Continuing its equal opportunity initiatives and practices under the roof of “Women’s Platform”, Yıldız Holding released its 2022 Report. According to the report, the ratio of Yıldız Holding’s male and female recruits were equal in 2022.

Having established the Women’s Platform two years ago with the aim of supporting equal opportunities globally and in Turkey for a sustainable future, Yıldız Holding released its third ‘Women’s Platform Report’ in 2022. Yıldız Holding performs equal opportunity initiatives under the roof of the Women’s Platform with the aim of ensuring a more inclusive working environment and encouraging inclusion of women into the economy. Accordingly, the Holding combines its equal opportunity practices, projects, and performance data in an annual report and shares with the public. According to the third report recently released, Yıldız Holding and subsidiaries continued to improve their performance in fundamental parameters such as female employee rates, female recruit rates, and promoted female employee rates in 2022.

Mutuş: “We continue to implement equal opportunities in every level”

Yıldız Holding Women’s Platform Ambassador Begüm Mutuş stated that the Platform aims to lead the business world in increasing inclusion of women into workforce, with great support from Yıldız Holding Chair of the Board Ali Ülker: “As Yıldız Holding, our goal is to build a mor inclusive and fair working environment and to offer equal opportunities in full awareness of the challenges women face in business world. To reach this goal, we review our recruitment process, closely monitor international standards and metrics, and establish future recruitment targets.

In order to reinforce our initiatives to empower women and make them a part of the corporate culture at Yıldız Holding and all subsidiaries, we established Yıldız Holding Women’s Platform in 2021. We also worked with employees in a collaborative process in 2021 to write the Yıldız Holding Women’s Platform’s Equal Opportunity and Women’s Empowerment Manifest, which steers the Platform’s operations. Last year, we especially accelerated initiatives to support female entrepreneurs and the women in supply chains to ensure equal opportunities in terms of inclusion in economy. In line with this initiative, we updated our Manifest in a way that represents four areas that we generate value in – namely, ‘Discourse, Working Environment, Ecosystem, and Value Chain’.”

USD 4.3 million investment in women entrepreneurs

Stating that Yıldız Holding joined the “Women’s Entrepreneurship Accelerator” (WEA) program run by UN Women in 2022, Begüm Mutuş added: “With this cooperation, we made a commitment to support women entrepreneurs in supply chains both regionally and globally and to invest more than USD 4 million in female entrepreneurs in 3 years. In the first year of the project, the total of directly or indirectly investment in initiatives led or co-owned by women reached USD 4.3 million with 53 ventures.”

Full support for female farmers with the Women Stars of Agriculture project

Begüm Mutuş also stated that Yıldız Holding’s subsidiary Kerevitaş’s SuperFresh brand launched the “Women Stars of Agriculture” project with the support of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in order to empower female farmers and to ensure equal opportunities in the supply chain. With this project, SuperFresh aims to guarantee the purchase of 5 thousand tons of fruit and vegetables by 2025 and has so far purchased 1,760 tons of products, generating a value over TL 8 million. Giving information on other projects to support female entrepreneurs, Mutuş said: “Every year, the Lady GODIVA Initiative makes donations to NGOs that work to improve equal opportunities, inclusion, and women’s empowerment in their own societies. Built to create a gender-balanced workforce and to increase women’s presence in pladis’ global leadership teams by the end of 2025, the Women in Leadership Network supports the bond and relations among our female employees globally. With Seç Market’s ‘Smile with Your Power’ project launched this year to support female entrepreneurs, we aim to increase the number of our women business partners having their own stores.”

Number of female employees increased to 41 percent in the last three years

According to the data in the report, thanks to the equal opportunity projects run by Yıldız Holding and subsidiaries, female employee rate, which was 37 percent in 2019, increased to 41 percent in 3 years. In terms of the share of women in new employees of all levels at Yıldız Holding companies, the rate increased to 50 percent in 2022 (compared to 46 percent in 2019), revealing equality in the recruitment of women and men.

Share of women on Yıldız Holding Board also increased to 18 percent, compared to the previous share of 12%. In publicly traded companies of the Holding, this rate is 22% and among the total of 23 Board Members, 5 are women.

With the report and its holistic initiatives, Yıldız Holding acts transparently and inclusively to fulfill its commitments of Gender Equality (SDG 5), Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8), and Reducing Inequalities (SDG 10), which are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that the Holding’s sustainability strategy is based upon.