Creating a standard diversity and inclusion reporting methodology
What is the Cultural & Demographic Sentiment & Representation (CDSR) Index?
The CDSR Index is a world-first global metric for reporting on the domain of ‘diversity and inclusion’ (D&I), but with an expanded and more meaningful scope. It can be used for any internal or external reporting purposes, including within the ESG framework, and is suitable for all organisations.
It also offers a world-first ‘score’ for commitment and results.
The CDSR Index analyses the customer results from the Diversity Atlas platform, and is comprised of 30 criteria, all connected to these results and what we believe should be best practice in the D&I space. The CDSR is designed to streamline reporting and bring clarity to results because increasingly stakeholders, investors and staff alike expect organisations to address and report meaningfully on diversity and inclusion; and of course, access benchmarking.
As there is currently no global standard or defined ‘best practice’, we have defined it ourselves.
The CDSR Index complements ESG and any regulatory or public-facing reporting with quantitative information on drawn from a combination of results from the Diversity Atlas platform as well as existing HR data provided by participating organisations. The Diversity Atlas CDSR Index is “global” in that it has been designed to accommodate all regions, however individual ‘by region’ reports and scores may also be generated using the same metrics, whether by country, continent or any other geography.
Our reporting is also compliant with EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and GDPR more generally. Further, tailoring the report to comply with all jurisdictions around the world is made possible with its agile framework and design.
What is ‘CDSR’?
It is a rebranding of DEI, a DEI 2.0 if you will, but it encapsulates better the work we actually do, or should be doing.
Culture refers to ethnicity, people-groups, cultures, religions, languages and countries.
Demographics refers to age, gender, sexuality, position in hierarchy, socioeconomics, disability, medical conditions, neurodivergence, education, priorities and others.
Sentiment refers to opinions about whether or not the company is a good place to work and positive in its messaging and practices, and whether or not the leadership and colleagues are supportive of the company values in their behaviours, and looks also to experiences of discrimination, perceptions of diversity, ‘buy-in’, job security, job satisfaction, engagement and other metrics.
Representation looks at internal representation (eg: are women under-represented in the hierarchy, are people with disability?), and external representation (does the organisation reflect its community / customer base?)
The CDSR Index brings a measurement to these factors.
Domains of the CDSR framework
How does it work?
- Customers license and deploy Diversity Atlas to their staff / teams.
- Once completed, customers request an CDSR report from their dashboard.
- As part of the assessment, some HR data will be required – this is submitted using an online form.
- The Diversity Atlas Anthrodata team will apply the criteria and calculate the score
- Diversity Atlas will deliver the final report – either ready for publication or for editing by customer’s own design team.
How is the CDSR Index calculated?
The CDSR Index was developed over the course of 2024 by the Anthrodata team at Diversity Atlas, comprising a lead data scientist and subject matter experts (SMEs) across an array of fields such as anthropology, linguistics and D&I advocacy. Part of the research included a literature review studying examples such as the Global Peace Index, Gender Equality Index and the Australian Cohesion Index among others, all of which hold their own calculative approaches within their own domains; some are weighted, some are not.
Our index is a score that is an easily interpretable measure of CDSR as a complex multi-dimensional space, ripe for analysis across five pillars. It measures both the efforts to collect and publish meaningful diversity data, and results on Community Representation, Sentiment, Proportional Representation, and Survey Cooperation.
Across these five pillars, the index is weighted. The weight (or relative importance) assigned to each pillar has been developed by Diversity Atlas’s Anthrodata Team. The index works on a scale from 0 to 10, with points allocated for meeting each scoring criteria in the pillars.
