Gender Equality Works!
by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Call to step up efforts to put more women on boards
Companies here should step up their efforts to appoint more women directors to reap the business benefits, said Madam Halimah Yacob yesterday..
Global Mobility Gender Gap
Are women benefitting from global mobility?
Creating greater awareness in the workplace is leading to some progress in gender equality, as evidenced by number of studies, including PwC's ‘Women in Work Index’ that measures the pay gap and other important indicators throughout the OECD community. But despite progress, the business community still has much to do in creating workplace environments that support the development of women in leadership positions.
International Women's Day was celebrated earlier this month with a call to action for more investment in the promotion of women in the workplace. Many organizations hosted important recognition events to foster awareness and action around this important issue. For example, at PwC we hosted our second global webcast in the Aspire to Lead series, an event designed to foster discussion and awareness around the topic of women in leadership, especially supporting women in transition from campus to career.
Unfortunately, talent mobility is an area where gender bias still seems to be hampering women in accessing the career-enhancing experiences that result from international assignments and global mobility.
Gender Diversity: Make It Happen
by Junie Foo
March 8 was International Women’s Day. A number of events for women and celebrating women were organised here and around the world. In fact, the month of March will see a myriad of events celebrating women and her successes.
The awareness of gender equality is becoming more ubiquitous. More women’s conferences are being organised around the globe. Over the last five years, there has been an explosion of women entrepreneurs and women organisations.
One such organisation is BoardAgender, launched in 2011 in conjunction with the 100th year anniversary of International Women’s Day. Its objective is to create awareness of the benefits of having more women on boards and the importance of building senior women leadership pipelines.
A global concern, a global need
The scarcity of women at senior levels is a global phenomenon.
The global average of women on boards is only 11 per cent. In fact, five per cent of Fortune 500 companies do not have a single woman on their boards. Thirty five boards in the ASX 200 do not have any women. Germany, which is Europe’s biggest economy, has women occupying only seven per cent of executive board seats among its 30 largest companies. Recently, it passed a law that required major companies to allocate 30 per cent of seats on non-executive boards to women.
Singapore also performs poorly. According to the SID-ISCA Singapore Directorship Report 2014, women occupy only 8.3 per cent of total listed board seats. More than half of listed boards in Singapore have no women. Singapore lags behind its peers in the region and is at about half of the percentages seen in the EU, US and Australia.
Gender diversity is not just about political correctness.
Why It’s So Important That Women Empower Other Women
Women's empowerment starts with how women treat other women.
Created by SheKnows Media and BlogHer, a new video features a few of the women from this year's BlogHer15 conference advisory board discussing the importance of women supporting one another in a collective effort to educate and empower female readers and content consumers.
BlogHer15 is an annual conference created in partnership with BlogHer and SheKnows Media that celebrates female content creators. This year's expert advisory board, which attends and speaks at the conference, is made up of 37 people who are making an impact in the media world.
Four of these 37 members are featured in the video, including the founder of Digital Undivided Kathryn Finney, the founder of Femsplain Amber Gordon, managing partner of Greenroom Communications Kim Holderness and the founder and CEO ofPipeline Fellowship Natalia Oberti Noguera.
“We are our own biggest advocate, and if we can break that stereotypical girl versus girl mentality there’s so much that we can do," Gordon says in the video.
Finney explains the impact that empowered women can have in media. "We have all of these platforms that are available to us, where there's no longer the gatekeepers that tell us what we can write, when we can write, how we can write — we can do it any way we want to," she says.
We couldn't agree more.