Research & Ratings

About the Ethiscore

The Ethiscore is a numerical ethical rating designed to help users quickly differentiate companies which have attracted significant levels of criticism from those which have attracted less attention. The un-customised Ethiscore rates all the categories equally, and we fully expect subscribers to use the Customise Scores area of Corporate Critic to generate ratings which best reflect their own organisational priorities.

Excellent for benchmarking companies within product or market sectors, the Ethiscore is also a superb tool for monitoring corporate ethical improvements.

When used in conjunction with the Customise Scores Function, the Ethiscore rating can reflect your own, or your organisation�s ethical concerns.

Although Corporate Critic holds data going back to 1991, all ratings and Ethiscores are based only on information published in the last five years. Detailed information on how we rate companies in each category appears on the Ethical Category Definitions page of this website.

The are two types of ethiscore present in the Corporate Critic database:

A company Ethiscore of 0 to 15 points.

15 is the best Ethiscore and 0 worst. This is the main type of Ethiscore which appears throughout the database.

The company Ethiscore is based on the subtraction of all the corporate responsibility categories in which the database holds current criticisms from a baseline number of 14.

Therefore if a company has received criticisms in the Animal Testing (1 point) and Workers Rights (1point) categories, its ethiscore will be 12. [14 (baseline) minus 2 categories = 12].

If the company had a lesser criticism under, say, Workers Rights (0.5 points) then its Ethiscore would be 14 minus 1.5 = 12.5

The fifteenth point is for 'Company Sustainability' - a positive Corporate Responsibility category - which gives an additional point to companies who, for example, only sell organic products.

A product Ethiscore of 0 to 20 points.

20 is the best Ethiscore and 0 worst.

This Ethiscore is a score for products and is made up by combining a company Ethiscore with a rating for product sustainability, and is based on five positive attributes which a product may have. Therefore if a 12 point company is listed as selling an organic (1 point) and fairtrade (1 point) tea, then the tea would receive an ethiscore of 12+2 = 14.