PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, 2 Others Boost 3 SDGs Pertaining to Women and Inequality

PepsiCo and Plano-based Frito Lay are feeling the pain of women who have lost their jobs due to COVID-19.

It is estimated that millions of women have been forced to stay at home due to the pandemic.

PepsiCo and its Plano-based subsidiary Frito Lay have partnered with a number of Dallas nonprofits including CitySquare to eliminate social barriers and help southern Dallas women get back to work, reported The Dallas Morning News.

Despite generous hopes and plans, Fortune noted that “Recent projections based on economic scenarios modeled by McKinsey and Oxford Economics estimate that employment for women may not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2024—two full years after a recovery for men.”

There is a real danger that female labor force participation could face its steepest sustained decline since World War II. Female workforce participation has already dropped to 57%—the lowest level since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

Fortune reported that the statistics show a harsher journey for women both during and through the recovery of the pandemic. McKinsey said as unemployment numbers were roughly equal between men and women in February 2020, unemployment for women peaked at 15.8% in April 2020, more than 2 percentage points above that for men. In September, when schools resumed, many of them with remote learning, 80% of the 1.1 million people who exited the workforce were women. In December, women accounted for all of the net job losses, while men achieved some job gains. Today, unemployment for women remains 1.9 percentage points above the pre-pandemic level.

Since the onset of the pandemic, 400,000 more women than men have left the workforce. The same is true for women of color; for example, Hispanic women face an unemployment rate of 6.5%, more than double that of Hispanic men.

“If these trends are left unaddressed, they will exacerbate existing inequalities and reverse decades of progress toward an inclusive economy for women and people of color,” Fortune observed.

In Dallas, the new coalition backed by PepsiCo and Frito-Lay hopes to reverse the pandemic’s unequal impact on working moms and put hundreds back into the workforce over the next three years.

PepsiCo and its Plano-based subsidiary Frito-Lay are partnering with nonprofits United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and CitySquare and Dallas College to train women in the skills necessary for jobs in hospitality, sales, marketing, manufacturing and logistics. They’ll also provide social services like housing assistance and child care.

The Dallas Morning News reported the program aims to train as many as 550 women in southern Dallas as part of the Southern Dallas Thrives initiative first announced in 2018. Dallas College will provide the education, CitySquare will provide social services and professional skills training and the PepsiCo Foundation contributed a $750,000 grant.

“More than a quarter of our 6,500 employees in Dallas-Fort Worth live in southern Dallas,” PepsiCo director of government affairs Rebecca Acuna was quoted as saying. “We see this investment as an investment in our community. We’ve also seen that when women thrive, families thrive. And when families thrive it means that North Texas succeeds.”

“We’re going to need to mobilize to get them back to work and ensure they have the social support necessary to work, and to reverse the devastating effects to their income that has been caused by this pandemic,” CitySquare CEO John Siburt said.

This benevolent effort by the business community is tied into three Sustainable Development Goals: #5—Gender Equality; #8—Decent Work and Economic Growth; and #10—Reduced Inequality.

If your business is open or on the verge of reopening, there’s an opportunity for you. Mainstream businesses of all sized as well as women-owned companies can get involved in this project of local levels. Collectively helping women in this dire situation – by outright hiring, training, social assistance with children – will result in many individual benefits.

You should also promote your companies locally through government officials and the media by pointing out that you are on the forefront of supporting the Sustainable Development Goals.

By the way, diversity and inclusion don’t happen by accident. It’s very deliberate. Monthly commemorations are opportunities to get topics in front of your customers, marketplace and audience. However, sustaining that level of engagement throughout the year is a matter of management’s commitment.