Tiffany Academy for Excellence and Diversity in Leadership is a program to identify and accelerate high-potential, diverse professionals who want to grow next-generation leadership skills at Tiffany. Since 2015, the program has offered high-potential early- to mid-career professionals the opportunity to build rewarding careers. We designed this program to help elevate our hiring and training initiatives. Each year, we convene a diverse class of aspiring leaders and provide them with leadership development training, mentoring and the opportunity to innovate the ways we do business.
Tiffany & Co. is proud to champion women as clients, employees and leaders in our Company. We focus on the representation of women throughout our Company and embed respect for gender equality through our policies and commitments. In 2017, we reinforced our commitment to women’s rights, human rights and diversity and inclusion by signing on to the United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles. Not only do women comprise 70%* of our workforce, but in 2020, women held 62%* of all positions in manager and above roles and as of January 31, 2021, 43% of our Senior Management is also comprised of women. We continue to invest in programs to advance gender equality. In 2018, we expanded our comprehensive parental leave program to provide new parents with greater flexibility and work-life balance. Ensuring equal opportunities for all of our employees enables them to reach their full potential in the workplace.
In 2019, Tiffany & Co. launched Employee Resource Groups, voluntary employee-led groups formed around aligned interests that provide employees the opportunity to engage more deeply, learn from one another and openly share ideas to influence our business.
Today, we have four global Employee Resource Groups—Multicultural, Women, LGBTQIA+ and Life Stages. These groups advance our goals around creating positive community impact, building an inclusive culture, expanding our learning and development and diversifying our talent sourcing.
We strive to create inclusive and flexible workforce policies and practices that respond to our employees’ unique needs. Recently, we updated our Global Wardrobe Program to reflect gender neutrality and inclusion, and we have updated many of our policies with more inclusive language. We also updated our policies to offer expanded paid time off for voting in the U.S. and we implemented a global COVID-19 emergency leave program.
Our Parental and Caregiver Leave policy is designed to give all employees greater flexibility. The policy includes a minimum of 14 weeks of paid leave for birth parents and eight weeks of paid leave for non-birth parents. The Company also provides two weeks of paid leave per year for employees to care for ill family members, as well as a flexible workplace policy to accommodate greater work-life balance.
We are proud to maintain a culture of inclusion for members of the LGBTQIA+ community. As part of our long-standing commitment to this community, we have maintained same-sex benefits for our employees, and we were the first luxury jeweler to feature a same-sex couple in our advertising. Since 2018, that commitment to inclusion has earned Tiffany & Co. a top score of 100% in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index in recognition of our LGBTQIA+-inclusive practices to foster a diverse, engaging and inclusive work environment for LGBTQIA+ employees. We have long supported LGBTQIA+ equality, which we champion through recruiting outreach, employee training and benefits, and expanded representation of relationships in our marketing materials and advertisements.
In 2018, our CEO signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ pledge, a personal commitment to uphold four important principles: cultivate workplaces that support open dialogue on complex and sometimes difficult conversations about diversity and inclusion, implement and expand unconscious bias education, share progress with other organizations undertaking this journey, and create strategic inclusion and diversity plans with our Board of Directors.
We have advanced our long-standing commitment to women at work through our culture, policies and programs at Tiffany. In 2017, we reinforced our commitment to women’s rights, human rights and diversity and inclusion by signing on to the UN’s Women’s Empowerment Principles. Through supporting non-discrimination, promoting professional development for women and publicly reporting on progress to achieve gender equality, signatories of the Women’s Empowerment Principles commit to prioritizing women in the workplace. Guided by these principles, Tiffany & Co. is committed to fostering gender equality, endeavoring to treat all women and men fairly at work and to support their health, safety and well-being.
We are honored to partner with the Black in Fashion Council and support its mission to represent and secure the advancement of Black individuals in the fashion and beauty industry. As part of this support for the next three years, we plan to develop ways to implement learnings from this collaboration within our Company.
Tiffany celebrates love in all its forms, and we are committed to advocating for equality for all. In 2015, we filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage. The same year, we became the first luxury jeweler to feature same-sex couples in our advertising.
In 2019, we signed the Open to All Pledge, committing to maintain a welcoming and safe environment for all people—including our employees, visitors, vendors and clients—regardless of their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, immigration status, religion or disability. We are now involved in an Open to All Inclusive Retail campaign that helps both employees and clients create an inclusive store environment.
We are also a proud signatory to the Freedom to Love Pledge, a business-led commitment to speak out against laws, policies and practices that threaten people for who they love.
In 2018 and 2019 we marched in the NYC Pride March under our “Believe In Love” banner.
And in 2019, we removed the term “bridal” for engagement and couples’ rings across our digital platforms in an effort to be inclusive of all relationships. We now use couples’ rings to stand for love in all its forms.
In 2020, we launched a partnership with the Ali Forney Center, a leading organization providing services for homeless LGBTQIA+ youth. We highlighted five graduates from the Ali Forney Center in a social media campaign during Pride Month in 2020 and plan to continue to create engagement opportunities between our employees and the Center.
Our 2021 Pride Month #StandForLove campaign showcased New Yorkers from the LBGTQIA+ community, highlighting what they stand for.
We are proud that Tiffany employees embody our cultural values, including being bold and doing the right thing. We applaud their strengths, appreciate their differences and know that the various dimensions of diversity that each employee brings to Tiffany makes Tiffany a more inclusive place to work. That’s why we include Tiffany employees as brand ambassadors—part of an ongoing storytelling program that allows us to recognize, share and celebrate our employees. This campaign, which has been featured on LinkedIn, demonstrates our commitment to inclusion by showing the ways we encourage our employees to grow, speak up, engage and drive meaningful change.
