Issue No. CCXI; August 27, 2013
THIS ISSUE’S HIGHLIGHTS:
I. URBANIZATION AND WOMEN LEADING CITIES
II. CROWDFUNDING TO HELP START OR GROW A BUSINESS
III. “LEANING ON”: AN APPROACH TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF WOMEN ON BOARDS
IV. WHAT WOMEN AND MEN THINK ABOUT WORK/LIFE INTEGRATION
I. URBANIZATION AND WOMEN LEADING CITIES
At the opening plenary session on “Megatrends” at the 2013 Global Summit of Women in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, attended by 1,100 women leaders last June, Marisa Drew, Co-Head of the European Investment Banking Department at Credit Suisse, pointed out a major global development – the world’s increasing urbanization. “The urban population in the developing world will grow by about one million people per week in the next 25 years,” she said. (For more of what Drew shared at the Summit, click here: http://youtu.be/JVJ03Ulm1ts)
While urbanization brings new forms of economic opportunity, it presents new challenges, especially in terms of environmental strain and resource scarcity. It also points to a potential decentralization of political power from federal to urban leaders. As borders of cities spread, access to affordable transportation becomes a critical lightning rod that can unite or separate people.
These are but a few of the issues that city mayors will have to deal with in the future. While there are only a handful of women mayors currently, several women do run major global cities. Among them are Ana Botella, elected as the first woman mayor of Madrid, Spain in 2011 and Annise Parker, who runs the energy capital of the U.S., Houston, Texas, USA. Christine Quinn is a leading candidate in the current New York City mayoral race to be decided on November of 2013. If elected, Quinn would become the first woman to head the city whose economic power ranks among the top fifteen countries in the world, ahead of both Mexico and South Korea.
5 Women Mayors or Mayor-Candidates: Ana Botella of Madrid, Annise Parker of Houston, Christine Quinn on New York, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet and Anne Hidalgo from Paris
Paris is another major city with mayoral elections on March 2014, where the winner will be a woman, since candidates from the major parties are women: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, former Minister of Ecology and Development under President Sarkozy, and Anne Hidalgo, who is the current Deputy Mayor. The new mayor will lead a city whose economy equals that of Malaysia, Israel, and Ireland combined. Against this backdrop, the 2014 Global Summit of Women, hosted by France in Paris from June 5-7, 2014, will have a special session featuring several women mayors that will focus on their vision for their respective cities. For more information on the 2013 Global Summit of Women, visit www.globewomen.org/summit/summit.htm.
II. CROWDFUNDING TO HELP START OF GROW A BUSINESS
Every new product idea, business venture, and social initiative must consider how it will finance its development and pursue its goals. Spurred by the growth of new technologies and social media, one form of financing has gained particular momentum in recent years: Crowdfunding — the use of the Internet to enable anyone to invest in small amounts on an enterprise, idea or creative project of their choice, a tool which democratizes financing of projects globally.
At the 2013 Global Summit of Women, Sam Shafie addressed an audience largely unfamiliar with the crowdfunding concept, according to the informal poll he conducted at the start of his presentation. Shafie, a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur and co-founder of Malaysia-based crowdfunding site pitchIN.my, noted that crowdfunding offers an attractive alternative to the standard ‘pitch’. “The beauty of crowdfunding is it tells you outright whether your idea is good or not,” he said. “The crowd can be very honest with you and tell you that it’s not [good]. So rather than waste time and money, you can pivot to another area.” For more of Shafie’s remarks, see
While some crowdfunding sites like Shafie’s pitchIN.my or the U.S.-based kickstarter.com are particularly well-suited to the funding of entrepreneurial and creative projects, platforms like kiva.org provide microfinance loans. Since Kiva was founded in 2005, it has had over 980,000 lenders and has raised over $467 million. Kiva returns an investor’s money when a loan is repaid, often with the opportunity to re-invest in a new project. For an overview of Kiva’s work and an example of an entrepreneurial project in Kenya crowdfunded on their platform, check out an excerpt from Kiva Portfolio Manager Joanne Gan’s Summit presentation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJNI4rQGctI
III. “LEANING ON”: AN APPROACH TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF WOMEN ON BOARDS
Legislative initiatives to increase the number of women corporate board directors on publicly-listed companies have passed in eight countries since Norway first implemented a quota law to create gender equality in the boardroom. While these laws have been successful in bringing more women into the boardroom, not all countries are ready to accept the idea of quotas in the corporate world. One strategy which can be employed in any country by both institutions and individuals is to “lean on” corporations resistant to greater gender diversity in the boardroom through the use of proxy votes.
Joe Keefe, the CEO of Pax World, an investment firm committed to socially responsible investing, calls on shareholders — the owners of public companies – to apply pressure to demand change by saying “no” to all-male corporate boards. This can be done annually through the shareholder proxies by only supporting director slates that include women.
In the U.S., where women only make up 16.6% of corporate directors in the US Fortune 500, one organization active in “leaning on” corporations is the Thirty Percent Coalition made up of business leaders, heads of women’s groups, state treasurers, and pension fund presidents, of which Joe Keefe is a member. The Thirty Percent Coalition has written letters to U.S. companies with no women directors asking them to add women to their boards and to adopt language amending their nominating committee charter to include gender diversity as a goal for their board. Since the endeavor began, six companies have added women directors.
As Joe Keefe says, “There are no longer any good arguments, nor any good evidence, in support of the continued patriarchy on corporate boards. The evidence that gender diversity correlates with better management and positive financial benefits is compelling.” If investors “lean on” publicly-trade companies, change can happen. (“To Advance Women, Investors Need to “Lean On” Corporations”, by Joe Keefe; For full article, click here – http://www.paxworld.com/system/storage/9/f6/a/2678/lean_on_remarks.pdf)
Corporate Women Directors International (CWDI), the research arm of the Global Summit of Women for over 17 years, has been detailing successful strategies for increasing women on boards in several publications. Its 2013 Report on “Women Board Directors of the Fortune Global 200 and Beyond” presented research on the percentage of women directors on the boards of the 200 largest companies globally (15%), while outlining what has been effective in opening up the boardrooms to more women in certain countries.
IV. WHAT WOMEN AND MEN THINK ABOUT WORK/LIFE INTEGRATION
Did you know that 31% of women believe that they would be paid higher wages at work if they were male, and 20% of men believe that they would earn less if they were female? This is just one of the findings from a recent survey conducted by Elle Magazine and the Center for American Progress described as “a surprisingly positive, occasionally infuriating survey on what women and men think about leaning in, having a life, scoring a raise, speaking up, and being the boss.”
The results of the “2013 Power Survey” suggest that the existing wage gap is partially attributed to women having more abridged work experiences than men due to time off for childbirth, reducing their workload to part-time, or quitting their jobs all together to stay home with their children – all moves that male parents are less likely to do. One solution to combat the wage gap, according to responses, would be to provide paid maternity leave, which increases the likelihood of women returning to work after giving birth, and thereby bolstering their work experience. The study finds that 87% of women and 80% of men in the U.S. support paid maternity leave. Currently, the U.S. is one of only eight countries worldwide (Liberia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Suriname, Tonga, and Western Samoa are the others) that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave.
Men are also more likely to put work before family, according to the Elle survey, although 63% of fathers do feel guilty about it. They feel that it adversely affects their familial obligations and relationships, but that it is a sacrifice that they have to make in order to advance at work. (Source: http: www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/power-survey). Some corporate best practices in addressing these ongoing work/life tensions will be presented at the 2014 Colloquium on Global Diversity, scheduled for February 20-21, 2014.
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