The Impact Edit: Carbon has a number. People have a paragraph.
Talking about carbon is hard. Talking about people is harder, and not because the measurement is more complex. Because a ton of CO2 does not have feelings, a family, or a lawyer. That is the real reason the "S" in ESG is still so thin, and it is the thing almost nobody in this industry will say out loud.
I have read more ESG reports than I can count, and I keep coming back to the same person: the one who cleans the building at 4 AM. She is almost never in the report. The systems we use were not built to find her. And until they are, the gap between what companies say about people and what they can actually prove will keep widening, behind very polished language.
We have been here before
Almost exactly 115 years ago, on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the upper floors of the Triangle Waist Company building in Manhattan. The workroom floors were covered in cotton scraps and tissue paper that had been accumulating for months. The fire escape collapsed under the weight of workers trying to use it. Many of those who died were trapped behind doors the owners had locked to prevent unauthorized breaks. One hundred and forty-six people, mostly young immigrant women, died in eighteen minutes.
The factory owners tracked their inventory with meticulous precision. They knew exactly what every bale of cotton and every finished garment was worth. The conditions of the people producing those garments had no equivalent ledger. There was no shared definition of what "safe" meant, nothing specific enough to hold anyone accountable.
The Factory Investigating Commission that followed inspected over 3,000 workplaces, held 59 public hearings, and took testimony from 472 witnesses. Within three years, 36 new laws had reformed New York's labor code. What drove that was not goodwill or corporate intention. It was the forced creation of a system that made human conditions measurable, specific enough to legislate against and verifiable enough to enforce. More than a century later, that is still precisely what the "S" in ESG does not have.
How the "E" got so much further ahead
The environmental side of ESG did not get rigorous by accident. In 1997, the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development agreed to build a shared methodology for measuring greenhouse gas emissions from scratch, convening a steering group that included environmental organizations alongside Shell, Norsk Hydro, and Tokyo Electric. At the time there were no guidelines for companies to measure their emissions at all. By 2001, the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard existed, and it became the foundation for virtually every carbon reporting framework that followed. It was negotiated across adversarial parties, designed to be auditable, and built to survive challenge.
The social side never had that negotiation. It has been expected to carry serious claims with looser definitions, weaker systems, and far less agreement on what counts as evidence. If you have ever read an "S" section and felt like something was missing, you were not imagining it.
Looking at the numbers
The World Benchmarking Alliance's 2024 Social Benchmark looked at 2,000 influential companies employing more than 107 million workers. Less than 5% disclose that they guarantee a living wage for their workforce. Only one in ten identify and assess human rights risks in their supply chains. Just 13% involve affected stakeholders in identifying those risks, and 4% include them in decisions about how to respond. These are not edge cases. They sit at the center of what the "S" is supposed to cover.
And then there is this. A study published in Nature Climate Change in December 2025 found that 74% of S&P 500 companies had revised their greenhouse gas emissions at least once over the prior decade, with more than 135 million tons having gone previously unreported. Carbon is the most mature, most institutionally supported category in ESG, and it still needed that level of correction. Social data, which is more fragmented, more self-reported, and often assembled across functions that do not share systems or definitions, is working with far less beneath it.
What happens inside the reporting process
The work is often happening. But reporting is not the same thing as measuring, and that is where things start to slip. Marketing wants the story to sound compelling without drifting into overclaiming. Legal wants to avoid unnecessary exposure. Leadership wants stronger positioning on people and wellbeing, but grows uncomfortable the moment those claims become specific enough to be tested. So the language gets sanded down until what remains is a section full of intentions doing far more work than the evidence beneath them can support.
Genuinely important work gets made to look softer than it is. When the evidence chain is thin, good work does not get protected. It gets questioned, watered down, or left in language so general it becomes impossible to distinguish from anyone else's. And the person cleaning the building at 4 AM remains invisible.
On DEI, and why it was never quite the answer
For a while, DEI functioned as the S section's most visible placeholder. The goals were right. Equity, inclusion, and belonging inside organizations matter enormously. But the mechanisms that grew up around DEI, the annual training, the volunteer day, the carefully assembled headcount photo, those were not really DEI. They were the appearance of it, and a lot of companies confused the two. They were also legible and containable in a way the real work is not. You could report a number. You could show a picture. You could say the training happened.
The reality is that the metrics behind S are not that clean. The S is supply chains and wage floors and whether the person who cleans the building at 4 AM has a safe way to get home afterward. It carries a real fear of getting it wrong in public, of saying something specific enough to be held to, of discovering that the audit reveals something nobody wanted to find. That fear is understandable. It is also exactly what has kept the reporting so thin for so long.
What companies can actually talk about
Here is what I find most frustrating: companies are often doing more than they say. The field simply does not yet have a place to put it, so the real work stays invisible and the safe language fills the space instead.
The building industry is full of examples. There are firms that have redesigned their HVAC systems to account for the different metabolic rates of the people actually using the space, not the average occupant from a 1960s office. There are procurement teams that have done serious work tracing labor practices through their supply chains, uncomfortable findings and all. There are building operators who have built genuine relationships with the communities surrounding their assets, not through a sponsorship check but through structured engagement that has changed how decisions get made.
None of that is in the report. The GHG Protocol gave carbon a home. The S is still waiting for its equivalent, a shared framework specific enough to make real work visible and rigorous enough to make that visibility mean something.
That is the gap. And it is not primarily a data problem. It is a courage problem, dressed up as a methodology problem. The methodology will follow once enough organizations decide that the person cleaning the building at 4 AM deserves to show up in the report.
The Conversation Continues...
This post is part of our ongoing exploration into how the "S" in ESG has historically lacked the rigorous standards of carbon reporting, and why building true corporate accountability is a courage problem rather than a data problem. As problem-solvers, we believe the best insights emerge when diverse perspectives meet. Have you encountered similar challenges or discovered different approaches? Share your story.
Connect with us as we continue to prototype, test, and learn:
Subscribe to our newsletter
Join us on Linkedin
Explore our resources
We acknowledge that social sustainability is always a work in progress. These insights represent our current understanding, shaped by our partners, communities, and continuous learning.