ in the UNGPs was a significant step forward in enabling human rights to be communicated in business terms. Businesses have also demonstrated their additional role in taking voluntary advocacy efforts to promote human rights through collaboration with State actors, philanthropy, community projects and innovations to improve lived experiences.

The UN Global Compact welcomes recent developments in the legislation of mandatory human rights due diligence that aligns with the UNGPs and makes reporting requirements the new norm for business. We know that relying on voluntary measures from business simply will not get us where we need to be. That is why the UNGPs call on Governments to implement a “smart mix of measures” — both voluntary, mandatory, national and international — to foster business respect for human rights.

The UN Global Compact has developed an array of resources to enable businesses in advancing progress in this area. These include:

• the Academy E-learning Course on Business and Human Rights: How to Operationalize the UN Guiding Principles which is available in 6 languages and has been taken by over 2,500 business professionals worldwide;
• the Business and Human Rights Accelerator programme helps companies move from commitment to action on human rights and labour rights by modeling a six-stage process to establishing an ongoing human rights due diligence process. Over 1,400 companies have completed the accelerator since 2023.
• the Business and Human Rights Navigator is a knowledge website in English, German and Spanish (soon launching in French) that guides companies around the world to better understand and address human rights impacts in their operations and supply chains. Users can access in-depth analysis of key human rights issues, due diligence recommendations, case studies illustrating how businesses have responsibly addressed human rights impacts, and additional key resources. The BHR Navigator has been visited by 150,000 active users since launch in 2022 to date.