DuPont Sustainability Report: Kim Markiewicz, DuPont Vice President, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Originally published in DuPont 2022 Sustainability Report
What excited you most about taking on this role?
I’m excited that we elevated this role to an executive level position, not for myself, but for the strategic oversight, expanded scope, and impact the role has now. I believe culture makes an organization. Safety has always been a strong part of our culture—now I see DE&I gaining that level of recognition and engagement around the world in alignment with our Respect for People core value. There are efforts to accelerate DE&I every week somewhere across our global organization. That’s exciting and provides an opportunity for me to help our teams make a greater impact within our organization and communities.
What are the most meaningful advances you think we made in 2021?
I think we made a meaningful shift beyond just helping individuals traditionally thought of as diverse feel more included, to celebrating and honoring all forms of diversity. Now, more than ever, we’re building a culture that respects and values all our employees, with more local involvement for broader global impact. For example, we have more employees involved in local ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) outside of the US and I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to increase their funding this year. We’ve done more listening and fostering brave conversations which helped our managers be more informed and better equipped to support their teams.
Do you think our teams recognize that we are making progress?
Recognizing that 2020 was an inflection point, we made advancing DE&I a corporate priority in 2021 and I am so proud of the progress we made. More importantly our employees see progress and that showed up in our IMPACT Survey scores for DE&I which were up significantly vs 2020. Also, we were able to maintain our gender and racial/ethnic minority representation goals in a very tough labor market. Our numbers benchmark well vs. peer companies and the industries in which we participate.
Knowing DE&I is a journey, what’s the next milestone you’d like to hit?
I think we took a huge step forward by publishing our Workforce Demographics Dashboard on our website in 2021. Few other companies in our peer group provide this level of transparency for all to see. Building on this, I’d like to provide more site-specific data so each site can set goals that matter most to them and engage more of their workforce’s enthusiasm and energy. That will take us to the next level of engagement, action and results.
