Gender Equity at The Body Shop
The goal of this project was to work in partnership with The Body Shop employees to bring about changes in practices, policies, and values that would improve opportunities for advancement and the quality of life for women and men, while also enhancing the company’s capacity to develop people’s competence. Another goal of The Body Shop project was to develop a pragmatic understanding of how to train organizational members to do this work as full partners in the intervention and inquiry.
The project team, working in concert with internal change agents, collected diagnostic data, fed back analyses in a number of sites within the company, and initiated several pilot projects. These projects resulted in a heightened awareness of how the firm’s culture created problems for women, but also had a negative impact on the business. These insights were incorporated into the primary executive development program at The Body Shop.
In addition, the action research team developed an off-site workshop for a group of self-selected change agents. That methodology has become incorporated into a framework for teaching about the dual agenda as an innovative approach to change. The project was funded by The Ford Foundation and spanned three years.
A case study of the Body Shop Project is available in the book, Gender at Work: Organizational Change for Equality, Aruna Rao, Rieky Stuart, and David Kelleher (Eds.), W. Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1999.
A series of articles based on CGO’s work at The Body Shop were published in the November 2000 issue of Organization.
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