Blog

World Economic Forum and INSEAD release Corporate Gender Gap Report

Our forum member INSEAD has collaborated with the World Economic Forum on a survey of 600 companies in 20 countries and produced a report which demonstrates that the biggest employers continue to lose out on female talent. The report surveyed heads of human resources at the world's largest employers, and its 25 questions assessed companies on representation of women within their establishments and the use of a variety of gender equality practices. The researchers found that female employees tend to be concentrated in entry or middle level positions and remain scarce in senior management or board positions in most countries and industries. The average for women holding the CEO-level position was a little less than 5% among the companies surveyed. While these findings are discouraging, the report should be a useful tool for businesses to continue assessing and improving their performance on gender.

Deutsche Telekom introduces gender quotas

Germany-based telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom just announced its intention to significantly increase the numbers of women in its leadership, becoming the first Dax 30 company to introduce gender quotas for women in management. While such quotas have been popular for years in the political sphere and countries such as Norway have started mandating them for women on boards, the business arena has not followed suit - until now.

Gendered investment patterns in the recession

The mutual fund company Vanguard has just released the findings of some interesting research on women's and men's investment patterns during the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis. Using data from 2.7 million people with IRA's, Vanguard found that men were much more likely to sell their shares at stock market lows. During the time period examined, this meant missing out on the stock market rally that followed. The conclusion is that male investors seem overconfident in their choices, when compared with their more cautious female counterparts. This finding is by no means novel. In 2001, a study entitled "Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment" found that men traded their stocks 50 times more than women, resulting in higher fees and lower returns.

Stories from the 10,000 Women initiative

Our forum member Goldman Sachs has a new website for their 10,000 Women initiative - a five year effort to provide 10,000 women around the world with a business and management education. The website features engaging, heartwarming stories from women's who've benefited. One of them is Andeisha, who runs a non-governmental organization for children called the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization. The organization provides various services to children, including orphanages, healthcare and education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The business education and mentoring from Goldman Sachs helped Andeisha run her orphanages more professionally and develop a strategy to build schools for the orphans. 10,000 Women is now in its second year, and the Financial Times did an interesting article for the occasion, summarizing their progress to date.

The war on baby girls

This week's edition of The Economist has a highly interesting, though disturbing feature on gendercide - the phenomenon of over 100 missing women, who have been killed, neglected to death or aborted because of continued societal preferences for boys. The situation is especially stark in countries like China, where research has found that there will be an extra 30 to 40 million of boys aged 19 and below by 2020. While the one child policy in China has contributed to this problem, other countries that do not have it still display unnaturally high ratios of boys to girls. They include Armenia, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Serbia, among others. The consequences of this gender imbalance could be profound - resulting in increased violence and higher crime rates. This alone should be enough to convince societies to raise the value of girls.

International Women's Day Survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

In 2009, our forum member PwC conducted an interesting survey on the impact the recession has had on women's career prospects. The survey respondents were mainly from the UK and the findings revealed that the economic downturn had rather negatively impacted women's career prospects. To mark International Women's Day, PwC is looking to update the research and get as many people as possible to take the survey around the world. The online survey will be open for four weeks and the results will be made available in due course. You can access it here.

Happy International Women's Day

Around the world, March 8 marks the celebration of International Women's Day. For the occasion, the World Bank Group has organized a series of educational and celebratory events. It is also using this date to highlight the progress it has made in integrating gender into its work. A story on the World Bank's website today, for example, notes the progress the institution has made in supporting gender-related projects in developing countries. Gender issues informed the design of 45% of all lending operations in FY08 –from July 2007 to June 2008-- compared to 35% in FY06.

A new database on gender and land rights

FAO has just launched a database that puts the spotlight on continued inequalities in access to land between women and men worldwide. The database covers 78 countries and includes information on national and customary laws, land tenure, civil society stakeholders working on the subject, and sex-disaggregated statistics. Such information has been generally difficult to come by, and this new tool is therefore a great addition to researchers and advocates for gender equality. Even though in many countries women form the majority of agricultural workers, they tend to have smaller land plots and less secure land rights, or no access to land of their own. This issue is also important because access to land is often needed for securing credit and growing a business. Improved information on the subject is the first step towards lowering the continued gender inequalities in access to land.

Benchmarking women's leadership

The White House Project, a non-governmetal organization that works to advance women's leadership to the American Presidency, recently released an interesting new report focused on women's leadership in the United States. The report surveys women's leadership in 10 different fields - from sports, to military and politics. The researchers report some encouraging progress, but find that women still rarely make it to the top. The overall news remains discouraging: women still make up only 18% of the nation's top leaders. Still, the American public believes that women have what it takes to lead - with the mental acceptance already accomplished, actual change can't be far behind.

Call for papers: challenges for research on gender and science

The final conference of the 'Meta-analysis of gender and science research,' to be held in October 2010 in Brussels, Belgium, is inviting paper submissions on possibilities and challenges for research on gender and science, and policies towards gender equality in science. The conference is part of a European Union project that includes more than 50 experts from EU member states. The deadline for abstract submissions is May 31st, 2010. For more information, visit their website.