Our definition of large and medium-sized Danish companies comprises businesses with 130 employees or more and annual turnover exceeding DKK 500 million. Three databases were used for data collection: • LinkedIn, which was used for collecting diversity data on managers within Danish companies. Almost 1.8 million Danish profiles are registrered on LinkedIn, and large and medium-sized enterprises accounted for an exceedingly large share of those profiles. For each company, up to 30 profiles were obtained across management tiers categorised as ‘manager’, ‘director’, ‘VP’, ‘CXO’ and ‘Board’. Companies with fewer than nine profiles were excluded in order to guarantee a statistically valid basis. • Bisnode, which collected a large volume of business information from official sources such as the Danish register of companies, the Danish Business Authority and Statistics Denmark, provided extensive data on Danish companies which were used in our analyses. • Finally, we collected financial data and other information from the companies’ own annual reports. For the purpose of this report, diversity is defined in its broadest sense; diversity is being present when people with different backgrounds interact. In Denmark, workplace diversity is typically synonymous with gender and ethnicity, but in theory, the list of parameters is endless. In our survey, the data set was collected and subsequently analysed in respect of four parameters: 1) gender, 2) seniority (meaning length of service within a company), 3) ethnicity and 4) age. These parameters were selected based on what was possible: the data that could be found for the purpose of the survey. For example, diversity of educational background would have been an interesting parameter, but due to the number of different qualifications that exist and the variable methods of registering them, including this parameter was not practically possible. We chose to address leadership/management in the broadest sense of the term. This was a conscious choice because we believe that all management levels have positive impact on an organisation and thereby generate the benefits afforded by diversity. We chose to divide leadership up into the following categories: Board, CXO, VP, Director and Manager. The above mentioned method and process resulted in a list consisting of 321 Danish companies. In the survey, the Herfindahl-Hirschman (HHI) model from the report ”Diversity Matters” (McKinsey, 2014) was used in devising a corporate diversity metric1. As the individual diversity parameters are mutually exclusive, it was possible to determine the degree of diversity for each parameter and then the total diversity value from the mean value. This made it possible to benchmark the individual parameters against each other or consider them in isolation. 1 See also ”Method for assessing diversity in Danish Companies”, a report by PwC Proprietary information ISS World Services A/S - Copyright © 2016 5
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