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you [Music] you gender equality is not just the right thing to do but it is the smart thing to do for the health and success of our organizations be they for-profit not-for-profit and it is the smart and right thing to do not just for our organizations but for our Nations and indeed for the [Music] seeing is believing you need to see the change not to believe in the change to have women at the top of the management of the country organization is absolutely critical to actual effectiveness and success my dream for my daughter would be that her work would be equally paid equally perceived like the work her husband does we have now data that shows that companies that are inclusive are actually more profitable this is the beginning of a research agenda which is very deep and very rich and will help support the cause of closing the gender gap because it provides such powerful evidence for the value of doing so [Music] I think people be tremendously surprised to understand what the gender gap is in fact a group of MBA students were asked just the other day how many women did they think are in the fortune 500 CEO level positions and it's 3 percent is the answer and they had said 20 to 25 percent even students who are about to embark on their journey in business they don't know what the spread is part of the problem with the gap not being closed is people believe that it's near closed or closed women are almost as healthy and almost as educated as men if not more in some countries and yet you're not seeing that same participation in to in terms of the economy so that's really has to be the next big push and we know that some countries that have done that well have made enormous gains in terms of their productivity you know crisis is a terrible thing to waste something to care more about these issues there's never a better time than now we've come through horrendous global recession the world is recovering at different rates but wherever you exist in the world you need and you know that this world has to operate differently going forward so we have now the very paradoxical and inefficient situation condition that we have a car of young women who are very well educated you know but then are not using that education in in the workforce societies are really missing on you know the returns the positive returns to education of females because they have not been able to advance in the workplace any country or any company that leads half of its population behind untapped is a mistake so the crisis really represents an opportunity and what I've seen in business is people willing to challenge your traditional ways of thinking think about new ways to create innovation and women are an incredible untapped resource what we do here at the women in public policy program is we focus on closing gaps we identify and teach and train on what are the key interventions that work whether it's in business whether it's in law whether it's in politics or whether it's in civil society it's not that people don't want to close gaps it's that people don't always know how to close the gaps and think that it's a problem too big to solve the entry into the workforce there's actually in certain organization probably 80% of the organizations that we work with and we study there are more women entering the workforce than men but when you look at the different levels of management it gets slimmer and slimmer people make up almost any organization they are ultimately responsible for any organizations performance so the degree to which you can remove those barriers be they explicit or implicit that prevent women from realizing their potential within your organization your organization will perform better it is imperative that we have a full slate of individuals regardless of nationality gender various characteristics to pull from in order to address the challenges that face our business and organizations as a whole its diversity of human experience and competency that will cause a team to outperform a homogeneous team every time let's suppose the business is forecasting the business trying to predict what's going to happen in this market or what products should we introduce or how are people going to respond to this new product in those situations what you can show you're in a very formal way is that if people from different backgrounds or people different life experiences frame the world differently if they have different categories they have different causal models in their head then they're going to make different predictions where you can show as those different predictions are going to combine in such a way that they're sort of that they're better than the individual predictions you can sort of formally lay this out so this isn't some sort of feel-good mantra it's literally just a mathematical fact most of our customers are women so we are doctors in in India the hospitals in the Delhi or in in in China we have a decreasing number of customers who are women so it's very very important that we connect effectively with with our customers we surveyed our partners at Deloitte several years ago and asked them have you sold to a woman in the last two years you know was the women the decision maker for buying our services ninety one percent of them said that they had women are clearly part of our marketplace and they're part of our talent pool any organization should do that kind of analysis to understand their their own business case for investing in women another argument is about the choices that women and men make in 1993 India amended its constitution with the following provision that a third of the village heads had to be female because one of women's mains jours in rural India in particular is getting water so an important public good that I invested more in was clean and safe water when you look at the United States and what it would mean to close gender gaps here in 1776 the United States was founded in 1789 Congress as we know it and it's shaped today was begun women didn't achieve the right to vote till 1920 between 1920 and today we've never had a stronger representation than we do now it's only 17 percent seventeen percent for the physical majority [Music] the evidence shows that empowered women in poor families have healthier children that's the only way that you can break this link in the intergenerational transmission of poverty mothers in poor households you know if they have meager earnings mothers prefer to invest those meager earnings on child nutrition a healthier child becomes obviously a healthier adult and a more productive adult looking at fertility preferences women tend to prefer fewer children than men the preferences they have happen to be more aligned with what's good for society when you educate a girl you actually increase the health of a family you decrease the fertility rates the number of children that young girl will ultimately have [Music] eliminating the gender gap is not at as easy as a sometimes claim so there's this thing idea that microcredit for example is going to kind of start all slow of women entrepreneurs and that's going to close the gender gap the striking statistics is that microcredit does increase the number of new businesses created but it's not a massive increase goes from 5% to 7% that's not bad but it's not 50% of women are not suddenly starting new businesses even if they are offered alone this is not something that women are sort of free to do just as they wish this is something they they do in negotiation with the entire other patriarchal structure that they are living inside around the world women start businesses at about twice the rate of men they actually grow those businesses faster than men the trouble is they tend to get stuck at a certain size of company and the reason they get stuck is for all the reason women get stuck in corporations as well lack of access to networks lack of access to role models lack of visibility in most organizations at least in the Western developed economies you have men and women coming in through the door at the entry level in equal numbers and then those numbers dwindle all the way through they start petering out at mid-level and they drop to very low percentages in the ten to 15% at the senior management when we start looking at CEOs of large global companies those numbers dwindle down to 3% what happens is that because we are so in a numbers game around having gender equality you know we think that if we can just get you know critical mass of women into a system or an organization the time will take care of it and actually that hasn't happened I recently read a report that really sort of stunned me the financial system in Italy the bank's the commercial banks in Italy and actually the commercial banks in Italy charge higher interest rates to women-owned firms than to mail owned firms there are also notions that people don't even know they have for example there's a conflict between being likable and being regarded as confident that a woman faces that a man might not consider a corporate setting a man who demonstrates himself to be a strong leader that people can rely on perhaps as the proverbial sharp elbow can be regarded both as competent and as likable by his peers but a woman with those same qualities or who has the potential to have the same qualities faces an inherent conflict she can either be respected or she can be liked but if she does what it was required to be respected people will say geez that's not exactly what I expect from a woman [Music] so what's the solution one is first education right and really focus not on off obviously educating girls which is beginning to happen but educating boys and men at senior to really be skilled and be viewed as an asset for employment the question then becomes how to organize business to take advantage of that pool to allow women to have the opportunities to be recruited for positions in business to be retained to be promoted another very important aspect is development because you can have say an MBA from a great institution you can have a PhD from a great institution when you get into the workplace you you will need further development and training and leadership opportunities which really come from the organization itself so therefore we have to run these experiments and try and see is it business training that might do the trick is it something about cultural norms that might keep these women back is it general education is something about the household maybe we have to give these women negotiation training to become better bargainers in the household so some countries have gone down the route for example of quotas so putting legislation in place that helps to get women into certain positions of political power [Music] labour codes have been written mostly by men with the idea of a man job they've also been written to prohibit a temporary employment or part-time employment inadvertently through those mechanisms they have made it impossible for companies to offer women workers job forms that are more compatible with the kind of time they have during the day so for many jobs women for example are expected to be nurses not doctors they are expected to be daycare center workers not policemen there is enormous variation across countries in some countries for example the more educated women are working more but they are less likely to marry than less educated women because now they have more labour market opportunities we haven't figured out how to make labor force participation compatible with marriage or we haven't really figured out how to make labor force participation compatible with motherhood the workplace will have to change and you know a lot of the systems and processes that were built and that we all live with today were built for a largely male worker in the Industrial Age so it's not just that the talent today is changing and women are an increasing part of the talent pool but it's also that the work itself has changed so companies need to sort of figure out how those two things which are sort of converging how they're going to respond to those trends we often have people thinking well I'm in the government sector or I'm in the private sector the corporate sector I'm in a civil society sector all of these sectors turn out they have to have similar dynamics you know and that we could actually number one learn from each of the sector's and number two they all have to be working on this problem at the same time let's take the case of like the gender gap in terms of upper management right there's not many women who are CEOs any of you close that gap you change the reality with its young women see the world right and you make it so that like they're gonna say I can do anything you get ripple effects one people will be dramatically more interested in full participation in political life - you're going to have an industry which is going to be a higher economic earner because its product is more targeted to the marketplace I know it can happen in my own company I've created an ecosystem that is actually now resulted in 49 percent of our executive leadership is women it is also the only way for our society to to make progress to evolve to innovate and probably to exist you know when we created the global gender gap index back in 2006 it's been it's been five years and the idea was let's have an index that's really comparable over time so we're actually able to track progress for countries not just relative to each other but relative to their own position when we first started and now that we have this five-year data set we we've done that analysis and the good news is that by and large the majority of countries are making progress when I talk to people parents in rural India one of the things that shows up and as an aspiration for their daughter's job is they're going to be in politics because there's a lot of reservation of jobs for women in politics that's an answer I would not have expected or didn't hear ten years ago now you hear it quite often so I was recently in Dubai speaking to a large conference of 600 men release our shift in the audience and really wanting to understand what this gender intelligence that we talked about really meant so we need more men to put that out there and really make those declarations so we can shift the thinking in the world I feel like we have a good knowledge base understanding what's going on and a good knowledge base of how to change and that coupled way the media has increased attention and stories out there on successful women and successful men who care about gender equality makes me optimistic we will have reached our goal when life isn't like a lottery that some people get the winning ticket and some people come to that everybody gets the waiting ticket [Music] you