Since 2006, Cartier has championed female entrepreneurs whose business ventures have a positive effect on society and the environment.
Cartier, the Richemont-owned jewelry house, is doing this through a program called the Cartier Women’s Initiative. The initiative awards women-owned or female-led businesses from any sector with grant money, networking opportunities, loans and professional advice designed to help them overcome barriers including underfunding and lack of access.
Until last year, the program was exclusively female-focused. But in 2023, Cartier invited men into the fold: The company introduced a new diversity, equity and inclusion pilot award to the program to reward entrepreneurs — regardless of gender — whose businesses fostered opportunities for underrepresented groups.
When the pilot award was announced last year, 70 business owners applied, 80 percent of whom identified as female and 20 percent of whom identified as male, according to Cartier. (Cartier does not disclose its overall number of applicants to the entire program.) This year, the number of applicants to the D.E.I. award category rose to 83, with 20 percent of them being men.
“We feel that the D.E.I. category should be open to all, regardless of gender, social background, religion, origin, size or sexual orientation because everyone can face challenges to access,” Cyrille Vigneron, the president and chief executive of Cartier since 2016, said by phone from Geneva. “Our objective is to create a sense of belonging in a more inclusive world.”
In Paris, Wingee Sin, the global program director of the Cartier Women’s Initiative, said recently that in the D.E.I. category they looked for “businesses who seek to solve an inclusion challenge.”
