BASF strives to foster a working environment based on mutual respect, trust and appreciation. Promoting and valuing diversity across all hierarchical levels is an integral part of our strategy and is also embedded in our corporate values.

For us, diversity means, among other things, having people from different backgrounds working at our company who can draw on their individual perspectives and skills to grow our business. As a global company, we serve many different customer needs. We also want to reflect this diversity in our workforce. By valuing and promoting employee diversity, we boost our teams’ performance and power of innovation, and increase creativity, motivation and employees’ identification with the company.

We expect inclusive conduct from all employees. By this, we mean creating an environment in which different aspects of diversity and individual strengths are valued. That is why in 2022, we focused on the topics of inclusion and our employees’ sense of belonging at BASF.

Our leaders play an important role in promoting diversity and creating an inclusive work environment. We support them with various offerings, for example as part of leadership development. In 2022, our leaders had the opportunity to deep dive into inclusive leadership in a training series on the CORE Leadership Values. The training supported our leaders in what they can specifically do to make the work environment more inclusive for all employees and how they can live up to their role model function and develop further.

To fulfill their responsibility for creating an inclusive workplace, all leaders in North America have been required since 2022 to set goals for the inclusive leadership of their teams. These are incorporated into their respective target agreements and implementation is reviewed. Market regions and countries in Europe developed individual diversity and inclusion roadmaps in 2022. The focus was on identifying the relevant topics in each country. In addition, since 2022 we have also been using the inclusion index to measure our employees’ sense of belonging as part of the regular employee survey.

Integrating different perspectives is very important to BASF and we want to create a greater awareness of diversity in our organization. For instance, we have created a digital learning format on unconscious bias for all employees. There are also a number of Employee Resource Groups around the world dedicated to different aspects of diversity. For example, the LGBTQ+ network in Ludwigshafen, Germany, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2022.

BASF Group employee age structure

(Total: 111,481, of which 26.4% women, as of December 31, 2022)

Diversity also relates to the company’s demographic profile, which varies by region within the BASF Group. Our aim is to create a suitable framework to help maintain the employability of our personnel at all stages of life and ensure the availability of qualified employees over the long term.

We also promote diversity in the selection and development of our leaders. We have set a global target to promote female leadership and aim to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions to 30% by 2030.

We have made important progress toward this and continually review our target. In the BASF Group, the global proportion of female leaders with disciplinary responsibility was 27.2% at the end of 2022 (2021: 25.6%).

To enable our management to monitor progress toward this target, we have developed a global dashboard that is used to regularly review the status of implementation. The systematic advancement of women is an integral part of our process for selecting senior executives and is regularly addressed in strategic dialogs with the divisions at the level of the Board of Executive Directors and in the Board’s strategic talent discussions. We also offer various programs to help female executives strengthen their network and increase their visibility at senior executive level.

As a signatory to the United Nations’ Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), we are committed to promoting gender equality. We are also involved in other external initiatives to promote inclusion of diversity and equal opportunities in the workplace, such as the Business for Inclusive Growth (B4IG) initiative.

• More information on diversity in the Board of Executive Directors and the Supervisory Board
• More information on diversity and inclusion