Davos: Where are the women, again?

As CEOs, celebrities, and champagne covers the snowy streets of Davos this week for the 2013 World Economic Forum, the media is enjoying its own spin on the world’s most exclusive event. While the mix of people at the event is slowly changing with the rise of World Economic Young Leaders, Global Shapers and technology entrepreneurs, there is one population that remains quite the same—the overwhelmingly low ratio of women to men at the event and the whispers of the quota system in the air.

With women still only making up only 17 percent of Davos, we are moving closer but we are not moving fast enough. There is still a long way to go.

This week in Huffington Post I share some facts about quotas as "controlled experiments" and what it might look like in the future. Read the full article here.

How are you tackling quotas in your workplace? Do you have strategies to recruit a pool of diverse talent—diversity of backgrounds, experience and ideas? We might not be able to change Davos, but we can change our own teams and companies to generate better ideas, leaders, products and services.

Women Can Have It All: My take on Slaughter’s Piece

Anne Marie Slaughter’s piece has reached over 200,000 recommendations on Facebook and an absurd amount of reactions on blogs everywhere. It is the most well read piece in The Atlantic history.

Beyond my leadership consulting and coaching work, I’m a Harvard researcher on the work-life aspirations of Gen Y women and men. I didn’t think Ms. Slaughter was saying anything we haven’t heard before, but her piece rippled and shocked millions of people, largely due to the absurdity of the title.

I believe that women can have it all…over the course of their life. Work-life balance is a unfair term in today’s age—it’s never a weighing scale between the two, it’s an ongoing process.

For those of you who skimmed or half read the piece (you know who you are), here’s a quick summary: Slaughter argues that maybe there are constraints that make women lean back (as opposed to Sandberg’s popular ‘women need to lean in’ argument). She further says that its society that needs to change, not marriage. Here’s a reader’s digest version if you need one.

Most of the critics of the piece had two main arguments.  First, women does not mean mother. Many women felt a broader set of issues could have been explored. Second, the phrase ‘having it all’ is a 1980s term. It was used back then as a perspective of what women wanted to be doing, but the negative framing has driven people crazy. It has positioned the issue as an HR work-life problem rather than a conversation on leadership.

The real challenge in my eyes is that this piece was setup as a woman’s problem, not a man’s problem. It sets up men as the norm instead of parents as the norm. Working women are not a special case—working parents are.

And most importantly, what I care about most is how this piece affects Gen Y women and men. The response I heard from some Gen Y women was one of dismay and despair, which upset me. The language and the way we frame this issue can make young women lower their aspirations, feeling like they will inevitably have to sacrifice.  I deeply hope that this piece does not become a reason for women to say ‘it’s not worth it’ or ‘I am not going invest in my career because it will ultimately come at too great of a cost to my family life.’

As 20 somethings, we are still trying it figure it all out, so we should see this piece as a guiding light, not a call for help.  At the end of the day, everyone has to define what it means for them to ‘have it all’. Having it all, for me, is to have what I want. And I believe I can have it all because I have what I want.

So ladies and gentlemen, let’s not make this piece an excuse to not continue to focus on the real barriers and hurdles that still very much exist in the workplace that prevent women from moving up the corporate and political ladder. Let’s stop being so hard on professional women and support them like we support men in our culture. I believe we can create collective change for the better in business and politics, but first we need to reframe this dominant narrative to a conversation on what women’s leadership might mean for our world.

 

Davos 2012 is in action

The conference has begun. Blackberries, black suits, and BMWs have taken over the streets of snowy Davos. 3,000 leaders have across the world have flooded the halls and sessions sharing their opinions on the debt crisis, emerging economies, health reform, technological innovations, diversity, and more.

A key conversation has been on the role of business in society. CEOs have been challenged to break the view that there is no ‘them’, there is only ‘us.’ We live in an increasingly interconnected world and many of the conversations have questioned the decision-making practices of CEOs. Business leaders have been called to personalize their role in society, openly share their tax payments and how they make an impact in their community. Matt Bishop from The Economist spoke of the failure of shareholders to focus on long-term sustainability, called for ethical capitalism, and advocated that atleast 1 person under the age of 30 to be on each company board.

My most inspiring moment of the day was the opening plenary with Desmond Tutu, former archbishop of Cape Town, who said “we need a revolution led by women. I think women ought to be saying to us men: You have made a mess, just get out and let us in…let us re-align forces, let us ensure that women have a significant part in the decision-making process.” His speech came shortly after German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the world’s most powerful woman, gave the keynote address at Davos.

The push to promote women and youth at these forums has been exciting and inspiring to me, yet there is much more work to do in this domain. The Global Shapers delegation is an incredible set of 70 leaders, yet it isn’t entirely representative of all young people today. However, for me, truly being of service is about stepping up to the opportunities here and engaging with people who are very different from me. We need more Gen Y leaders to step up (in December, I called for more Gen Y women to take the stage). This is an evolution that will be happening for the next century.

More to come! Follow @davos @wef and #4mygen for leaders from our generation.

ForbesWoman: How Women Executives Who Leave Their Roles Affect The Next Generation of Women Leaders

It’s been over three years since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the downfall of CFO Erin Callan. Yet the underlying unfair media portrayal facing women executives who leave their roles continues in cases like Carol Barsh and Sallie Krawcheck this year. What I care about most is how the media’s disservice to women executives given the portrayal of them when they leave powerful positions affects future generations of women leaders.

Check out my most recent piece in ForbesWoman entitled How Women Executives Who Leave Their Roles Affect the Next Generation of Women Leaders. I hope you can share your perspective and thoughts as well.

Highlights from TEDxWomen

This post was cross-published at Levo League.

TEDxWomen was an inspiring day packed with female change agents and innovators. More than 100 TEDxWomen gatherings convened all over world, including the first ever TEDx event in Libya. The themes of the day were Resilience, Relationships, ReImagine, and Rebirth. My favorite speakers were many of the Gen Y women who took the stage: Claire Sannini, a 8th grade girl who spoke about her experience with girl bullying alongside Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, and Busisiwe Mkhumbuzi, an amazing 17 year old girl from Johannesburg and V-Girls action team leader.
Here are some of my most memorable quotes from the amazing group of speakers:

  • Gayle Lemmon, writer and journalist: “If you see the word micro finance most people think women. If you think entrepreneur most people think men. We must move beyond micro hopes and micro ambitions for women…Women can no longer be both 50 percent of the population and a special interest group.”
  • Jennifer Newsom, producer of Miss Representation: “The media is killing our daughters’ ambition and destroying empathy and emotion in our sons..3 percent of decision makers of media are women, 97 percent of decisions are made by men. For the 97 percent, I challenge you to mentor women up the ladder and help promote them. Let’s demand a media culture that uplifts us all, inspires our daughters to be president, our sons to be empathic partners.”
  • Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: “In a 2006 study, 74 percent of girls were under pressure to please everyone. If we want girls to be resilient, we have to give them the skills to navigate.”
  • Shahira Amin, Egyptian journalist: “Women are the future of the new Egypt; they will lead, and men will follow.”
  • Gloria Steinem, author and feminist activist: “My generation thought life was over at 30 and your generation feels like you have to be successful before 30.”

This is just a small dose of an incredible set of women and men that came together to hear groundbreaking ideas to advance women and girls. Stay tuned as TEDxWomen will publish the various talks online in the coming days!

MIT and Gender Inequity

Walk the halls of the MIT corridor and you’ll feel a much more balanced gender ratio these days than in 10 years ago. But have gender quotas inevitably caused resentment at today’s universities? Perhaps they have replaced the resentment that marginalized women have faced and created a more connected, aggressive resentment from a larger pool of men?

This NYTimes article shows that gender awareness needs to happen at an undergraduate level. Both young women and men need to be sensitized to sterotypes, negotiation habits, and marginalization.

“To women in my generation, these residual issues can sound small because we see so much progress,” said Nancy H. Hopkins, a molecular biologist who instigated the first report. “But they’re not small; they still create an unequal playing field for women — not just at universities, and certainly not just at M.I.T. And they’re harder to change because they are a reflection of where women stand in society.”

Meaningful life with meaningful work

Last week, I was fortunate to meet Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon, who was the keynote speaker at the Sloan’s women celebration. She embraced a vision that I aspire for: having a meaningful life with meaningful work. In this post, I want to recount some of her “lessons learned” that have motivated me to do the same.

1)     Follow your compass, not your clock. Do you want the company, the work, or the title? Many people find jobs but not careers. She advises to find passion by finding the work that brings you both passion and compassion.

2)     Thank your parents. Andrea discussed her traditional Chinese upbringing (reminds me of my Indian-American childhood!) and the principles and values she learned along the way. This has counted to be most important in dark moments. At the end of the day, human values and human relationships are why companies survive and thrive.

3)     Reinvent yourself. Every month, reflect on your decisions. Are you being objective and opening up to listen?

4)     Innovation. George Bernard Shaw said “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” Be a transformative thinker.

5)     Use technology. Social media is transforming business and the world.

6)     Be open to stamping your passport. We live in a global marketplace now. China is the second largest consumer market in the world.

7)     Social responsibility. It’s not an option anymore, it can be part of your job. Any private company can do good. It is not only for what we do that we are responsible, but also for what we don’t do.

Andrea reminded me to stretch myself and find balance between all sectors of my life: my work, my home, myself, and my community. When asked about work-life balance, she said “It can be done, but you need to make decisions prioritizing the two.” As an example, she spoke of a time she declined an invitation to meet President Bush at the White House in order to send her daughter off to Paris for summer camp because “she will remember forever that I wasn’t there… [whereas] President Bush would never have even noticed.”

This fall, I am forming a women’s entrepreneurship circle with a group of Sloan women to share ideas, exchange ideas, and learn from one another. If you know any great speakers or organizations we can partner with, please let me know.

The voice of women

My desire to write has been motivated by my recent attendance at the Op-Ed Project, an initiative to expand the range of voices we hear in the world. Most of the voices around the world come from a narrow slice of society-white, wealthy, and majorly male. In order to expand public debate and build broader movements, women need to engage in key thought leadership forums, whether in op-eds, blogs, twitter or even on Facebook. As Katie Orenstein, head of the Op-Ed Project said so well, “This is because we-the public and our leaders-are not getting the best information we need to make the best decisions. What is the cost to ALL of us when half of the best minds and ideas in the world-women’s minds and women’s ideas are left out?”