AUGUST 2022

Contents
1. Background
2. Actions
3. Challenges
4. Results
5. Recommendations

CASE STUDY: TIMELINE CONSULTANCYINTEGRATING DIVERSITY, INCLUSION AND WOMEN’SEMPOWERMENT INTO CORPORATE MANAGEMENTLESSONS LEARNED• Promoting gender equality in any company requires
support from senior management.

• Making a strong business case for promoting genderequality and raising gender awareness is helpful for
leadership buy-in.

BACKGROUND
Founded in 2002, Timeline Consultancy is a small Chinese company
that provides employee relations management services to othercompanies. Given the focus on employee relations, Timeline pays
particular attention to issues of power within companies, including
gender relations, and its services are often focused on companies
in industries dominated by women workers, such as the garment,
footwear and electronics sectors.
The recent introduction of laws, policies and guidelines on genderequality in China has helped Timeline to recognize the key roleof the private sector – its clients – in promoting gender equality.
Timeline found, for example, that although most factories haveundergone compliance audits and established a set of compliancesystems, these are not always fully integrated into daily practice.
Managers who have received compliance training are aware ofnon-discrimination requirements but often do not understand thelogic behind them and aren’t able to implement them properly.
Discrimination therefore remains but is less visible.

Case Study: Timeline Consultancy ┃ 1

ACTIONS
As a consultancy, Timeline promotes gender equality andinclusivity with a wide range of clients and supports themto establish the right systems. In particular, it helps to set up
employee representative mechanisms with adequate participationof women employees and carries out capacity building on
communication and negotiation for women representatives.
In 2015, the company conducted a project to enhance dialogue
and communication between employees and management at
a clothing factory in China with nearly 200 workers, over 70%
of whom were women. They found that women workers wereinitially reluctant to volunteer as worker representatives. Following
this, Timeline organized a meeting exclusively for female workers
and found that their main concerns were issues around a lack of
education, lack of confidence, and a belief that such work was not
for women and that it might take time away from family duties.
After Timeline staff addressed these concerns one by one, a few
women workers agreed to put themselves forward. The selected

representatives – three women and two men – were trained oncommunication and negotiation skills, such as ways of dealing
with differing opinions or reluctance from management. The
company’s human resources (HR) department was trained on
how to support the work of the representatives. It supported
the setting up of gender-responsive systems and guidelines on
how worker representatives should be elected, how often themanagement should meet with worker representatives, andhow often workers should have meetings internally. Policies
were drafted and issued, including a Worker Representative
Charter. It was made clear that 1) when electing representatives,
the gender ratio of representatives should be proportionate tothat of the workers; 2) representatives' working hours should becompensated, and meetings with representatives should be held
during working hours; and 3) educational level or literacy should
not be part of the eligibility criteria for representatives. Also,
to ensure leadership buy-in, the company communicated withthe management at the start of the project to explain what wasplanned and the reasoning behind it.

Case Study: Timeline Consultancy ┃ 2

CHALLENGES
Challenge

Solution

It can be difficult to convince companies toinvest in gender equality. This is often due
to misunderstandings about gender equality
and women’s empowerment at the seniorlevel. For example, many corporate executives
believe that because many or most of acompany’s employees are women, it cannot
have a gender inequality-related issue; or theyhold discriminatory beliefs that promoting theagency of women employees may make themdifficult to manage.

Timeline works with corporate senior management staff toclarify what gender equality is and promote the importanceof addressing the different needs of men and women. It
also communicates the business case for gender equality
and the risks posed by a company remaining outdated
and not adapting to meet the changing environment andemployee relations. This involves outlining current employee
management challenges and the relationship betweenthese and issues of inclusion and diversity. It highlights that
promoting gender equality is both a value and a crucialtransformation strategy.

Some managers pay little attention to thelack of female representation in a company
because they lack gender sensitivity and believethat female workers are reluctant or unwilling toparticipate in representation tasks.

Timeline raises the gender sensitivity of managers, making
them aware of the benefits of female worker participation, andthe need to encourage female employee participation.

Companies can find it difficult to mainstream
gender in their daily work, as they may not beaware of issues stemming from unconscious
gender bias.

Timeline elaborates on various scenarios where unconscious
bias might be present, including in recruitment, promotion,training and security. Through concrete examples, genderawareness of managers is raised, and they are inspired to thinkcritically and analyze situations with a gender lens.

RESULTS
After participating in the training and dialogue activities in
the case above, the female worker representatives reported animprovement in their communication skills and self-confidenceand felt they had much greater engagement in company issues.
“I didn’t know how to communicate with managers before,” said
one worker, “But now I do”. In one situation, the management met
with worker representatives to discuss how to reduce its defective
product rate. A woman representative collected feedback
from her team, and the factory accordingly made a series ofimprovements, which led to a significant improvement in quality.
“It hadn’t occurred to me before that these female workers could
observe and reflect on the production process with such depth,and help us to problem solve,” said the production manager. “Inthe past, even if the workers knew the reason behind a problem,
they would not inform management”. One senior manager also
acknowledged that it had been a learning process, noting “theiropinions have made us more empathetic to the frontline situation.”
This new trust has helped women workers become more at easewith being representatives, which has also strengthened their selfconfidence.
As of August 2021, Timeline has provided more than 200
companies with training, consulting and evaluation services
related to gender equality, reaching about 10,000 direct
beneficiaries, and more than 100,000 indirect beneficiaries.

Case Study: Timeline Consultancy ┃ 3

RECOMMENDATIONS• It is vital to operationalize commitments to the WEPs and fully
integrate gender into daily corporate management, so thatthese concepts live ‘off paper’.

including corporate social responsibility (CSR) personnel,
corporate senior management, frontline and mid-level
management, and frontline workers.

• Many private sector entities don’t have much experience inpromoting gender equality, thus it is important to encouragecompanies to share experiences and learn from each other’s
good practices.
• To ensure success, the broad participation of stakeholders
should be secured in any actions to promote gender equality,THE ROLE OF WEPs
A signatory to the WEPs since 2021, Timeline has been provided with both guidelines and a rich directory of reference materials andresources in its work with companies, including tools for gender gap analysis and examples of the WEPs in action. The WEPs network
provides opportunities to exchange with and learn from other organizations, which has inspired and enhanced Timeline’s work.

Case Study: Timeline Consultancy ┃ 4

weps.org
weps.org@WEPrinciples@WEPrinciples

weps@unwomen.org
weps@unwomen.org@Empower_Women@Empower_Women
  
      
           

Case Study: Timeline Consultancy ┃ 5