The Calvert Women's PriniplesTM (CWP), developed by Calvert Investments in partnership with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), constitute the first global code of corporate conduct focused exclusively on empowering, advancing, and investing in women worldwide. The CWP provide signatories with a concrete set of indicators for tracking progress toward gender equality and justice within their companies.
Symantec adopted the CWP in October 2007 to, in part, help establish gender equality, diversity, and inclusion goals for the company. In the two years since, we have turned our commitment to the CWP’s inspirational principles into concrete action. In the Bay Area, for example, we have partnered with the City of San Francisco, sixteen prominent Bay Area companies, and others to form the San Francisco Gender Equality Principles(GEP), which address local challenges and opportunities, and offer clear, practical standards and measures against which private-sector entities can assess their progress.
The CWP is particularly relevant and useful to us as we work to address the challenges of operating in a global business environment, with its different and often conflicting cultures. We support the CWP in its effort to address these challenges globally through its collaborations with the United Nations Global Compact and UNIFEM. In March 2009, for example, Symantec participated in "Advancing Women in the Global Marketplace," an event designed to identify ways in which businesses can empower women, with a special focus on the role of the Calvert Women’s Principles™ in setting a corporate agenda to promote gender equity.
