The SEC wants to know if your corporate employer is investing in you

Dr. Angela Jackson
4 min readNov 24, 2021

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.

The “Great Resignation”–or as former Department of Labor Secretary Robert Reich puts it, “a general strike”–showed that while many companies say human capital is a valuable asset, they aren’t always walking the walk. And workers are expressing their displeasure.

This mass exodus of the workforce coincides with conversations about the importance of investment in human capital — defined by UNICEF as “a set of knowledge, skills, and abilities that individuals accumulate towards personal well-being and improved work opportunities.”

SEC chair Gary Gensler recently tweeted one of the many reasons why human capital disclosure matters, explaining that investors need more transparency around metrics such as turnover, skills training, diversity demographics, and more.

New research from JUST Capital found that human capital data disclosure on topics like compensation, training, demographics, and health is low across the board. This type of disclosure matters because it gives a baseline to measure improvement, provides important information to employees and workers as they navigate employment decisions, and can help shape investors’ decisions. Simply put, it holds companies accountable.

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Dr. Angela Jackson

Innovating + Investing at the intersections of the Future of Work, Race and Equity. Twitter: @angjack