LBS Global Leadership Summit: Where were the Women? - Building Gender Balanced Business

It was a forum “to reflect and debate with leaders on the global downturn and how to emerge stronger once the recession is over,“ trumpeted the London Business School (LBS)on its website.

This was in reference to this year’s LBS Global Leadership Summit (2009).

As one of the world’s leading business schools, the occasion on June 29 provided an important opportunity for the world’s leading thinkers and doers to get together and discuss how to respond to the worst economic recession in decades and suggest ways we can all move forward into the future with a new (and hopefully more sustainable) approach.

The need for the woman’s voice to be heard
The companies that created the financial mess we are in were and are largely dominated by men. The trading floors that took excessive risks (and given half the chance will do so again) to the cost of the wider “real economy” were dominated overwhelmingly by men. And for years, businesses have sung to the same hymn sheet about the value that women bring to leadership teams, contributing to better corporate performance and governance. We’re also living in an age where women are the majority of graduates, the majority of consumers, and where women leaders are still woefully lacking at the top of most organisations.

(Though we have noted elsehwhere that women were key players at J. P. Morgan, where the innovations in credit derivatives first began. See: Women and the Crisis.)

In that light, you might imagine that it is important to have a strong woman’s voice at a summit such as this.

But where are they?
So, it is with some surprise, that we note that of 20 guest speakers listed on the school’s website, there were no women at all!

Out of nine faculty speakers, there were only two women.

There was only one woman out of seven panellists discussing the critical question, Is the global market broken?

Men gave keynotes on “The way forward for business in a reset economy” (Jeff Immelt) and “A crisis of trust” (Richard Edelman).

There were no women panellists at all discussing how to fix the financial system (strange when you consider how many women have been recruited to clean up the mess largely caused by men).

Alone, Professor Lynda Gratton was given a late afternoon slot to talk about how people bring energy and innovation to work.

20-first’s dream team of female speakers
In case, the organisers at LBS could not dream up any possible speakers to balance out the men, here is our wish list:

• Gillian Tett, assistant editor of the Financial Times who oversees the global coverage of the financial markets. She is also author of one of the best accounts of the causes of the financial crisis, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Little, Brown, 2009).

• Anne Mulcahy, outgoing CEO of Xerox (rescued Xerox from near bankrupcty and the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company to hand over the reins to another woman).

• Elín Sigfúsdóttir, CEO, New Landsbanki or Birna Einarsdóttir, CEO, New Glitnir (female chiefs of newly nationalised banks in Iceland).

• Chanda Kochtar, MD and ICICI Bank, India (one of the few women in India to run a bank).

• Terri Kelly, CEO, WL Gore (head of a company that is better than most at “empowering” its workforce).