GeoPark culture is reflected in the diversity of contributions that each employee makes based on their personality, profession, experience, age range, ethnicity and gender, and an important part of this philosophy includes providing job opportunities to the communities in our areas of influence.
Having the best work team available is part of our formula for success. We have a diverse workforce and a percentage of women that is well above the industry average.
Our management team leads by example and, with the support and participation of everyone at GeoPark, we break paradigms and biases and generate an increasingly inclusive, diverse and equitable environment. This guarantees that we are a successful company.
In line with best practice to promote equality, inclusion and diversity, in 2020 we furthered the implementation of the Gender Equality Management System (SGIG) to help secure Equipares certification. SGIG has eight dimensions with respective plans, actions, indicators and assurance mechanisms.
This system is the result of implementing requirements established by the Equipares program, which is promoted by the Ministry of Labor of Colombia with the support from the Presidential Council for Equality of Women of Colombia and technical support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Gender Equality Management System
(103-3) As part of this process, in November 2020 we created an Equality, Inclusion and Diversity Committee, which has 64% women members and 36% men. This committee has 11 members from GeoPark senior management, who are supported by a technical team of 18 employees from the countries we operate in.
In 2020 GeoPark ran its first Equality and Labor Harassment Survey, which had a gender perspective and which drew a 83% response rate among staff in Colombia. It allowed us to measure the value of our practices and consolidate a baseline to build an action plan and work towards closing gaps.
In 2021 we have the challenge of documenting policies to meet the requirements of the Equipares program and communicate them to our employees so that we each lead this process from our respective roles.
We created this program in GeoPark in 2013 to provide opportunities for young women from the local communities in the territories where we operate to access university education in science and engineering courses.
The program currently runs in Argentina, Chile and Colombia, and aims to offer young women the possibility of learning professions in which women are generally less represented. The scholarship covers academic expenses and provides holders with a permanent support network to help with specific needs and guarantee their academic success.
With this program we have offered 13 scholarships: four in Casanare (Colombia), seven in Neuquen (Argentina), and two in Punta Arenas (Chile).
To continue improving the implementation of diversity and inclusion practices, in 2020 we applied the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for the first time, revealing to the capital market our main indicators on this matter.
This evaluation allowed us to measure ourselves against an important group of listed companies, and although our capitalization at the time of calculating results was beneath that required to be part of the index, our equality metrics in 2020 were better than some companies that were in the ranking. Bloomberg highlighted GeoPark as a diversity success story, demonstrating the success of our ongoing work in closing equality and inclusion gaps. In 2021 we hope to apply to the index again.
