The Great Debate UK

from The Great Debate:

The next emerging market: A billion women

You would never dream of not investing in India. You would never dream of not investing in China. So why wouldn’t you invest in women? That question was posed by Beth Brooke of Ernst & Young at the launch on Wednesday of a campaign called The Third Billion that aims to empower women as a means to drive economic growth. The campaign is based on the notion that there are a billion women not participating in the global economy who should be.

“Every country, every company in the world is looking for growth wherever they can find it,” Brooke said at a panel discussion (which I moderated) at Thomson Reuters headquarters in New York. “Where is the growth coming from? It’s coming from the emerging markets … We historically think of those emerging markets as India and China and many others. But it is clear that women are an emerging market.”

DeAnne Aguirre, senior vice-president at Booz & Company, said the concept of the “Third Billion” comes from the notion that if China and India each represent 1 billion emerging participants in the global marketplace, then a third billion is made up of women around the world whose economic lives have been “stunted, underleveraged or suppressed.”

The figure is based on a Booz & Company analysis of International Labor Organization data on women in the global workforce that showed some 860 million women were excluded for one reason or another, a number forecast to rise to 1 billion in the next decade. (Many of those women are in India and China, of course, so there is overlap with the first and second billions.)

La Pietra Coalition, the global alliance behind the campaign, has identified five factors that contribute to keeping women from playing a more productive role: access to finance; legal and social status; barriers to entrepreneurship; lack of education and training; and labor policy and practice.

The group wants to bring together corporations, governments, NGOs and institutions such as the World Bank to address each of those issues.

Among those that have already partnered with La Pietra are Coca Cola, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered Bank. Brooke, who is global vice-chair for public policy at Ernst & Young, said a key goal of the campaign is to enlist more big companies.

Women’s fortunes in the job market take a turn for the worse

By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.

Back in early 2009 I was sitting in the library trying to find a new spin on the U.S. financial crisis for a college paper. I trawled through book after book and they all said the same thing. But finally, late into the night, I stumbled upon something fresh in the latest unemployment report.

Jobs had been slashed in the U.S. and unemployment was rising, but interestingly, women were faring better than men. So there was my story. After June’s jobs report I decided to review this phenomenon and find out whether this was really just a male crisis.

The latest data would suggest not. Although women are still faring better than men: the unemployment rate for women is 8 percent compared to 9.1 percent for adult men and 9.2 percent for the economy as a whole. Women’s employment position has actually deteriorated in the past year.

Back in June 2010 the unemployment rate for women was 7.8 percent, today it is 8 percent. This compares with men, in 2010 their unemployment rate was running at 9.8 percent, today it is 9.1 percent.

Traditionally women and men have a fairly close rate of unemployment, prior to the 2008 crash the average rate for women from 2000-2008 was just below 4.5 percent, for men it was 4.6 percent.

If female unemployment continues to creep back up this is worrying development and deserves closer analysis.

from FaithWorld:

Pakistan’s booming female madrassas feed rising intolerance

(Covered Pakistani female madrassa students take part in an anti-government demonstration in Islamabad August 27, 2004 after a government raid in their mosque and Islamic seminary/Mian Khursheed)

Varda is an accountancy student who dreams of working abroad. Dainty and soft-spoken, the 22-year-old aspires to broaden her horizons, but when it comes to Islam, she refuses to question the fundamentalist interpretations offered by clerics and lecturers nationwide.

Varda is among more than a quarter of a million Pakistani students attending an all-female madrassa, or Islamic seminary, where legions of well-to-do women are experiencing an awakening of faith, at the cost of rising intolerance. In a nation where Muslim extremists are slowly strengthening their grip on society, the number of all-female madrassas has boomed over the past decade, fueled by the failures of the state education system and a deepening conservativism among the middle to upper classes.

Parents often encourage girls to enroll in madrassas after finishing high school or university, as an alternative to a shrinking, largely male-orientated job market, and to ensure a girl waiting to get married isn't drawn into romantic relationships, says Masooda Bano, a research fellow at the British-based Economic and Social Research Council.

But, like Varda, many students at the 2,000 or so registered madrassas are university students or graduates looking for greater understanding of Islam, as well as housewives who, like others in Pakistani society, feel pressured to deepen their faith.

Asked about the killing of a governor earlier this year because he opposed the country's controversial blasphemy law, Varda, without hesitation, said Salman Taseer's murder by his own bodyguard was the right thing to do. "If people ... call themselves Muslims and they are members of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, then they should not be criticizing this law," she said. "I am sorry to say this, but this is what he deserved."

from FaithWorld:

How will Afghan women fare if Kabul and the Taliban reconcile?

(Schoolgirls listen to a speech by Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a ceremony marking the start of the school year at Amani High School in Kabul March 23, 2011/Omar Sobhani)

The gaggles of giggling schoolgirls in their black uniforms and flowing white hijabs seen across Afghanistan's cities have become symbolic of how far women's rights have come since the austere rule of the Taliban was toppled a decade ago. While women have gained back basic rights in education, voting and work, considered un-Islamic by the Taliban, their plight remains severe and future uncertain as Afghan leaders seek to negotiate with the Taliban as part of their peace talks.

The United States and NATO, who have been fighting Taliban insurgents for 10 years in an increasingly unpopular war, have repeatedly stressed that any peace talks must abide by Afghanistan's constitution, which says the two sexes are equal. But President Hamid Karzai's reticence on the matter, constant opposition by the Taliban, and setbacks even at the government level cast a shadow on the prospects of equality for the 15 million women who make up about half the population.

"I am not optimistic at all," said Suraya Parlika, 66, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament. "We do not know the agenda of the talks and this worries all women in Afghanistan."

"Women are at risk of losing everything they have regained," she told Reuters in her office at the All Afghan Women's Union, the country's most prominent women's rights group that she set up 20 years ago.

The dangerous business of fighting for women's rights in Afghanistan highlights just how precarious their situation is. Parlika said Taliban militants have tried to kill her eight times. In the latest attempt, gunmen tried to shoot her through a window at her home but missed and blew a hole in the wall.

Sarah Brown calls for action against maternal mortality

Sarah Brown is Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance and author of Behind the Black Door published by Ebury Publishing on March 3, 2011. Follow her on Twitter @SarahBrownUK The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

To mark the 100th International Women’s Day it is as good a place as any to start with U.N. Women’s objective to seek a pathway to decent work for women.

Back in 1911, the very first International Women’s Day was held to protest unfair wages and poor conditions of work for women.  Today, much of the focus lies similarly in seeking equal treatment, repairing injustices and opening up the opportunity for women to improve their lives in the poorest parts of the world.

As U.N. Women’s Executive Director Michele Bachelet said just last week, “Women’s strength, women’s industry, women’s wisdom are humankind’s greatest untapped resource”.

As we aim also to tackle the great injustice of high maternal mortality and to improve infant and child survival and health, we should draw on all that women have to offer.

So let’s find a way to put more women in to dignified work and simultaneously reach towards a great unmet need.  That need is more trained health workers – 3.5 million of them in fact.

Join the quiet revolution – Kristin Davis

Kristin Davis, star of the show and movie Sex and the City, is an Oxfam Global Ambassador. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

International Women’s Day is special. In China, women get the day off work. In Bosnia and Italy, women receive gifts of flowers. In Cameroon, women dance in the streets. What will you do to make March 8, a special day?

For 100 years, the world has marked International Women’s Day by celebrating women’s economic, political and social accomplishments. This March 8, we are coming together again to mark this special day by calling attention to the inequality and discrimination that is still a daily fact of life for millions of women.

There have been dramatic changes since 1911, when more than a million people around the world took to the streets to protest discrimination against women and to demand that women be allowed to get an education, have the right to work, to vote and to hold public office. But there’s a still a way to go.  There isn’t a single country which can claim its women are treated equally to men, but it is across the developing world where discrimination and inequality have the most dramatic consequences.

Take food as an example.  Across the globe – from New York to Nairobi – it is still women who do most of the cooking. No surprise there. But did you know that the majority of the food eaten around the globe everyday is grown by women too? And the irony is that they are more likely to go hungry!

Millions of women face a daily struggle to put food on the table because of discrimination and inequality. This doesn’t just make their already difficult lives harder, but it is also part of the reason why the number of hungry people around the globe continues to hover around one billion. 

And when crisis hits and food prices rise – as they have in recent months – it is women who go without to ensure their families have enough to eat and their children are well nourished. With increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather hitting harvests, women face an even steeper uphill struggle to feed their families.

Women and the science education question

Elisabeth Kelan is a lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s College London. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

Earlier this year, research indicated that few of the contributors to online encyclopedia Wikipedia are women.

It showed that 85 percent of Wikipedia entries are written by men. This leads to a disparity in how knowledge on Wikipedia is constructed: stereotypical male interests receive more coverage than stereotypical female ones.

Is this an indication that women are not participating equally in the information and knowledge society? Do women miss out on creating the world of the future and on lucrative work?

These are some of the questions raised by the United Nations theme of the International Women’s Day ‘Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women’.

One might presume that with more women than men in higher education in the developed world, gender disparities in education have disappeared or have moved to disfavour men rather than women.

What do women want?

Vicki Hazelden is the managing partner of international law firm Walkers’ Dublin and London offices. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

Men have been asking themselves this question for generations. Are women happier when we stay at home with our children or does fulfilment lie with a nanny, a grown-up career and our own earning power?  To my surprise I’ve turned out to be one of those “career women” the news media talk about and I’m not sure I know the answer. I don’t think I am alone.

My generation were the first to launch themselves in a wholesale way into the traditionally male dominated careers – banking, law, accountancy and to make it to the top. We grew up with expectations of full time rewarding careers, equal pay and hordes of children, you CAN have it all!

I think many women have now experienced what that means in practice and recognise the wider implications of combining children and a full time job.

So what do I mean by combining children and a full time job? I was reading recently about the concept of the working mother and the one child “pet”. This single child is low impact, easy to transport and precociously sophisticated. She sits quietly with no protest with her parents in smart restaurants until 11 p.m. Mum and Dad take it in turns to get home and see the little one before bed.

There is also the working mum who — guilt-free — delegates the early years to her team of nannies and dives in at the deep end on a Monday morning to surface late on a Saturday morning for some “quality time”.

The absence of women in senior positions – a ‘wicked’ problem

Savita Kumra is a senior lecturer at Brunel Business School. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host a follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I get a feeling of déjà vu every time I see a headline decrying the lack of women on FTSE boards. Most recently, focus has been on the dearth of female non-executive directors on such boards and the solution of choice seems to be a number of organizations springing up to ‘mentor’ women so they are ready and able to take up these positions when the call comes.

Quite why this is seen as the way forward; when the approach has been tried for at least 10 years is not fully explained. What is clear is that the painfully slow progress of women onto FTSE boards is a fact and as Rittel and Webber would put it, a ‘wicked’ problem whose solution is as elusive as its continued presence as an issue is frustrating.

A recently commissioned study shows that of the 1,772 non-executive positions available on FTSE 350 boards; only 204 (11.5 percent) are held by women. Of those who make it, we know from work done at Cranfield School of Management that they are more likely than their male counterparts to have titles, they are more likely to have experience in a greater number of sectors and they are more likely to have greater experience serving on minor boards before breaking into the major leagues of the FTSE.

It is thus evident the bar is set extremely high for women and whilst there is evidence that men recruit in their own image; the women who gain these positions also come with fairly standard, albeit glowing, ‘vanilla’ CV’s.  Indeed as a friend, who is head of diversity in a City based firm astutely commented ‘…even the networks who look at getting women into Director positions are very elitist and will only look at women at VERY senior positions; they are not willing to mentor talented women a little further down the food chain’. So perhaps relying on mentoring, and making progress one woman at a time, may not be the whole answer.

As with many ‘wicked’ problems, perhaps a way to approach its solution is to reframe the problem itself. I attended a seminar a couple of years ago, and an Australian colleague struck me with her novel approach to framing the usual lament; rather than focusing on the lack of women in senior positions; she talked about the problems and challenges apparent in organizations by having a ‘surplus of men’.

The future is female? A re-traditionalisation of gender

Ruth Simpson is professor in management at Brunel Business School in West London and founding member of the Centre for Research in Emotion Work and Employment Studies. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters is hosting a live blog for the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011.

Are we in a post-feminist era or are conventional images of masculinity and femininity re-surfacing in society? I argue that rather than gender disadvantage being a thing of the past, as captured in understandings of post-feminism, gender is becoming more entrenched. In fact post-feminism itself – the belief that sexism is over – has allowed renewed disadvantage to emerge.

Post-feminism can be identified in a range of social trends. It can be seen in representations, common in the media, of the “Future is Female” celebrating the supposed assets that women bring into organizations. Women are thus seen to be the new “winners” – bringing crucial “emotional skills” to an economy characterised by attention to customer service and to “modern” organizations that are based on managing horizontal relationships rather than vertical ones and on a need for team-working rather than old-fashioned command and control.

Women are seen to have the right skills and mindset for this new working environment – to be adept at listening and communication, to be risk-aware rather than risk-taking and to be charismatic and visionary leaders. These celebratory visions are associated with Generation Y – the younger generation born after 1977 and who are just entering or who have recently enrolled in the labour market.

Members of this generation are confident, independent and seek challenging enjoyable work as well as time for play. They believe they can author their own lives through the choices they make, have a faith in meritocracy and, in terms of gender, believe that discrimination is a thing of the past.

The glass ceiling has been broken and feminism is an issue for their parents’ generation, not their own, with young women, particularly in the context of education, outperforming men. But a post-feminist faith in meritocracy and choice may mean we have become blind to issues of gender so that a new traditionalisation has crept in. A feminist consciousness has been replaced by a belief in merit, empowerment and choice. But notions of merit are not gender free.