David Latten is the Head of Global Indirect Procurement and Supplier Diversity & Equality at Logitech. Lean in as he discusses what he’s passionate about, his niche: As of today, despite all our best supplier diversity efforts, only 6.1% of the total US corporate spending goes to Black, women and other under-represented suppliers. The other 94% of corporate spend represents a vast untapped opportunity to positively impact equality. Most of this 94% of non-diverse spend is with very large suppliers. These large, non-diverse organizations employ millions of people across many countries and accrue trillions of revenue each year. These influential companies have the power to shape a gender fair future and in turn we have the power to influence them. We will not achieve gender equality without these large organizations taking a stand.
Logitech along with Gender Fair co-founded The Coalition For Gender Fair Procurement with the simple aim of leveraging the multi-trillion dollar spending power of corporate procurement as a lever to provoke urgently needed progress towards gender equality.
In coalition with GenderFair, Logitech has started assessing their high impact (high headcount and/or high revenue) suppliers for gender fairness using GenderFair/Ethisphere assessment based on the UN WEPs. We will continue to assess these suppliers each year with the hope and expectation of seeing progress in their gender fairness. We will also look to direct future spend decisions towards gender fair organizations.
But this is not enough. We need others to take action with us. It is only by coming together that we can make meaningful progress towards gender equality. Only by uniting as an industry and with one voice asking one simple question; “Are you Gender Fair?” that we can fully unlock our influence for equality. None of us alone can be as influential as all of us together
Our ultimate goal is to engender an industry wide change in procurement practices whereby all organizations assess all their high impact suppliers for gender fairness as a matter of course as we do today for risk, privacy, data security etc… and then make spend decisions accordingly. As a coalition we want to create a new procurement standard for gender equality.
Finally, we are aware that to amplify the impact of this initiative, and to provoke industry wide change, we need allies. Our impact starts by extending an invitation for other progressive organizations to join Logitech, Gender Fair and Andela as founding members of the coalition.
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