Gender Equality
For long-term sustainable development, Yapı Kredi aims to create, encourage, and maintain a common corporate culture incorporating diversity and inclusion criteria. In particular, Yapı Kredi's focus areas include enabling gender equality, combating the prejudices caused by the concept of sexism, and empowering women in business life. Also, by adopting gender equality as a guiding principle in its workforce, Yapı Kredi prides itself on being the bank with the highest number of female employees in Turkey.
In the belief that a rich and diverse working environment where differences are celebrated will be a successful one, Yapı Kredi adopts an approach that takes a firm stand against all kinds of discrimination, including, but not limited to, discrimination on the basis of language, religion, gender, ethnicity, faith, and sexual orientation. Yapı Kredi outperformed the global and sectoral averages with its reporting under the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index in 2020 as part of its efforts in gender equality, and qualified for the 2021 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index. The Index evaluates companies across five pillars: female leadership and talent pipeline, equal pay and gender pay parity, inclusive culture, sexual harassment policies, and a pro-women brand.
The Bank has signed the Declaration on Equality at Work, established under the leadership of the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Family and Social Policies in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to reduce gender inequality. In 2016, Yapı Kredi signed the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs), created in partnership with the UN Global Compact and UN Women, which is the most important global platform participated in by players from the private sector and aims to empower women and enable them to take part in economic life. The Bank discloses its implementations in relation to the WEPs in its annual reports. Yapı Kredi introduced the Business Against Domestic Violence Policy in 2019, where employees are provided with mechanisms that will offer consultancy, guidance, training, and support services.
Yapı Kredi has undertaken a pioneering role in gender equality and women's employment and has taken part in numerous initiatives to date. As part of these efforts, Yapı Kredi completed the Gender Equity Certification Program, which was provided under the leadership of the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey (KAGİDER) and received technical support from the World Bank, that concentrated on the Equal Opportunities Model. Within the scope of this program, Yapı Kredi successfully completed an independent assessment covering a number of aspects such as the management’s approach to equal opportunities, egalitarian practices in recruitment, performance and promotion processes, training opportunities, feedback and complaint mechanisms, and gender-sensitive communication. Yapı Kredi was also the first organization to have been digitally assessed in this sense and to have successfully passed.
You can find more information about Sustainability at Yapı Kredi here.