Gender equality within the scope of sustainability

In today's everchanging world, the concept of sustainability has gained a major place in the global sense. Thus, what companies do in the name of sustainability in both the national and international contexts has gained great importance. In order to develop good relations with their stakeholders, companies have started to publish their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities within the scope of sustainability in their annual reports. What kind of activities the companies in Turkey have included in these reports on behalf of gender equality which has great importance in terms of sustainibility is the subject of this study. The extent of this study has been established with 442 reports published by companies in the sustainability and corporate governance indices of Public Disclosure Platform (PDP). In these reports, the question of when the gender equality activities were carried out, the industrial differences of the activities and the scope of the activities have been tried to be determined. The collected reports were analyzed by content analysis. From the findings, it has been determined that companies do not attach enough importance to gender equality activities. Gender equality activities in the reports have turned out to be narrow-scoped, most of which were created by a certain few companies that belonged to the same industries. It has been observed that more attention was paid to the gender equality issues that emerge in the business world, than to the structural problems of society. According to these results, it is concluded that the reports published by the companies are insufficient and companies should include more comprehensive gender equality activities in their reports in order to gain an advantage over each other and to reach out to the problems of the society correctly.