Moreover, simplifications in climate and pollution reporting may slow the detection of harms affecting fundamental rights to health, decent work, and a safe environment.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nFRA are also apposed to relocating human rights policy disclosures to a single, cross-cutting item ( GDR-P), since it risks reducing human rights to generic statements. The GDR-P disclosures should require to remain explicitly disaggregated by rightsholder group (own workforce, value chain workers, affected communities and consumers), setting out group-specific commitments and the associated governance and due diligence approaches, rather than a single, undifferentiated policy statement.<\/p>\n
In addition, FRA identifies three clusters of changes that could significantly weaken transparency on gender outcomes:<\/p>\n
1\ufe0f\u20e3 Gender pay gap (S1\u201115)<\/p>\n
The simplified ESRS would require companies to disclose only the unadjusted gender pay gap \u2014 a single aggregate figure showing the raw difference in average pay between men and women.<\/p>\n
No adjusted analysis.<\/p>\n
No breakdown by age, category, or country.<\/p>\n
This falls short of both GRI and the Pay Transparency Directive, which requires deeper analysis and action when unexplained gaps exceed 5%.<\/p>\n
Without granularity, companies may appear compliant while lacking the insight needed to detect discrimination or structural bias.<\/p>\n
2\ufe0f\u20e3 Removal of gender\u2011disaggregated data<\/p>\n
Several mandatory gender breakdowns disappear in the simplified standards, including:<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0f non\u2011guaranteed\u2011hours employees (S1\u20115)<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0f participation in performance and career development reviews, and average training hours (S1\u201112)<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0f uptake of family\u2011related leave (S1\u201114)<\/p>\n
These deletions reduce visibility into gender\u2011specific outcomes \u2014 especially for women in precarious roles or with limited access to development opportunities.<\/p>\n
They also diverge from GRI requirements and weaken the ability to identify structural barriers.<\/p>\n
3\ufe0f\u20e3 From \u201cparental leave\u201d to \u201cmaternity leave\u201d (S1\u201110)<\/p>\n
Replacing parental leave with maternity leave narrows the scope of social protection disclosures.<\/p>\n
EU law \u2014 notably Directive (EU) 2019\/1158 \u2014 promotes shared caregiving, granting each parent at least four months of parental leave.<\/p>\n
By focusing only on maternity leave, the simplified ESRS risk reinforcing the stereotype that childcare is primarily a women\u2019s responsibility, sidelining fathers and undermining gender equality objectives.<\/p>\n
\ud83d\udd0d Why this matters<\/p>\n
Taken together, these revisions reduce the ESRS\u2019 ability to reveal gender disparities.<\/p>\n
Without mandatory gender\u2011disaggregated data, companies will struggle to identify patterns such as:<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0f women\u2019s over\u2011representation in variable\u2011hour or part\u2011time roles,<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0f unequal access to training and career development,<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0f structural barriers affecting women differently across operations and value chains.<\/p>\n
Intersectional inequalities \u2014 increasingly recognised in EU policy \u2014 also become harder to detect when disclosures are limited to aggregate figures.<\/p>\n
\ud83d\udcac Final thought<\/p>\n
Transparency is not a burden; it is a prerequisite for progress.<\/p>\n
If we want to close gender gaps, our reporting standards must illuminate inequalities \u2014 not obscure them.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s keep pushing for the data and the standards that make equality real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While ECB, EBA, ESMA and EIOPA focus in particular on cross-cutting and environmental standards, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) opinion assesses whether the proposed simplifications of ESRS preserve essential safeguards for people adversely affected by corporate activities, and do not compromise the protection of human rights or the quality of disclosures. FRA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2328,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-csrd","8":"category-esrs","10":"post-with-thumbnail","11":"post-with-thumbnail-large"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2329,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2327\/revisions\/2329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleeritesg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}