Inspiring Women, Doubting Men - Building Gender Balanced Business

October 20,2008

I returned from the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France, with the feeling that women seemed to be more optimistic then some of their male colleagues. Many of the (very impressive) women leaders obviously felt that the current crisis could yield positive moves towards systemic and sustainable changes in companies and in the economy as a whole.

I’m not sure all the guys were equally convinced. In the Men’s Corner that I ran with Bain & Co., in partnership with Les Echos, the mood leant towards hedging bets on better gender balance. The dozen CEO’s we had invited to share their thoughts on why and how to introduce gender balance indicated that their priorities lay elsewhere. Several representatives from the financial services sector seemed particularly unconvinced that any big changes – in working styles, profiles or reward mechanisms – was necessary. The pressure seemed to be on who to lay-off, rather than calling into question any underlying models. A few notable exceptions included Barclay’s Pascal Roché, Sodexo’s Michel Landel, Renault/Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn and JP Morgan’s Philippe Lagayette.

This was definitely not the tone of most of the discussions. Women leaders like Elisabeth Guiguou, Emma Bonino, Margot Wallstrom and Anne-Marie Idrac avidly called for more change, more women, more cooperation, more ethics, more regulation. You could almost feel the appetite for change and sustainable progress on prosperity among the 1200 or so women from 88 different countries. Representatives from China, India, South Africa and Europe made this a distinctly global, and distinctly non-Anglo-Saxon conference. An interesting counterpoint as many women’s conferences seem to have much more of an Anglo-Saxon slant. Not this one. You could even hear several of the American speakers refer to Europe’s leadership during the crisis, and the model offered to the world by 27 countries having managed to work together to cobble a constructive consensus.

Margot Wallstrom echoed many speakers when she wondered whether the crisis was a time of risk or opportunity. The risk is that fighting against climate change becomes less urgent because we can’t afford the cost. The opportunity is that this is not time for business as usual. It is a time for new visionaries to think in new ways about global challenges of sustainable development, security and democracy.

“If women are not at the decision-making table,” she continued, “policies are set by men.” She went on to illustrate what this meant in practice. And described a project in Sri Lanka to build a bridge. Gender equality was on the agenda, but the male engineers making all the drawings did not think it relevant. Until they interviewed some women from the local village, and discovered that the majority of users of the future bridge were women and children, walking across the bridge to work, not the men in trucks that the bridge had originally been designed for. So the bridge was redesigned to include a pedestrian lane…

A NEW WORLD

Jeffrey Garten indicated that the developed world’s one billion people produced 75% of the world’s GDP. But by 2050, they would only produce 35% of it. This tectonic shift of economic power towards emerging markets and the developing world will pose a challenge for the one billion people in the ‘developed’ world.

Anne-Marie Idrac, France’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade, reminded the audience that “it is not so easy to share… we have to work on new values for this new world. It is a change for developing countries, but also for developed ones. We will become the non-developing countries. That is not easy to explain. What progress will we offer young Europeans? How do we prepare them to be citizens of the world? It is a generous goal we need.”

After three days of listening to these fascinating women share a passion for progress, one leaves Deauville with a renewed determination that our bridge to tomorrow be designed with the full contribution of women, taking into account their opinions and visions for the future.