B Lab Forces For Good Podcast — Episode 3: Which comes first — policy or progress?

The ultimate chicken-and-egg debate—business edition: which comes first—progress or policy?

In the latest episode of Forces For Good, host Irving Chan-Gomez explores this question with Jamila Rizvi, Deputy Managing Director of B Corp Future Women, and Wojciech Baginski, a member of B Lab Global’s Board. They’ve seen how businesses can push for change—setting new standards before regulations catch up. But they also know that without strong policies, progress can stall, leaving workers, communities, and the planet behind.

From gender equity in the workplace to the latest EU sustainability regulations, this episode unpacks how business and policy shape each other—and why they must work together to create good jobs, fair work, and a more just and sustainable economy.

Listen now to explore:

• How workplaces can play a central role in shaping policy that benefits everyone

• How businesses can drive progress ahead of regulation

• When policy is essential to accelerating systemic change

• What it will take to create a future where companies prioritize people and the planet

Listen to Forces For Good and join us in rethinking the relationship between business and policy: https://lnk.to/forces-for-good-progressive-policy

TRANSCRIPT: Season 3 — Episode 3: Which comes first — policy or progress?

This is Forces For Good, a podcast from B Lab, the nonprofit network powering the global B Corp movement. I’m your host, Irving Chan-Gomez.

Forces For Good takes a hard look at how businesses are helping to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges of our time.

We're excited to be back with Season 3 to dive deep into what makes a good job.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The answer to this silly but also serious scientific question is still up for debate. As is the answer to my question today: Which comes first, progress or policy?

Without progress, we don't get progressive policy, but without policy, we don’t always see progress. Take the 40-hour work week, for example. Workers and unions started demanding better hours and wages in the early 1800s. Some employers complied, but it took until 1940 for the United States to pass a law reducing the work week to 40 hours. Other countries, such as Canada and Australia, have followed suit and enshrined the 40-hour work week into law. But others have let society set its own standards without legal interference.

Now, some businesses and countries have started considering an even shorter work week—four days. So which came first here? The progress or the policy? Depends on who you ask.

Jamila: We’ve seen for a very long time that policy change can drive societal change. Policy is a lever to change the way society works and businesses operate. We know that policy can incentivize or disincentivize various behaviors, but we absolutely see the flip side as well, where social change is moving ahead of government change.

That’s Jamila Rizvi. She is Deputy Managing Director at Future Women, a B Corp committed to achieving gender equity in Australian workplaces.

Jamila: We spend at least eight hours a day, most of us at work. And that's a huge portion of our waking hours. A lot of us spend more time with our colleagues and our bosses than we do with our own families because of the nature of work. And so for me, trying to make sure that workplaces are not only effective and fair, but inclusive and joyous, supportive places to be has become something I'm really focused on.

Jamila works across sectors. She works with businesses to improve their gender inclusivity policies, with women to upskill and find jobs that value them, and in the public sector to implement policy change.

Jamila: I’d love to tell you it was a grand strategic decision, but I don’t think it was. My business partner, Helen McCabe, who’s the founder of Future Women, and I both grew up around policymaking. She worked in politics and the press gallery in Canberra, and my first full-time job was in the Prime Minister’s office. We were always surrounded by policy and governance. We grew up around the legislature and we grew up around a building where votes were being taken daily and we were watching the government try and move decisions through houses of parliament to be able to make change.

And I think for both of us coming into this equation, it made sense that if we only focused on business, we wouldn't be able to get the results that we wanted. And that unquestionably we had to look at all sectors and that included the private sector, the not for profit sector and the public sector. I don't necessarily think we sat down and thought about it. I think we assumed it.

Our second guest today is Wojciech Baginski, a member of the B Lab Global Board of Directors and Partner at Impactive.law. Wojtek has been involved with the B Corp movement from the moment he found out about it.

Wojciech: I was working in New York when I came across a paper on benefit corporations by Rick Alexander, William Clark, and other influential lawyers. I read it and thought, 'Hallelujah, this is my world! I’ve got to get engaged.' I reached out to B Lab in New York and said, 'Hey, I’m here, I’m ready to help. Let’s see what we can do together.

Wojciech has a similar answer to the progress-versus-policy question: they are inextricably linked.

Wojciech: It’s a loop. In some fields, societal progress moves ahead of policy, and policy then tries to catch up. 

AI is one example of this. Right now, policy is playing catch-up to quick advancements in the field, but it’s also trying to get ahead of negative effects through regulation. 

Wojciech says benefit corporations are another example of this loop where progress and policy chase one another. Many B Corps already voluntarily report and share data on their ESG performance, but incoming EU directives like the Empowering Consumers Directive and Green Claims Directive will make it compulsory for companies to provide transparent, verifiable information. The goal is to combat greenwashing and protect consumer interests.

Wojciech: If you look at Europe, we seem to be ahead in legislation and policy. If you look at those pieces of regulations holistically, some of them are far ahead in terms of societal progress, which is why there’s backlash. That’s why we have a lot of these tough discussions in the EU where businesses are saying, 'Not too fast! We can’t catch up; this will cost too much.' In some cases, it’s difficult to tell whether policy is leading or chasing progress.

Both Wojciech and Jamila work at the intersection of policy and progress for workers. Jamila works mostly on pushing forward gender-based initiatives, while Wojciech encourages stakeholder governance over shareholder primacy, encouraging companies to consider all stakeholders in decision-making. Let’s dive into Jamila’s work first…

Jamila: My work is twofold. I get to work with employer organizations, talking to them about gender inequality and what that might mean within their workforce and trying to support them and encourage them to recruit more women, retain more women, and ideally promote more women as well and create workplaces that are going to support those women. 

I also work with women who are unemployed or underemployed and face barriers to accessing paid work. And that’s the work we do at Future Women through government funding. And that is something that, for me, is at the very core of what I’m about and what I see as the purpose of my work. 

Jamila says it’s a lot easier for women to fall out of the workforce or become under employed. There are several compounding factors that make this true. 

Jamila: That might've been an experience of family violence or domestic abuse, might've been an experience of discrimination or harassment at work.

It might be that they have struggled to get back into the workforce after having children or as they've become older. We know that age discrimination, for example, is something that women experience far more significantly than men. So for me, the way that my work fits into the broader picture of how you make work better for people is quite clear. 

But as we’ve been telling you for this entire series and as we’ll continue to tell you. Diverse workforces are good workforces. So including women and other marginalized groups is just good business. 

Jamila: The reality is that having a more diverse, representative workforce, a workforce that looks like the general population is good for an organization. And I think most of us know that instinctively from our own lives. If you've ever had the experience of working in a group of people who have a lot of things in common, you know, we all get that feeling in a room of people who are quite like us, there's a bit of a buzz of like, yeah, you, you get me.

You're like me. We've had similar experiences. We've got a similar view of the world. That's a lovely feeling. It's a really tantalizing feeling. And it's often a feeling we tend to want more of, but in that very same group of people, you are missing information. You are missing new perspectives. You are missing the potential of what could happen in terms of that group of people making decisions, thinking about the world based on a broader experience of the world.

So more diverse groups make better decisions. 

So companies can and should set business strategies that are inclusive. But what if they don’t? Policy can force them. Take equal pay… in the UL, the Equal Pay Act of 1970 prohibited sex discrimination in employment and wages–and in the US, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 did the same. Both laws had follow up legislation to strengthen their effect. According to Jamila, even if equal pay is achieved, a pay gap will still remain.  

Jamila: So something I think is worth touching on is the difference between equal pay and the gender pay gap, which sometimes get conflated, especially by employer organizations. Um, so equal pay is about saying, I have two people in front of me who are doing exactly the same job and they are being paid differently.

If they are being paid differently, then you do not have equal pay. If they are being paid differently for exactly the same job in the same organization, working the same amount of time. In most countries, in the OECD at least, that is now illegal, and so it should be an absolute bare minimum that we do not pay a man more than a woman for doing the same thing. That's equal pay. Pay gaps are different and actually a lot more complicated. 

OECD stands for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It includes many European countries, Australia, Canada, The United States and Japan among others. Jamila refers to it frequently because these countries share many policies and workplace practices.

Jamila: So forgive me, I'm going to use the Australian example, but it is an example that we know is not dissimilar to most countries in the OECD.

So I promise the data doesn't differ much. If you took a cis man and a cis woman's age, let's say 22, they've just finished university and they're heading off into the workforce. We know straight away that the woman is more likely to be going into an industry or a sector that pays less than the industrial sector that that man goes into. In fact, we know that even if they go into the same sector, the woman is more likely to be paid three or 4 percent less.

And that gap starts there and it begins from the first day in the workforce and then it starts to grow and it grows over time. And we start to see an intense acceleration around the average childbearing years where women of course are still more likely to take time out of the workforce than men are. And we see that gap start to grow and grow and grow such that in Australia at the moment, the average woman's salary peaks at age 39. Like that's when you hit the ceiling, right? 

Women are boxed in by the pay gap so policy needs to help them catch up. Jamila describes a sticky floor that holds women back—women are often the ones taking time off to care for children and other family members. When policy changes make child care easier, women are able to get into the workforce and stay in the workforce. 

Jamila: We have seen policy responses around the world that are doing that better. We've seen it in France, more subsidies and tax deductions to companies that offer childcare facilities on site that offer flexible working arrangements, including job sharing, reduced hours, remote working. And we've seen the impacts of that. France now has one of the highest rates of female labor force participation in the European Union, I think it's close to 70 percent now, compared to an average that's closer to 60%. 

Jamila also describes a hard glass ceiling. Women struggle to make it into the c-suite and get top jobs. There may be policy remedies but businesses can also choose progress on their own. 

Business leaders and policy-makers need to work together to make the pay gap smaller and smaller until it's gone. It'll take incremental change from all parties and incentives as well as penalties. 

Policy and progress can also work together to make other improvements to the working world. Here's Wojciech again…

Wojciech: There’s two things I’d like to mention. Firstly, B Lab’s standards initially pushed the boundary on responsible business. They basically formed an avant-garde of standards and how a company should behave and operate. 

So that’s one thing. It pushed the boundary much further. And we managed to do a really good job in attracting really impactful companies to the movement based on our standards, providing them with a certain blueprint of how to function, where to get better, how to get better, compare them among the crowd and exchange ideas between B Corps. That was one of the functions of the standards that they managed to rally companies around them. And make them, you know, become better by showing that you can become better in this place and that place, and many other areas. 

And now, going back to Europe, which is at the avant-garde of the sustainability shift, you have certain standards coming out of Europe which are really high at the end of the day. So now, in my mind, the value proposition from B Lab is that since we are doing this work with shifting our standards, upgrading them, our role now should be to push the boundary a bit more further again, and try to show where companies could be actually better than the regulatory frameworks that are being set in Europe. It’s high, but we can go higher. 

Policy and progress must continue pushing each other forward. If we look at sustainability, for example, many progress goals [in terms of both policy and activism] have been set for 2030. It’s going to take radical action to meet these goals. 

Wojciech: It's a little bit disappointing that we have basically five years and I think the progress that we've made is not that significant at the end of the day. Time is running and we're nowhere near. I would say even with the big push in Europe for policy around sustainability, SDGs, everything. I think even when people, when you talk, for instance, with people from the U.S. they think, ‘Oh, you are going really, really quick.’ You're saying you're in Europe, you're looking at it. You're saying, yeah, that goes quick. But at the end of the day, there's also some backlash actually.

And there are some talks to delay implementation of certain regulations and policy initiatives. And there's a big push from bug businesses that say, ‘Hey, this is too burdensome. This will not change anything.’ And we have all that discussion. So having said that, I think the policy element is quite important, because if we would get in line politicians, academics, the main activists, the main actors in the space, and actually manage to agree that we need to change quickly how we do business, then I think policy as the ultimate tool and regulations as the ultimate tool could very quickly force companies to change their operations. I think you put sanctions, you know, regulations in place that will make managers accountable. There, you have a lot of options, what you could actually do, but the sad and disappointing part is that we're still in most spaces under discussions. Some politicians still don't believe in anything that we're talking about, some are actually contesting a lot of the academic work that has been done around climate change, around the flaws in our system. It will just take time.

So policy plays a huge role here and could actually play a much larger role if we would manage to collect again, politicians, academics, and, and the main business people to agree on one way forward.

We may never know if the chicken or the egg came first, but we do know that policy and progress must work together to improve the working world. Governance incentives, wage regulations, and environmental sanctions all play a role in shaping the workforce of tomorrow.

If you’d like to learn more about B Corps and purpose-driven companies, visit BCorporation.net. Subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your support helps Forces for Good reach new audiences.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the interviewees and do not reflect the positions or opinions of the producers or any affiliated organizations.

This podcast was brought to you by B Lab in partnership with The Gates Foundation. Special thanks to Sherri Jordan for coordination. Forces For Good is produced by Hueman Group Media.

I’m your host, Irving Chan-Gomez. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!