Modern feminism must include men.
Shelley Zalis is no stranger to the Davos Man.
Inside a pop-up on the outskirts of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland,
We found Shelley hosting high-profile women executives
who she says have been left out of the conversation at Davos for decades.
What it’s really all about is creating a destination or really a home for equality.
For world leaders to come and not just admire the problems
and talk about the problems, but to create solutions for change.
Shelley’s pop-up, dubbed “The Equality Lounge” this year, has been a fixture at
Davos and major business conferences around the world for years.
In here, anything goes.
And it truly is authentic unplugged conversations
about what we’re truly going to do.
In this lounge, the minority acts and feels like the majority.
Of the roughly 3,000 participants at Davos last year, only 21 percent were women.
But this year at Davos the future looks slightly more female.
For the first time in its nearly 50-year history,
the conference is chaired entirely by women.
There is this economic case for gender parity.
Davos’ co-chairs include powerhouses like Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg,
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde,
and IBM CEO Ginni Rommety.
All of those people are reflective of being
some of the most influential people within their particular stakeholder group.
So it’s almost irrelevant what their particular gender is, but at the same time
it’s powerful that the seven of them are female leaders.
Women still only represent one fifth of all the participants this year,
but we did find the split on stage was a bit more even,
with women moderating nearly as many panels as men.
Outside of the conference, we noticed several companies
jumping on the gender equality bandwagon too.
The myths are taking over some of the narrative
and that’s what we want to stop.
Procter & Gamble partnered with women’s leadership platform Seneca Women
to bust some of the myths that women face in the workforce.
Procter & Gamble’s North America Group President
says the conversation needs to change around gender equality,
and Davos is a good place to do that.
We want to spark a conversation.
We want to change mindsets.
And we want to create a picture of a different world.
And then for Davos, we want to set an expectation that we all lead towards that.
But there’s still a long way to go.
A new report from the World Economic Forum found that among
the 1.4 million jobs in the U.S. expected to be disrupted over the next decade,
a majority, 57 percent, belong to women.
The Forum also estimates it will take 100 years
to close the gender gap based on current trends.
One thing these women can agree on?
That’s not soon enough.
That’s just too long, right?
So we need to find a way to make progress and
we need to make step-change progress immediately.
We do need to create simple next-step solutions
so that we can look back and say, "Wow, look how far we’ve come."