Women Making a Difference

Bonnie-Lyn de Bartok is an expert in all things social impact. Her 25-year career began in social impact management and measurement, first for organizations like the Red Cross, Peace Corps and the United Nations Development Programme and later in the mining sector and as an advisor to investors, asset owners and governments as an expert in social risk and impact. 

Now, de Bartok is bringing her insights to organizations as Founder and CEO of The S-Factor Co., a data-analytics company focused on the social factors of ESGs.

Disruption caught up with de Bartok to learn more about how her company is using data to identify and rate social impact, how serious efforts on social impact are linked to better organizational performance and how to spot social impact washing.

Your work is all about the S in ESG. What motivated that focus?

Working in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 2000s taught me about dependency models that forced people to leave their farms to work for foreign companies, which ultimately left because they ran out of money or moved to another country where labour and resources were cheaper, leaving behind no farms and no jobs. This helped me realize later in my career the intrinsic value of companies that cared about the communities in which they worked. 

How do you help organizations address the ‘social’ in their approaches with ESG issues?

My work with The S-Factor is focused mainly on advising investors to fully understand the implications of companies on society and to include 360-impact measures in their considerations. Our services allow investors to either subscribe to our ratings on all things social in their investments, or we can customize monitoring and evaluation to a particular set of social values they would like to purposefully include in their strategies, for risk, for impact and for purpose. 

 How are you leveraging tech to support your work on the social factor?

It would be impossible to see the macro patterns and measurable evidence that stem from data without the technology we have today. In 2009, we covered about 600 companies manually, annually and across roughly 15 data points. Today, with big data, machine learning and NLP (natural language processing), we cover over 40,000 companies, another 40,000 funds and every country in the world in near real-time across 1,200 data points. This information has the power to change the world, in ways investors couldn’t see before.  

Why is it important to help organizations measure and understand the social impact of their decisions and actions?

Social indicators are not just about the number of jobs created. If those jobs pay less than is livable, in a harmful environment, under forced labour practices or contribute to toxic waste dumping and inflicting harm on the communities where they operate for future generations, those jobs may in fact be perpetuating systemic risk and harm. The oversimplification of ‘social’ to just the number of jobs, or diversity head counts is dangerous territory, and leads to lack of accountability, lack of transparency and lack of fiduciary responsibility. 

How do you think companies can be incentivized to take ESG seriously in their business plans and approaches?

Companies that do well in disclosure and reporting on social issues outperform their peers, hand down. We now have hundreds of cases over history to prove it. They have better efficiency through social license, the most resilience, employee loyalty through tumultuous times and best in class returns.  

With more attention on ESG, we’re seeing some companies paying lip-service, or ‘impact washing’—how do we spot the wash?

Impact washing is a spin off of the more commonly known green-washing, which happens when companies spend more time talking about their efforts than actually taking meaningful action. 

So, how do you spot it? There are a few key hallmarks. First, look for vague statements and policies. ‘We’ll do our best not to inflict harm’ are huge red flags because they are non-committal and can’t be measured—and that’s by design. There’s also often a focus on reputational risks and rewards, rather than genuinely committing to an improvement program with measurable outcomes. 

You’ll also often see what I call a ‘fad focus’—things like having more women on boards, because organizations can appear to support gender parity with greater female representation at the top while not actually doing the work to genuinely support women leaders. And finally, beware of oversimplification—that goes back to my earlier points about reducing efforts to measures like the number of jobs created or taxes and royalties being paid. While these are major contributions to the social, they do not equal the social.

Editor’s Note: de Bartok recently participated in the Canadian Women’s Network Climatetech Founder and Funder event, which brings together Canadian female founders and investors in a casual setting to help forge connections and build long-term relationships. Flip to the back page of this issue to learn more about our next Founder and Funder event on Oct. 27.