Equipares — Colombia's Gender-Equality Management Seal for Employers

Colombia's Ministry of Labour and the Presidential Advisory Office for Women's Equity launched the Equipares Labour Equity Seal in 2013, with technical support from UNDP, as the national version of a gender-equality management-system seal also used in other Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Equipares is a voluntary certification against a gender-equality management standard covering recruitment, pay, work-life balance and prevention of workplace violence and harassment. It has two tiers: a Silver seal for organisations implementing equality actions, and a Gold seal for those that demonstrate measurable closing of internal gender gaps; the programme was extended to small and medium enterprises in 2021 and requires periodic external audit for recertification.
By the most recent public tallies, roughly 86 to 103 organisations held the seal, with 20 further companies and entities recognised in 2024 alone (10 Gold, including Ecopetrol, Cruz Verde, Intercolombia, ISA Interconexion and XM; 5 Silver, including BBVA). External audits produce verifiable compliance scores: Grupo Energia Bogota's independently audited Equipares management system scored 94.86%. The associated Gender Equity Elite Group of certified companies reported reaching more than 26,000 people through training and violence-prevention programmes. Colombia is cited in press coverage as the country with the second-highest number of Sello-certified entities worldwide, after the Dominican Republic. Caution: the published figures are largely programme-reported participation counts and audited management-compliance scores, not an independently measured reduction in the gender pay gap itself.
Equipares is a national adaptation of a UNDP gender-equality seal model already replicated across multiple countries, demonstrating that the certification design itself is transferable across borders, even where pay-gap outcome data remains limited.

Read the full analysis: https://www.mintrabajo.gov.co/el-ministerio/victimas-y-equidad-laboral-con-enfoque-de-genero/equipares