Male Speaker: Thank you for joining our fourth annual workspace session on the
gender gap, gender parity.
I'd like to get some sense so that the folks at the forum can know where to go
next. What you all think about priorities,
what you all think about next steps, the point of today --
J. Frank Brown: The issue in terms of gender parity being so paramount and why
we're all focused on it is because we really have a global skills gap.
We have a huge talent shortage in so many places, and one of the problems is take
a corporation.
Women join a corporation in equal numbers to men.
Five years later, they're down from 50 percent to 25 percent.
Five years after that, they're down to ten percent, for a variety of reasons.
But think about it when 50 percent of your workforce is no longer present when
you need people in managerial roles, then you wind up with a male dominated
hierarchy which is a huge problem.
What the World Economic Forum is trying to do and the Gender Parity Group is develop
a framework whereby we can coordinate and list best practices, things that are
currently being done by companies, by governments, and by other types of
organizations around the world so that these can be shared, these can be
customized to other situations, and really disseminate it and built upon.
Brian A. Gallagher: So if want gender parity across your company, you probably
have to look at certain geographies and so if you don't measure that, you won't
target it.
Laura Tyson: They need a set of goals, measure the goals.
If they operate in diverse geographies, the goals might have to reflect those
geographies and the framework might have to be --
Ricardo Hausmann: So we're trying to make a world, right, in which women have as
much or more education than men and decide to work and so on, but then we have to
make marriage and motherhood compatible with these other things.
Magnus Uggla: And they care and all. That is extremely important.
And, of course, we'd done -- and we have all that..., but we still have a huge
gender gap, very few female chief executives.
So it's necessary but it's not enough. It's necessary but it's not enough.
And why? Well, we started with this.
I think it's attitudes are still a problem in Sweden.
Margery Kraus: ...company are being made by people who reflected diversity of
views. Tian Wei: And, of course, this is already
the chicken and egg thing, isn't it? It has to be from the bottom up and up
down. Lubna S. Olayan: The Ministry of Labor
did issue an encouragement for the private sector to hire a woman.
Young men just to come late. They had a monopoly on us.
But once the women started showing up, it has improved substantially.
Male Speaker: Is anybody doing all these?
Are you doing all these? Muhtar Kent: Well, I was just gonna
comment that somebody who lives with the gap every day and who tries every day
who's made it part of the strategic framework of business with a company that
is so like the fourth or fifth largest employer, private employer, in the world,
it has to be embedded into the business framework, into the philosophy, into the
culture, and then all of these starts working.
Kathy Koll Matsui: It's just makes business or political sense.
I don't think there should be -- if any -- if spots or wiser questions, but we've
got to do the analysis. J. Frank Brown: And we need the actual
case studies that prove it. Female Speaker: That's right.
J. Frank Brown: Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, great point.
Lubna S. Olayan: We found out when we were tracking is the reasons why they're
leaving is a data that is quite useful to see why women are leaving.
Ricardo Hausmann: If one of the companies present here that has the right data set
of their Human Resources, wants to collaborate with me in the Kennedy School
in developing a technique to do these longitudinal gender based analysis,
it might shed light on them and become a best practice for others.
Melanne S. Verveer: I think a compilation of best practices not so much focused
within the company but in terms of what companies are doing to impact positively
the emerging market and to enable women to grow, I think this would be very useful
information because it could be a scale, document the instancese.
Nigel Chapman: Look outside as well. Do activities which connect with this,
because if you say always about yourself inside, then your philanthropic,
your engagement with communities is not around these issues.
It's a mismatch. If the girls don't the opportunities they
need, then we're not gonna have these people to employ in the future anyway.
Michelle Bachelet: My message is we want to build partnership, of course,
with government in their national capacity but also with a couple sectors so we're very
happy to build partnership with you. Thank you.
J. Frank Brown: This is the point in time where this issue was going to rise very,
very high on the agenda. Much will be accomplished and many more
people are coming on board and signing up and saying yes, get me involved.
And the more of those kinds of connections we make, the better we're
going to be in terms of making very, very significant progress on the issue of
empowerment of women, gender equality.