Cummins discovers International Day of the Girl two months late and turns it into another branding exercise.
Two Months Late To The Party
International Day of the Girl falls on 11 October. Cummins rocks up on 9 December, waving a blog and calling it “looking to the future”. The lag is never explained. No reason, no honesty, just a tidy headline and a byline from “Manager, Cummins Powers Women” like it is a product line.
The date is the tell. They did not build anything around the actual day. They slotted it into the content calendar once the real business of selling engines and chasing quarterly numbers was done. Girls get the leftovers.
Cummins Powers Optics
The copy opens with textbook UN language about girls rights, achievements and the inequalities they face around the world. Then it pivots straight into Cummins Powers Women – the in house gender halo designed to make a heavy industry giant sound like a grassroots movement.
Everything is global, strategic, transformative. Girls are abstract. “The advancement of women and girls everywhere” is treated like a brand territory, not a set of obligations inside Cummins own plants, offices and pay packets.
This is not a company talking about what it is prepared to give up. It is a company talking about what it wants to be seen doing.
400 Volunteers In A Global Machine
The big number is “more than 400 employees” who “embraced the theme” and “took action”. No denominator. No context. No attempt to say what share of the workforce that is, or whether any of them were given protected time to do it.
If this was genuinely central to how Cummins works, the piece would talk in percentages, not head count spin. It would name functions, plants, teams, and what changed for them after all this activity. Instead we get one soft number and a fog of adjectives about “leadership” and “innovation” and “brighter futures”.
When you are proud of scale, you say it. When you are proud of optics, you pad it.
Wonder Cup, Corporate Mug
Centre stage goes to a new global innovation challenge with a comic book name – the “World Changer Wonder Cup”. Girls are invited to “lead diverse teams” and come up with “groundbreaking solutions” for gender equality. Nearly 15 teams, across a few regions, trying to fix in theory what Cummins refuses to fix in practice.
Girls are given responsibility without power. They are asked to design “solutions” while the company keeps hold of the budgets, the job descriptions, the promotion lists and the seniority charts. It is hackathon feminism: the people who do not run the system are tasked with inventing ways to make it kinder.
The Wonder Cup lets Cummins pose as the wise sponsor of a problem it still materially benefits from.
Girls Labour, Corporate Credit
The rest of the “highlights” list is a familiar corporate charity menu.
Webinars with non profits in Asia Pacific, Hispanic America and Europe. Nearly 20 workshops and group events. Packing hygiene kits. Talking about period poverty and gender stereotypes. Organising book drives. Writing nice letters. STEM projects. Career sessions.
All of it has value on the ground. None of it touches Cummins own power structure. The labour is emotional, unpaid and feminised. The beneficiaries are girls and women in the community. The credit flows upwards to Cummins and its gender equity “initiative”.
You could read this whole piece and leave thinking the main barrier to girls futures is a lack of encouragement letters, not a lack of actual, paid, secure work in companies like Cummins.
When The Real Work Starts
At the end, the article wheels out the final flourish: “As Cummins powers transformative change around the world, we remain committed to building a future where women and girls can lead and succeed”.
The missing line is the only one that matters: what Cummins is prepared to give up.
Which contracts it will walk away from.
Which behaviours it will no longer tolerate from managers.
Which metrics it will publish and tie to pay and promotion.
Which failures it will admit rather than spin into a case study.
Until then, “transformative change” means girls get Wonder Cups and webinars while the diesel keeps moving, the data centres keep humming and the people in charge keep looking like they always have.
Brighter Futures Start At Home
If Cummins wants to talk about the future of girls, it can start by telling the truth about the present of women.
Publish the uncomfortable numbers.
Fix the pay gaps without needing a tribunal or a regulator to point at them.
Stop exporting equality as a philanthropic product while importing it as free labour from volunteers and schoolkids.
Anything less is just another International Day of the Girl story written for shareholders, not girls.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability project
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