Our Diversity Advantage Program focuses on helping minority- and women-owned small CPG businesses grow. We do this by helping them forge closer partnership with our large retail clients and by providing operational support such as data, training and consultative resources. The goal of this program is to help create more equity in the CPG industry.

IRI partners with Generating Genius, an organization that supports young people from diverse backgrounds who show high potential in science, technology, engineering and math but lack access to top universities and businesses. IRI opens its workplace to these young individuals to show them what it’s like to work in data insights and analytics, inspiring their interest to work in the field and ultimately help create more diversity in the industry.

IRI is honored to partner with the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) for the UIC-IRI Diverse Marketing Scholars program. This two-semester program includes a monetary scholarship to select UIC students of color, ongoing mentorship and instruction from IRI market research professionals, and real-world lessons and project work in market research. The program is designed to develop a pipeline of diverse talent for Chicagoland that possesses the hard and soft skills needed by tomorrow’s market research professionals.

IRI collaborates with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and its SeeHer movement for increasing accurate portrayals of women and girls in marketing, advertising, media and entertainment.

SeeHer developed GEM (Gender Equality Measure™) to uncover unconscious gender bias in advertising and programming. IRI partners with SeeHer to analyze layers of shopper, panel and store sales data, along with viewership data, to learn the sales impact of GEM-scored ad campaigns.

This research has shown that depicting women accurately is not only the right thing to do for gender equality, but also for a positive impact on sales.

Read the latest GEM Lift study from IRI and SeeHer