 It's a great pleasure to welcome you all to the Palais today. For this interactive session on the theme of Planet 5050 by 2030, step it up for gender equality to mark this year's International Women's Day. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance. And indeed, the goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls is now firmly anchored at the heart of the international agenda as the fifth of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that were approved by Member States last September in New York. This is why in October 2015, the UN Office of Geneva, the US Permanent Mission in Geneva and Women at the Table, co-launched the International Geneva Gender Champions Initiative. The initiative showcases the role of each of us in breaking down barriers by doing away with gender bias and stereotypes. And this is why we are here today, to become conscious of our own bias in order to overcome it and to make greater strides towards gender equality. We have a very interesting session ahead of us. And therefore, without further ado, I just have to give the floor to Ms. Tanya Odom, Harvard Graduate Global Consultant. She's also a diversity thought leader and writes for the Huffington Post and CNN. She'll be facilitating today's discussion. The way we're going to do it is that the first part will be dedicated to a candid dialogue with the champions sitting here focusing on their own experiences. And in the second part, Ms. Odom will moderate an interactive discussion with all of you on unconscious bias. We look forward to your active participation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. You can talk back. Like, we're alive. So those who aren't here or who are on Periscope or Twitter aren't live, but this group of people are live. I shook hands with each of them so I know it, right? I think one of the benefits of having people of this esteemed quality is to be able to see what we know as a good practice and getting leaders to really talk about diversity and inclusion and gender equality. This is a unique opportunity. And so, as was stated, it will be a dialogue. So I'll ask them some questions. We'll have a couple of opportunities for you to ask questions. And my first question to all of them, in addition to just thanking them for being here, is why is this important to you? So the topic that we're talking about is unconscious bias, which we know are sort of these implicit associations that we sometimes make, these things that go beyond detection and actually could contradict our personal values. So I think that's an important piece. That's really a different topic that we might be talking about. So why is this important to all of you? Maybe I'll start on this way. Why is this topic important to you? Well, as you say, it's extremely important and it's critical to all that we do. First of all, by not achieving gender parity, and we never quite arrived at that goal, I'm afraid, we're cutting ourselves off from a lot of important ideas and catalytic efforts. We are wasting a lot of talent who could be helping us to achieve our objectives. We basically lose credibility as an organization. We are lacking, we're taking a reputational risk. We're not representative and we're seen as such in the field, particularly where we're working around the world. And I have to say on a confessional moment that IOM has not achieved gender parity that would have been hoped for and that I had expected. I'm disappointed in that. I'm disappointed in myself in that regard. Okay, we have overall globally with our 9,000 to 9,500 staff, we have roughly a 53-47 ratio now, which sounds very good and I wish it were. But if you go then to the senior levels, P4, P5 and D1, we don't go beyond D1, then it drops off to about 78-22, with women falling off deeply around 20%. This shows you that we are not giving the opportunities. First of all, we are not keeping up on the promotion side and I will never forget that when I was brought back to Washington in my former career, I was brought back to Washington by the Under Secretary for Management to do something about the gender problem because the women had just taken the State Department to court and had won. They had won on lack of recruitment, promotion, and assignment equity. So they just lost. So I went back to try to do something about minorities in general, but women in particular. So in the end, if you don't do the right thing, you'll be forced to do the right thing. So we have to do more on that to move forward. The only other point I guess I would make is that we, I made this point this morning when we had our session. We tend to treat female mediocrity much more harshly than male mediocrity. If you're a mediocre male, you probably get bife with it for a whole career. If you're mediocre as a female, you're likely to sort of not advance very much. So I would make that point. And then I failed in my part over the years for not spending more time counseling, mentoring, trying to help develop some of the women's staff who were not excellent performers and probably all they needed was just a little help to be seen that they're appreciated in order to move forward. And I guess the final thing I would say that I should have insisted much more with the UN secretariat and DPKO to give me at least one woman deputy SRSG when I was in the Congo. We had two ASGs, DSRSGs, and they were both male all the time. I could have done more there. I was fortunate when I was ambassador to have a deputy ambassador, a woman deputy ambassador in three of the six missions I headed, but I could have done better, certainly in the UN. Sorry. Thank you, Ambassador. Thank you. I think that to me the question of gender equality or gender parity is important for two main reasons. One is the issue around it's a basic human right and I'm sure Kate's going to talk more about that when the floor is turned over to her. And then as Bill mentioned, there's the economic imperative to having women adequately represented, equally represented as full members of society and contributing to their full potentials. And we've all seen the studies of how having more women in the workforce leads to greater creativity, greater productivity, greater profitability, and how women are also much more inclined to invest their earnings back into their families and into education and healthcare for their kids and into their families' well-being and so sort of all the benefits that we see that come down the road from that. In terms of unconscious bias, I think there's, to me, the two main drivers are how pervasive it is and how powerful unconscious bias is. In terms of being pervasive, we all have unconscious bias. We men, women, children, we're all shaped by our cultures, our families, our own personal experiences. The media has a big role to play and we form these default ways of thinking about things and patterns of how we categorize things. And then anything that doesn't fit into what we've sort of been hardwired to think is the right way, when that happens then we kind of don't know what to do with that information and it causes us to be very judgmental and very unaccepting of things that don't fit. So an example of people think of men as leaders, providers, being driven, being decisive, and on the flip side the women's default is you're emotional, you're caring, you're supportive, you're a great team player, you're compassionate. And so a woman that is trying to advance or is in a field of study that's not considered male is judged more harshly and not supported. And these are often in ways that we don't even realize that we're doing. And these patterns and these beliefs are really developed and shaped in early childhood and as I mentioned the media has a big part of that but so do parents and teachers and peers so it's something that's very pervasive, it plays out in the workforce, in the classroom, in our world, in panels and conferences and those types of discussions. So it's basically everywhere so that's one reason why it's very important and that we all need to be mindful and address this. And then secondly it's a very powerful phenomenon because the cumulative effect of unconscious bias is so great whereas for one individual in her lifetime as she's going through elementary school, secondary school, whatever, higher education and then on into their career these little biases and barriers and obstacles add up and so you can't underestimate that the cumulative effect is going to end up having a significant effect on individual women's careers and productivity and feeling of self-worth or lack of confidence. And then if you then take it in a more macro view and you think about collectively what that's doing when all women and girls are being made to suffer the consequences of unconscious bias. I mean the overall global result is really astounding so I would say that's sort of why it's important to me. I've had my own experience with unconscious bias. I was thinking back trying to get ready for this. One of my earliest memories was at the time I didn't even think about it that way but it was when I was in fifth grade and I went to a new school and I was originally just put into a regular math class and after a few weeks I was pretty good at math and the teacher said oh you know we're going to move you to the accelerated math class. They didn't call it that. They called it the smart boys class and at the time because it happened to be a group of boys and I didn't really think that it was unconscious bias playing out when I was ten years old but I remember thinking that I must have like a boy's brain and like why do I have a boy's brain you know. So it starts early and then as I sort of progressed through my career I for whatever reason picked a lot of male dominated fields. As I was an engineer and then I went into some of the science energy and telecommunications and some sciences and then ultimately investment banking and so I was always finding myself in situations of being you know assumed to be the spouse or assumed to be the assistant and you know the things we all see those stories and there's some funny videos online that have flipped the roles and have a man showing up and being automatically assumed that he's the spouse and he's going no but I work here so it resonated with me because I've had that through my you know my entire career so there's a personal aspect of my concern about this as well. Great thank you. Director General Romolo why is this important to you? It's important for several reasons. It's important both at the personal level over the years and the experiences I've had certainly professionally and personally but let's just speak to the professional have shown that it's better when there is greater diversity. Some of the best bosses I've had have been women. Some of the best staff I've had have been women but particularly where there has been a balance in the makeup of the team in which I've been working with it has been more productive it's been more pleasant to work in so from a personal point of view I've had so many examples across the years that it makes it sort of a no-brainer. On the sort of broader which is actually more important than my personal likes and dislikes. Let me start by using a quote from the new Prime Minister of Canada who was asked why his new cabinet was so diverse and his answer was because it's 2016 and it's true and it's true in many ways. It's particularly true because in the business that we work in and the world we live in we are now in the process of undergoing a very deep change in the way we're going to be managing our affairs both at the international and the national and the local levels. We're moving from very strict structures to something much more inclusive, multi-stakeholders where we need to bring in all sorts of new voices around the decision-making table and that cannot be done without having everybody around that table. That means women as well of course. It's true in the field where I've worked many times where most of the most successful programs that we implemented were only successful because women were involved both in terms of peacemaking but also in terms of development issues. We have just given ourselves, the world has just given itself a whole series of policy frameworks last year, 2015 I think. We'll go down in history as much more important than most of us think of it right now. But it will bring about and it has brought about already the need for a completely different way of working. And it's paramount to a deep culture change in structures both national and international where again it is not going to happen unless we have everybody on board. So it's a no-brainer as I said before, it's absolutely essential and that we do that. And that we change the bias around and make it a positive one. I've just been given a gift, I wasn't aware of this, but Corrine who keeps a BDI on this just tells me that, first of all in Geneva here in UNO, we are about the same as Bill's organization, we have about 48% overall. But again on the top it gets a little thinner, particularly if you look at the whole UN. If you look at the UN at D2 level it's about 27% but it turns out that my bias has been turned around because I now have total parity between D1s and D2s that report to me. So that's good. So it's something that we really need to work hard at, it's really, it's not a nice to have, it's a necessity, it's a must-do and we'll get there. I'm a little worried when I see the figures that are being brought about from the EFORSHIP campaign and others that tell us that parity in the workforce was not going to happen until 2095, that simply doesn't make any sense. And we just have to double, triple quadruple our efforts to make sure that it happens. It's possible. Thank you. I'll be the high commissioner. Why is this important to you? Thank you very much for the opportunity to sit with these fantastic leaders and I really want to celebrate the occasion of International Women's Day and the gift of the conversation. If I may most humbly say gender parity matters because its alternative is unfair, it's just wrong. I mean it's wasteful, it's inefficient, it's unimaginative, it's unintelligent, it's dumb, it's stupid, it's wrong. So that's the bottom line. The second thing though, well let me just say how wasteful it is in an age of austerity in a time of great scarcity, how can it be that we use such a dumb category and we use a category so dumbly to deprive ourselves of the fullest talent of the greatest resource there is on the planet, the hope for the planet which is the human resource. So that's the first thing that strikes me. The second thing that why I think the theme of this year's International Women's Day is important and gender parity is we are complicit in it. This doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from agents of decision making that create that system, that rewards unevenly unfairly and unimaginatively, uncreatively and stupidly. Did I say that before? Women is compared to men. I think, I was just trying to remember who it was but I think it was Juliet Mitchell who spoke of the internal map of patriarchy and for me almost any power relies upon a complicity, joining us to the legitimation of the claim to power and what for me is incredibly important and of course it's not just confined agenda but the intersectionalities that cluster around gender so it's also about race, it's also about indigeneity, it's also about ability, disability but these clusterings of rigidities, you know the boxed in, the boxed out, the boxed about that is created through these narrow, mean-minded, unimaginative depriving of talent categories, we're instrumental in that unless we make conscious the bias that we've been gifted with and for me the owning of your responsibility to deconstruct and stop constructing the other because it's not only about your own identity and particularly as a woman I think there is a journey of evolution there for your own esteem and your own sake but it's also how you're complicit in creating another and the other ring so that you join to this stratification that really is unsustainable, I mean it's not cool, it's not okay, we can't afford it, stop it now, really, cut it out, don't do that anymore. So we could all leave, that was it, stop it now. So I know you had a comment, I just wanted to say one thing on this and this is connected to something you say, one of the things those of you who've been through my sessions know is that the unconscious bias is there but it's the actions that actually perpetuate the bias, right, so it's cutting people off in meetings, it's not giving people a voice, it's not putting people on panels, so for me your examples are really important but because they show the severity, because I think people here on conscious bias and think it's something woo-woo, right, oh this is a flavor trend, we actually point to 40 years of research around how these micro behaviors that often come from unconscious bias impact people at the cumulative level which I think you both have mentioned so you had a comment but for my next question. Yes, in terms of changing the culture of sharing responsibility and changing it, just take a look at this room, 95% or 97% of you in here are women, why is that? Why is it that every time I take part in one of these meetings where we talk about gender the vast majority of you are women? I mean you're already convinced, I don't really need to talk to people. So part of your responsibility is to convince the males in your environment whether it's workforce or at home or wherever it is to come along to these talks. I mean frankly we really need to proselytize here otherwise we're not going to get there. So I have one question for each of you and I'm mindful of your time so Ambassador I'd like to ask you a question and it's really a question about and you mentioned this a little bit, you were in fields where maybe you were one of few and I would think that has a cumulative impact and yet sometimes it helps people to also want to help other people and you and Director General Mueller started the Geneva Gender Champion so I'm just curious when we talk about it what was the thought behind it? In other words what prompted you to be a part of that? Why did you want to be a part of that? Well I think the way it came about can be characterized by the international Geneva community really coming together and deciding through a lot of discussions that we were having trying to work together in different ways to address these long standing issues that have we go decades with very little progress or uneven progress and really the broader community engaging and saying we need to do something about this we need to push each other push ourselves to try to problem solve in different ways we need to partner we need to work together and sort of break down you know people about breaking down silos and you know in some ways with the work that was being done on the SDGs and Beijing plus 20 and a lot of other factors it seemed like sort of the time was right to really come together and so what we did was and you know really the formation of this was a collaborative effort it was Michael and myself and Caitlin and really saying you know we these are issues that we can't solve all these issues alone we have to work together man and women and so how can we put a structure in place here in Geneva that can be action-oriented and that can really address and get at some of these issues like the unconscious bias you know one of the primary components of the Geneva Gender Champions Network is this panel parody pledge and we tried to shape it so that it wasn't overly prescriptive and demanding parody tomorrow because we knew that wasn't going to happen but what was more important was to put a process in place so that really everybody that is involved in these these events and put an organizing these discussions and these panels can be encouraged prodded into changing the way they're thinking about things you know why do you not have a woman that's on your suggested list of participants no longer accepting the explanation that there aren't any qualified women because of course there are so pushing back a little bit and really putting a process in place which would then lead to in a hopefully relatively short period of time something closer to parody and you know Michael and several of the other male champions have gone so far as to say I won't participate on a panel that doesn't have at least one woman so you know it was something that could be collaborative and action-oriented and I'll point out that you know right now I think we have approximately 60% of our gender champions are men so it's been a really successful uniting of this community around this important issue and I just think the other two things quickly is I like that it's there's an inward focus to it there's a reflective process and you know it's it'll play out as people it's helping to change attitudes change these preconceived notions and then there's an outward focus where we're not only benefiting from hearing the diversity of views and more women's voices but we're also you know helping these women be more visible and and giving them an opportunity and a platform to show how qualified and capable they really are so the pledge you should know I've shared with private sector CEOs a lot and it seems so simple but I have to tell you how many of them have grasped onto this pledge as what a great idea right and I literally send them to your website send them to the handout I was in a meeting last week with a large global newspaper and the CEO said to me why didn't I think of that and I was like because they did in Geneva I'm not sure what to say right but I but I want to ask you a question about this so you as as part of it and we heard your thoughts about one your motivation but two and this actually happened to me last week in Vienna with a couple of entities there's some pushback sometimes in some questions that says that if you're pushing for parity that in essence what's the risk you may be running the risk of replacing women replacing men with sort of not qualified women so what have you come across that and what's been your response to that no I haven't come across that yet you will I'm sure they told me versus you so maybe it will be in the future but what do you think about that but the answer is rather simple as far as I'm concerned and we can bring it back to the discussion of the next secretary general for example but the fact is that this is not either or this is about getting the best person for a given job and whether that person is female or male is secondary of course we need to push for parity and but that means that we have to be much better at first of all going out there and making sure that there is equal access to these jobs and that people know about them and the way that we assess them analyze them, interview them and that the process is fair and even the playing field for everybody the fact is that access and opportunity those are the things that need to be opened up I'm not here to replace men I'm here to make sure that the best possible person is going to be working in this organization so that we can deliver on the mandates that we've been given now as to why I joined Pamela and this is very simple because I was tired of the talk and there was no action and here we came up with something really easily understood practical, measurable, something we can hold people accountable to and it works from the day that I announced that I was no longer going on panels where there's no women, there are no panels without women basically the last one I had to really hit over the head was the Vatican a bastion of male dominance if there ever was one and within 24 hours there were lots of women on the panel all of them just as good if not better than the men who were on it so that to me was the clincher with small, simple interventions practical interventions that make sense to everybody you actually get things moving and we're getting things moving in less than, I don't even know how many months, a couple of months we have over 100 of them we're now looking at how to scale that up into other duty stations and I'm really happy to hear what you just said because clearly we also have to do it with businesses tomorrow I'm going for dinner with the IOC another bastion of male, male-ness and I'm going to push Mr. Buck very hard to wonderful, thank you Director General, migration is an issue on everyone's minds it's on television we're all thinking about it talking about it and we look sometimes through the lens at women and women migrants so can you talk a little bit about how this is related to that topic and the work that you do and what are some of the biases that might be harmful about them or to them? Let me just pick up one point that Michael and Pamela were both making let me abide just by a way of levity I was in New York last weekend to moderate a panel and I thank the ambassador of Zambia and the ambassador of the Philippines for being there because otherwise I said I wouldn't have been able to take part they were the only two women on the panel and sure as soon as I finished the next panel was all male but anyway what I like about the gender champions is it's very practical and I just want to make the point that gender parity will not happen naturally the males will make sure it doesn't so if you don't have a policy if you don't have targets that are measurable if you don't review it at regular intervals then it just won't happen and I think what you all are doing is terrific and I'm really proud to be part of that on the question of migration it is true that about 50% of all migration is women the character of the migration has changed significantly over the years it's no longer just women going to join the family it's increasingly professional women pursuing careers fleeing violence and all of that it's true they're much more vulnerable along the migratory path the whole problem of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse violence against them is much greater but we should also make sure therefore that we have the right policies in place to protect them there I'm very concerned right now the humanitarian crisis that has developed along the migratory paths into Europe women are also contributing enormously through migration to all of our societies most of our countries were built with the brains and talent of migrants including in particular women so I think that's the main thing I can say about it we shouldn't just immediately think of them though just as victims think of them also as pioneers because they are bringing ideas and new ways of thinking that will enrich all of our societies they bring in a dynamism that we of course in the U.S. know very well W.I. Commissioner can you talk to us about and you said you started to talk about this I think but just why is this a human rights issue I mean how do you connect this to human rights I think the foundational premise of rights of causes that we're all born equal and that anything that builds on the foundation of that equality that emerges as diversity and talent is to be celebrated but anything that erodes that foundation of being equal under the skin is to really be questioned and in that sense the social construction of gender has become a confinement rather than a source of empowerment gender in a way emerges as performance as theatre you put on the accruement of your gender you wear a dress as opposed to trousers you dress dolls as opposed to dig in the ground I mean these are artefacts or artificial constructs of gender that has nothing at all to do with our individual uniqueness or the solid platform that we hold in common and of course that discriminatory idea of what's acceptable for one group of people as compared to another is not uniquely attached to gender it is a perversion of human capability that chases race and it chases sexual orientation and it chases disability and in each instance it creates a stratification that's completely counters to the basic ideas of human rights an idea that somehow my identity versus yours is either superior or of greater value I mean the cherry picking that's associated with that differentiation of identity is a perversion of the basic principles of human rights and I think it's something that is so profoundly unjust and so profoundly wasteful that in fact we should be deeply disturbed by our tolerance of it why on earth are we so tolerant of it why does it pass almost unremarked why is it not problematised deeply if you think about the sustainable development agenda actually it says we've got to start with those left further behind how on earth are we going to do that if we disguise exclusion, marginalisation, bigotry and discrimination behind highly tolerated, very problematic but somehow normalised categorisation of peoples I mean we will never ever realise the full potential of human beings so long as we disguise and distort the full capability of human beings behind these redundant ideas of how one should fit in so to me it's a deeply ethical problem it's a deeply immoral problem it's plain and legal under human rights law but it's eroding our access to human capability and that's unacceptable so that's what human rights business thank you so before we bring Caitlin up and the time goes so quickly if possible and I appreciate you all have started to do this if you can end with something that everybody in the room could do and I'll just give you like 30 seconds maybe less because I'm getting looks from people because so just what could people do I think this piece about the practicalness of the Parity Pledge is really something to think about and as someone who's been doing this work a long time I think we often thought that people would figure it out let me give you the education and somehow you would be able to problematise this to use your language and we haven't found that people need guidance, people need help so any one of you to start what would you say is something that people in the audience could do as we sort of sum this up I have a couple of ideas I think the first would be to well there's sort of general awareness raising which we all of course expect you're going to do but I would add to that to look for ways to consciously filter women in as opposed to unconsciously filtering women out so just be much more mindful as you go through your daily lives your days in the office and really try to be proactive about it and look for those opportunities because I forget somebody just said this isn't going to solve itself you really need to take action so that would be one and then the other thing would be to look for some ways to change systems because their systems are definitely set up to fit with these stereotypes and unconscious bias bias is one example I was talking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting there was a senior executive of a corporation and she said that whenever senior management positions become vacant and they basically post the vacancy notice and she gets a long line of men at the door and no women or very few women and she knows that there are women that are as qualified, better qualified than some of the men that are basically raising their hand and saying that they're I'm the one for you and there's been studies that of course show this that a man I think the statistics are that as long as he feels that he's sort of 60% qualified he's all in and I'm your man but a woman to raise her hand and to self promote needs to be 100, 110% sure that she can do the job and some women have a hard time that's what makes them uncomfortable generalizing but it's harder and so maybe the system that relies on people voluntarily promoting themselves and putting themselves forward for promotions isn't the right system maybe there should be a different system in place so look for those types of opportunities where we can tweak or change systems so that they can basically adjust for these unconscious biases that we all have Great Anybody else? Let me piggyback on what it says which I think is very true I think that we all need to be educators we have to talk about it we have to confront our own biases whether we are women or men and really have it as part of our daily conversations with those around us it's a major culture change that we're looking at it's been one that has been there slowly and it's particularly important in a place like the United Nations where you have 193 or more different cultures a very asymmetric picture of where the issue of gender is I'm from Denmark our society is maybe a little bit more gender sensitive if you want but we've been talking for many decades than another so we talk differently but the fundamental of what you say has to stay the same and I think that that conversation is not taking place enough around the coffee cooler or water cooler whatever at lunch etc because as you say we accept it all of us it's too easy to accept because it's part of our daily lives it's part of the way we were brought up it's part of our culture of the culture these stereotypes are being reproduced in movies and music and all over the place it's not as if we are in some sort of bubble here so it's really a very conscious hard work effort to educate each other and ourselves on a constant basis that this has to change and then eventually we'll get there but we just need to speed up this process because it's now that we need it it's not in 2019 so what do you think a little bit along the same line as Michael I think that we have to multiply our voice on this by reaching out to as many people as possible making sure we bring a gender element into all of our conversations secondly I think we need to follow the gender champions lead and come up with some very practical things I mean for example I began the practice some time ago that if I get a short list for a position and there's not a woman on there I send it back and I say is there not one qualified woman in this whole organization who could do this job I got this because when I was the secretary for the ambassador of the department in the state department the deputy secretary told me he said don't ever send me a list here there doesn't have at least one woman on here it's the way you've got to make it happen and if we can do practical things like that I think we'll make some progress not enough but at least the beginning wonderful thank you Deputy High Commissioner what would you say people can tell me I think we're hearing and seeing examples right here today three great leaders making it personal and I think we have to make it personal if we're to subvert a system that is very resistant to change then we all have to consciously step away from it and call it for what it is it is a system that has dominance built into it in a manner that doesn't enable human creativity I think the second thing is we have to predict that it is a resilient system and it will kick back so that it's intriguing that Merritt suddenly comes into the picture when a woman is asked when gender parity is sought in recruitment processes when quite clearly if recruitment processes have tipped out only men and in particular white-skinned men the Merritt has had very little to do with it for some time but you have to keep subverting what the dominant narrative gives you which then comes to a third point I think you have to own your own standpoint you have to own your privilege and each of us has to live inside the skin of our own identity identity is not just in the other it's our own I might be a woman for all intents and purposes but you know I'm also white I'm also privileged I'm also without immediate apparent disability I mean these things matter enormously that I understand the privilege of my position but my identity as well and that I then think about how to dismantle where it's unfair and unjust and I make it personal and this time let's make it personal and let's make it a deeply personal project that we will not be made complicit with a system that we know is inherently wrong that's how it will change so we're going to invite Caitlin up but before we do I'd love to just thank all of you and just give them a round of applause if we can because it's because I think that one of the things we know is that you do have to look at culture we do have to look at culture and people who want things to change but we have to look at systems and accountability as well so I'm now going to turn it over to Caitlin Kraft Buckman who's the executive director and founder of women at the table to do a short summary sort of as we end this piece okay great that works too okay so thank you all very much thank you very much so there's a little bit of a this is called it's not really intermission but what it is is that we have our guest that are going to leave the stage and I'm going to come down and start the unconscious bias short presentation to give us a little more of an idea about what we're actually talking about so let me just come down this way and let you all be able to get off the stage so many of you have seen this presentation we've been doing this for almost a year at this point I was brought in by you and women initially to work with the UN swap which as many of you know is a very unique way to also keep us all accountable across the UN system and one of the things we know if we can just pull up that other presentation that would be great presentation yeah perfect so one of the things we know and is that we sometimes see things and we don't necessarily always name them I love this example of sort of naming things and naming things when in fact they're a problem so I often begin with this slide which may be hard to see but it's a slide of this beautiful balcony anybody know where this is except for the people who've been through my session what do we think where might this be Italy I don't have a lot of time so I have to go quickly it's Italy this was actually a seven day private sector client retreat this is in Taramina and many of you know Ron Heifetz is a business school professor who does a lot of work on leadership and he says that we have to actually get on the balcony right we have to look at things and we have to sort of get a perspective other than what we normally see that's why I think this panel was so amazing right to have leaders at this level here's my perspective here's what I'm doing so how many times do you think I went on that balcony come on you some of you have been on mission once to take the photo right and then maybe one other time as I sort of looked at it and I'd love for you to think about this unconscious bias as a way to think about getting on the balcony we know from the research a lot of research that diverse teams actually outperform homogenous teams that's not new that's research that we've had for quite some time the interesting thing that many people don't focus on is it's not going to just happen this is where accountability comes in this is where metrics come in meaning this last piece from Scott Page's research but also from research that we have for years shows us in fact that you have to help people with the skill set that's what director general was talking about those that that practicality what are the skills that people need in order to manage and leave diverse teams so unconscious bias as a concept we've seen a lot more of it's popularity in the last three to five years however a lot of the seminal research on unconscious bias in the workplace actually started in the 1990s and I'll talk about that we get 11 million pieces of information coming at us from any at any one particular point how many pieces of information can our brain process the people who were already in my session are saying the answer so we're not going to listen to them the answer is 40 40 so what happens to all of those other pieces of information this is before wine right so that's on a good day in the morning as I start my day 11 million pieces 40 my brain creates shortcuts my brain creates tricks and ways to in fact remember things to in fact help me get through the day and what we know a byproduct is unconscious bias so the definitions a couple of them as you'll see up here and I'll read them out it might be hard in the back I'm not going to read every single bullet point but the one thing that's important they operate beyond our control right they're beyond our control they're also implicit associations or characteristics so I get off the plane in Geneva and I say oh the Swiss you see a New York woman in front of you who speaks quickly wears all black and you say oh those New Yorkers right so we do this and then the thing that's important is that it comes from our experiences our exposure the ambassadors description about that story imagine smart boys class imagine just thinking about the message of the girls who never made it there and by the way to think about I sort of love this and it's not revenge but how many years later the fact that she's an ambassador from the smart boys class I love that that's a book anyway