The draft codes of good practice made allowances for gender. In many aspects an enterprise could earn points under employment equity for black people, and additional points for black women. This always translated in extra indicators of some of the elements - one indicator for black people and another for black women.  Last year cabinet and the minister decided to reduce and simplify the number of indicators on the scorecard. The concept of gender adjustment was born.

Whereas previously the scorecard had two indicators - the new scorecards use the following wording in for example the QSE scorecard, employment equity.

Black employees of the measured entity as a percentage of all employees adjusted using the Adjusted Recognition for Gender (my italics)

How does this adjusted recognition for gender work, and is it less complicated than the old codes?

The codes use two formulae

A = B/2 + C

Where A is the adjusted recognition for gender

B is the percentage of employees who are black people

C is the percentage of employees who are black women

There actual calculation for points is:

A = B/C X D

Where A is the score achieved

B is the adjusted recognition for gender calculated above

C is the target for that indicator

D is the weighting

At first glance this is quite complicated - the math sometimes seems quite daunting.

Let us use a practical example;

Rules to follow:

• Take the points available and halve them, One half for both male and female, and the other half for female only. In this example, 3 points are available. Half is 1.5 points for black people, and 1.5 points for black women.
• Take the target and halve it for the black women calculation. In this case the target for black people is 40%. Half is 20% that is the target for black women.

Worked example:

Let us say that in this business there are 12 top management. Of that 3 are black males and 1 is a black female, i.e. there are 4 black people in top management

Then we know than 33.3% of all top management is black people and 8.3% of top management are black females (1/12).

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8^th March 2007