EnglishDavos: if women are the future, where are they?
The observations by Jane Martinson in her portrayal of the Davos economic summit - Davos: if women are the future, where are they? - reveal a lot, and leave many unanswered questions. Why are women not more generally present and involved in such important policy and decision framing processes? The conclusions point to the very real good business it is to include women.
Jane writes that despite a quota system to boost female participitation, the gender imbalance is still heavily skewed towards men. The first day at Davos, which included honours for the Japanese violinist Midori and a screening of the biopic of Aung San Suu Kyi, may have ended with a party to “honour women innovators” such as the web entrepreneur Arianna Huffington.
And the biggest day of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) on Friday may include a main room event discussing “women as the way forward”. This is a most important question, but it is puzzling that it will be discussed by a disproportionately male dominated group.
The barriers to women participation have been lowered in talk but in practice much hasn’t changed. The cost of the meeting IS astronomical – delegates have to pay for five nights’ stay as a minimum – not to mention the annual membership fees of about £100,000 for the strategic partners. It is not a surprise that many companies are happy to talk while hoping that others do the walking.
So why even bother to set a quota for women participation? Why not simply accept the status quo at an event which sums up a world governed by just 1% of its population? Is the whole gender parity programme part of a cynical PR exercise to encourage a belief that the most powerful people in the world care about half the world’s population?
Roger Carr, the chairman of Centrica is quoted (he is leading efforts to get more women appointed to British boards): “Davos is a special place populated by the most senior decision makers. The fact is that the number of women in that position is quite small. Davos is just the symptom of something that happened way, way back.” Centrica sends just two delegates and both the chief executive and chairman happen to be men.
WEF founder Klaus Schwab says: “A world where women make up less than 20% of the global decision makers is a world that is missing a huge opportunity for growth and ignoring an untapped reservoir of potential.” The more popular sessions dealing with gender tended to be those discussing this “diversity dividend” or whether “decision making is better when there’s a diverse set of people making the decisions”.
The charismatic chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, captured how the political agenda, and organisational structure ideas will be shifting on Wednesday night when she said: “If the central moral imperative of the 19th century was slavery and of the 20th, totalitarianism, the central moral imperative of our time is the equality of girls and women around the world.”
Category: Equality, Press center
