In Conversation
Sodexo has five pillars of diversity and inclusion: gender, LGBTQIA+ rights, disability, culture and ethnicity. At the helm of the local D&I program is Mariana Olivares, who also heads the legal team in Peru. She explains Sodexo’s approach, and how the legal team works to uphold these pillars
When I joined Sodexo 11 years ago, diversity and inclusion was part of the DNA of the company even then, but not in the same way that we work now. Ten years ago, these topics weren’t part of the board of directors or the leaders of the company. Nowadays, I think it’s not acceptable if a company doesn’t take the time to discuss these topics at board level. It’s not about one specific sector or business – the market in Peru needs to talk about diversity and inclusion.
At Sodexo, we started setting D&I KPIs in 2015 – I remember the first time I asked for the number of women in the company, and we had 25%. We started working. We developed our local diversity and inclusion policy because we had a worldwide one, but we wanted to work on this topic in Peru. After six years of working and understanding the real problems of D&I, we have reached 40% women in the company. If I told you that we had improved the number of women from one year to another that’s easy – you just hire more women and that’s it. But if we see this change over six years, it’s because the culture has changed. It’s a statement by the company about how we want to be seen and how the talent sees us from the outside, especially considering we work a lot with the mining sector in Peru, where the average number of women in mining is very low, around 6%.
