91% of UK retailers now have a coordinated D&I strategy: Report

The survey titled ‘Tracking progress on diversity and inclusion in UK Retail’ aims to shed light on D&I in the retail industry in 2022 through the lens of gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+, disability, social mobility, and age. This comes after last year’s release of the BRC’s D&I Charter, which has over 75 retailers as signatories, committing to improve D&I in the retail industry, and the first D&I report evaluating the 2021 retail landscape in terms of diversity.

An important finding of the report was that women’s presence on retail boards increased from 32.6 per cent in 2021 to 37.5 per cent in 2022. Moreover, 59 per cent of D&I strategies concentrated on social mobility, 29 per cent on age, and 76 per cent on disability.

The data for the report was collected directly from a broad range of retail companies. Among the 50 member signatory companies, 32 members participated in the research. These responding companies employ nearly 860,000 people, which is around 28 per cent of the retail workforce in the UK.

BRC and The MBS Group said that the report will be released on an annual basis to reflect great practices, show any achievements, and emphasise what more needs to be done in the future to make sure every single individual has equal opportunity to flourish in a business. It intends to play an important role in bringing about positive change in the industry.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (NB)