 Gallbonydd am ymgyrch yn gweithio wrth gael i chi fod gennym rhai o'r wych, ond mae'n gweithio i'r Ysgolau Ysgolau Cymru, wedi bod yn gofynu'r ffordd ar y cyfnodau gyda'r busg, i meddwl y Gweithgaredd Cymru, y gydagol yma. Mae'r rhai o'r ffordd yn y cyfnod i'r gweithgaredd, mae'n gweithio i'r busg, ac mae'n gweithio'r busg yn cael ei ddechrau, ac ydy'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod lleol yn y ffordd. Ac rwy'n fawr yn helpu i'r byw ymgyrch, y dyfodol a'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod ar y gyrfa. Gweithio'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod ar gyfer y dyfodol yma, ac mae'n gweithio'r ffordd yn y rhan o'r refaelu. Yn gyflwyno, mae'r gweithio'r cyfnod yn llwyaf yn y cyfrif. Felly, rwy'n gweithio'r cyfrif yn ychydig, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyfrif yn y cyfrif. I'm going to keep my remarks to a minimum, but I will just, however, introduce my panel. First of all, I'm going to ask my colleague Sadiad Zahidi, who's head of employment and gender initiatives at the forum, a member of our executive committee, to discuss some of the key findings and highlights from a recent report we put out on Monday on the industry gender gap, and what exactly it means as we head towards this revolution. Theresa Whitmarsh is executive director of the Washington State Investment Board. She's got some personal experiences to share about your rise through the career progression, as well as your personal experiences working in the financial services industry, not a unique industry, but one that's very challenged nonetheless when it comes to gender balance. Mariswan is executive vice president, global strategy and talent and manpower in the USA, a long-term partner of the forum in our work on gender parity, and also I believe you have some more research. More importantly, you're at the cutting edge of trying to work with your clients to break down that barrier, and I'm sure you've got experiences to share as well. Sadri, over to you first, please. Thank you, Ollie. So I'm going to talk about this report that we put out on Monday on the future of jobs, which had a pretty significant section on the industry gender gap. I'm representing the work of many people, so my co-authors inside the forum are external collaborators from the Global Agenda Councils on the Future of Jobs and Gender Parity. Mariswan has been involved with that. Let me try to give you just a few highlights. One, most businesses state that they want to hire and promote and retain more women, where there tends to be a failure is on the action. To try to understand that and unpack that a little bit, we ask for the reasons why. Just before I get there, that statement that we want to recruit, retain, promote more women is even more prominent in the traditionally male-dominated industries. They are certainly feeling the pressure to try to reverse that gender gap. The reasons range from being a moral imperative all the way through to a business imperative, but what's come out quite clearly from the study is that about half of the businesses lean towards the moral argument, and then there's a variety of reasons which include having a more innovative workforce, having a more diverse workforce, feeling some external pressure from governments and media, and then a range of other reasons that other businesses state. The gender gap then obviously does persist across different industries, but what is very interesting about the study is how different it looks in different industries. Part of the conclusion we've drawn from that is that it may take a very tailored and specific approach with different industries to try to deal with that. The reasons are both cultural and structural. There are issues related to unconscious biases, the cultural factors that many of us carry around whether we're aware of them or not, but they're also structural. A lot of organisations are still designed for society, families of maybe 40 or 50 years ago, and that just doesn't quite apply anymore. There's some basic design that needs to change in organisations as well as broadly for policy. Then if we look towards the future, there's a lot of findings about where job growth is likely to come from and where job losses are likely to come from. What's clear is there is a gender dimension to both issues. The losses are likely to be in areas like office and administrative functions, which have actually provided mid-level or high-skilled women middle-class livelihoods in a lot of countries, not just in the developed world, but also in emerging markets. Those jobs are going to be hollowed out, so we could see a reversal of the gender gap, particularly in those areas. Then the growth is likely to come from STEM professions. That is where there is a very well-documented lack of women today, and that's where a lot of the structures of the organisations that employ them are not set up for today's world and for today's talent. Again, there could be some growing gender gaps there. Finally, looking at the results of this, it may be time for companies and governments to start leaning in, not just women themselves, and that will require some structural change that will require putting in place measures to change culture. People always say cultural issues, how can we possibly get past that? Well, culture is very much man-made or woman-made, if you want to call it that. That does, there are some very clear strategies that can help change that. It just requires sort of concerted effort. Part of those concerted efforts are things like the efforts that Theresa is making in her specific industry. I just remind you all, the headline of this press release, Women in the Firing Line of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Theresa, how are you going to address that? I do feel like I'm in the firing line. Let me back up and tell just a little bit of a personal story and then I'll get into some of the findings that we found in this very specific industry. I run the State Investment Board in Washington. We're a very large private equity investor and have been in that asset class since 1981. In the dozen years that I have been at the State Investment Board, anyone who seeks money from the private equity industry comes to ask. We're always a first stop because we're a very popular and well respected investor. In my entire time there, I can count on one hand the number of women partners that have come through. Typically the women in these firms are in investor relations. Again, that's an important profession, but they're not the deal makers and they're not the partners. I had to observe that. My first Davos was three years ago and it really came into sharper leaf for me. What a big issue it was because as a member of the investor industry's group and attending the investor industry events, I found myself to be the only woman in the room often other than the forum staff and thank goodness for the forum staff because I would have really felt out of place. In one of the sessions, some of the men, general partners in the private equity industry, were talking about the search for talent and some of the challenges they have in putting together their teams. It really struck me that they were sitting here talking about their trouble in sourcing good talent and yet they exclude 50% of the population from their talent pool. I publicly, in this one session, made that comment. It was kind of tongue in cheek, but it got quite a pretty interesting reaction afterwards. I had so many men come up to me and say, we've tried, we've worked at it, we have trouble sourcing women and we have trouble retaining them. My challenge to the industry, if you think about the private equity industry, what's its job? It takes really troubled companies and turns them around or it takes startups and puts them on good footing and gets them going. The skillset of the private equity industry is solving complex problems. I challenged them. I said, listen, just take this approach as if you were taking over a really difficult company and you had to analyze all the structural reasons for that and come up with a good business solution, take that same skillset and apply it to this particular issue. I think by, in a sense, taking it away from a moral imperative to more of a, it's a business problem to solve and the guys in the private equity industry are good at that. That started a conversation and then I had a number of conversations with the forum staff and the forum very generously committed resource to this initiative and we pulled together a couple sets of meetings. The first was a meeting in New York with a number of the general partners and limited partners and we just started peeling the onion and started really thinking, okay, what are the challenges? Then in a follow on to that, one of the things that we really did hear from our partners is if this is an important issue to their investors, it will become an important issue for them. Then we pulled together a second event with what we call the limited partners and the investors in these funds and we started talking about, okay, what expectations should we have of the industry? That's how we got to this point and again we're finding a lot of both structural and cultural issues that are challenging but solvable. Amara, what's the recipe? What's your secret source for breaking these barriers down? So I have the benefit of being a practitioner myself and working with 400,000 clients around the world and what we hear a lot similar to what Teresa is saying is everyone's stuck in this circular conversation. Is it an economic problem? Is it a business problem? What's the business case? So we really want to really talk about how we're going to take action and move out of this. So we did commission a study recently and what we did was we wanted to find out whether the millennial generation is going to be the generation to solve this problem. One of the things I found most interesting and I've gone out and presented this a couple of times is every time I present this because the millennials believe that 100% believe they will solve the problem, though they think it's going to take them 22 years to do it, which they will no longer be young, they'll be old like us, is that the boomer said, hey, we thought the same thing too. So one of the things that came out of our study similar to what we saw at the Mercer study is that CEOs have to take responsibility and they have to get their leadership teams to do it. The second piece that I wanted to point out, and you can look at this on our website, Seven Steps to Conscious Inclusion, but is there something even more than unconscious bias and I've heard study talk about unconscious bias, I think it's almost just poor management, poor management of the talent. So in general, what we've been doing is that we have been living off the generosity of a very robust talent market and we are basically have a strategy that's basically just in time. It's like spot recruiting. I'm going to go out and get somebody. So when you want to go out and just get somebody, there's more men out there than women. So when they say they can't find them, it's because they don't want to look very hard. They want it in one day. And so I think that's a big issue. The third one I really want to point out which I found to be the most troubling is when we asked women what was one of the number one things that's going to help you advance into leadership. They talked about networking and mentoring. These are nice things that make them feel happy. They make them survive in the organization. They do not make them thrive in the organization. Not one mentioned getting a profit and loss job. And these are our millennial women. And I think this is probably one of the most disturbing things that we have to address. OK. A sit will junction to pause for questions. If not, I have many, but please. Just wait for the microphone, Mum, and if you wouldn't mind giving us your name and where you're from. Sure. I'm Donna Llinewan. I'm Donna Llinewan Lege from USA Today. And I'd like to ask Theresa. So you've been here three years now. Last year the gender breakdown was 17 percent women. This year it's 18 percent women, which is a very small uptick, maybe not even statistically significant. Where do you see the progress coming from and how long will it take? You know, one of the reasons that I've tried, one of the decisions we made as a group of investors in thinking about how are we going, what are we going to ask of our general partners, we decided not to focus on a number and not to focus on statistics. And I think and instead focus on progress, tortigal and visibility of women. And I think the one thing that I've really observed this year, and it's a huge difference from three years ago, because the forum, even though there's not a lot more women here, the women who are here are being put in very powerful positions and been given a voice. If you look at it, every panel has pretty much every panel has women on it now. That wasn't even three years ago. That wasn't true. And that takes effort. And so I think putting women in visibly powerful positions, that then helps create a feeder pool. Because I think of myself as a young woman coming up in male dominated careers. I just did not have role models. And I remember reading this one book when I was like 32, 33 years old on CEOs. What does like to be a CEO? I had aspirations at quite a young age. And it was such a funny thing because it was just all men, all male models. And I kept thinking, how am I going to possibly do this? And I think women often run into those situations where I don't look like what you think of as a CEO. I'm a petite blonde woman. And so you have to be able to visualize yourself in a profession to be able to strive for that. So I think having women more visible is a really important and powerful first step. A justification as well of the work we do throughout the year, whether it's measuring the gender gap or whether it's spearheading task forces in countries such as Turkey, South Korea, Mexico, to try to put in place the fundamental environment where women can start to thrive. The leaders of tomorrow are better reflected across both genders. Sadia, there's got to be some good news. I read in the report very late at night, quite possibly. But I read in the report that the number of women who will progress to senior positions is actually going to increase quite significantly between now and 2020. Yeah, I mean that was one of the very interesting things that came out. Regardless of how narrow the pool is, how small the pool is that's coming into every industry, every single, almost every single industry is expecting growth in the middle management and senior management positions. And that also shows in terms of the strategies they're applying. They're not focusing so much on increasing the pool that's coming in. They're focusing much more on ensuring that women are being retained and promoted. So the good news, the good part of that is we can expect to see change in the next five years. That's at least what the heads of HR of these organizations are predicting. Maybe the aspect that still needs to be worked on is for a lot of industries they actually do have a pipeline problem and a perception problem. And they need to be working on changing that as well. So they do need to connect back to universities, back to schools, and help bring women into professions they traditionally haven't gone into. And that should be fairly easy to do because in about 100 countries in the world women are the majority of those that are enrolled in universities. What it might just now require given the kind of forecasting tools we have is a little bit of engineering to ensure that women are actually going into the areas where jobs are going to be created. Mara, we've known for a while though that we need to do something about this problem. It's not new. What makes now different? What gives you greater optimism or do you not have any greater optimism? I have to be optimistic. You have to be optimistic in this business. I think the difference is we're starting to realize that there is a talent shortage and that driven by demographics and driven by the number of women in university. So I think actually the success of women in university is actually putting a push on businesses. So if they want to really go out and get the best talent some of the women are not only graduating at a higher rate they're graduating with higher grades and higher achievement. And I think that does two things. One that broadens the talent pool but also broadens the expectations of those women. If they're successful in the academic environment they're going to demand to be have the same success in the business environment and businesses are going to have to respond to that. Theresa, anything on timing? Anything you think about? Now it makes a good time for us too. Yeah, I think it does start with the talent pool. But I also think again getting to Saudi's point which is it has to be very industry specific. You have to tailor strategies and in the private equity industry if you think about a private equity partnership trust is absolutely vital and trust is something that builds more quickly with people who are like you. This is the way it is. And so one of the things we look at when we're selecting a partner, a new partner, is we look for longevity of the team. We look for cohesiveness. We look for a group that works really really well together. And so I think there has been this idea that I need to hire people like me to get that trust in the organization. And I think as we started to sort of peel that away, the industry is beginning to say you know what yes that's a really good attribute of a partnership. But diversity of opinion is also critical to good investment decision making. So we now have data about how both men and women's brains work that we didn't have say maybe a decade ago. And we think very differently about risk. And the more diversity of opinion you bring to an investment decision, the better investment decision you're going to have. So we have data now that we didn't have before that kind of debunks or maybe offsets that need for natural trust and affinity. So I think just better data, the conversation is more comfortable for people than they used to have. You know what I think when I was growing up I really did not want anyone to even notice I was a woman in my profession. I just wanted to be known for what my skill set was. Now I think we're much more comfortable talking about the very real differences between the way men and women process information and sort of celebrate those differences and bring them to the forefront in the workplace. Do you think the diversity, just curious, I think it has helped that the diversity of the men has changed because globalization has now required that men are different. So they're not from the same university. They're not from, they're not all white males that grew up in you know a certain city. They become more diverse because they're from all over the world. Has that helped to create more opportunity for women to kind of penetrate that? I don't know that, I don't know that that has, but that's certainly a condition we see. I mean we see incredible cultural and racial and ethnic diversity within the private equity firms that are global and we still don't see women. So I think, but I mean it is, that's an interesting thought. So we'll come to you in a second, but if I may just go back to Mara, your comments about university and I believe again from reading my global gender gap report avidly that there's a drop off from success in university to success in professional life and then a further drop off to success at the top echelons of business. So we're losing talented women throughout that life cycle if I'm not mistaken side here. So what's going on is that's not enough is it just to have successful role models and success at university. A lot of I think it's cultural and I think we've seen that when the WEF reports every year when we do the gender what's preventing women, one of the biggest barriers it's usually, first one's usually country culture and then company culture. So I think you can be successful but you still have to be accepted and welcomed and I think a lot of what's happening is companies used to be the company man, trust look, we all look alike and we're the company man and we dedicate our life and I think the company man is dead and I think companies need to replace that. What's the new definition of trust and commitment and loyalty and once we change our minds on that then we'll be more welcoming to other groups of people and I think because the pressure we're having for this talent pressure will put more pressure on organizations to break down those barriers. Maybe not fast knock but I think we'll start to break down. So Frank Brown, partner at General Atlantic, a large global growth private equity firm. We were talking this morning to Risa in another group about the need for LPs to evaluate GPs and to put some pressure on and it's not just in private equity, it's across the investment community. The need is really for metrics. You can't just say okay what's your percentage partners, you have to look a little deeper. Is there a thought to how we do that and maybe not necessarily create a standard but some idea of metrics that we can all agree upon and compare each other and compete a bit. The one thing that we and we talked a lot about that when the LPs met for this workshop that we held in New York in the fall and we ultimately didn't come up with a metric but what we did suggest is that we would ask our partners to develop a strategy and a metric that was meaningful to them and then track them against their own commitment and I think again this industry is so as you know every sort of strategy and sector has its own particular focus and so we felt it would be difficult to come up with something that would work across all the entire industry like for instance a very large leverage buyout firm that has hundreds of employees is going to be able to put a completely different kind of program in place than a very small partnership with you know seven or eight and so again what we talked about is let's just ask for a strategy it's in the same thing we asked for you what your outlook is on the markets and where you're going to you know where you're going to commit your money and what you you know how are you going to how are you going to deploy our capital um how are you going to address this issue and then hold you accountable to what you commit to but this is where collaboration I think can help in that I believe one of the biggest issues is in business you're rated by financial results you're not rated on other results and this is why I think CEO support is so important I know in our company one of the things I've been talking to our CEO about is how we rate our top leaders they need to it needs to be a scorecard that has multiple factors on them and some of these are these human factors around what are you doing around your talent pipeline how are you developing women and other groups of people and I think one thing we could do is we could create that because I think a lot of people aren't thinking like that because we've been trained in business school to think in total financial outcomes and so I think this is one area where we could cross industry not have adopt the same one but adopt the concept and then personalize it for our own companies well I mean certainly what you know what gets measured gets managed and we all know that and so I'm not suggesting that we don't need metrics but I think at this point it's still early stages and early days and so we'd love to hear what our partners think is realistic and and also again I'm I'm really working to make this a collaborative effort and not I mean also as a fiduciary I have an obligation to maximize returner to prudent level risk and where lack of diversity contributes to maybe a risk profile we don't like then we can consider it in our investment decision process but otherwise we can't just we can't consider it so I'm not going to pick a firm based on their gender scorecard I'm going to pick a firm based on their investment performance where this ties into investment performance that I can think about it so ultimately that fiduciary hat is something I have to really wear tight on my head yeah but I think internally companies can be doing this themselves absolutely yeah absolutely it's raising just a point there it sounds like you're you've got a plan for your industry but are there any other industries you can learn from you trying to do this all or all on your own is there any best practice out there yeah I mean not if financial services that I know of I don't know maybe we should look for one maybe the industry gender gap has some have some good ideas and maybe there are other ideas that you could look for different different vertical sectors I mean yeah and I I'm going to be blank I'm going to be blank sorry maybe Saudi maybe you have some ideas because you have a more global perspective I've been literally very narrowly focused on this one particular aspect I mean not surprisingly perhaps the consumer and retail sector and the media entertainment information sector is the one are the two sectors that are doing the best in both in terms of sort of the the incoming pool but also in terms of how many are making it into middle and senior management but there are some interesting because of you know maybe they're not necessarily under that same pressure but where we're seeing some some change or some desire for collaboration is also in the oil and gas industry which has actually a very similar issue in and very similar profile in terms of how few women are involved and so instead of each company trying to create you know its own scholarship for women in going into science for example in country X they're going to try to pool their effort so that they're collectively working on getting more women into science technology engineering math and then whether that talent goes into that industry or elsewhere it's still setting up I think a very different kind of pipeline coming in and then of course they've got sort of a very specific perception issue very specific kind of playing field issue within their own organisations just time for one quick question before we we start finalising this session. Mum, baby T have you got the microphone there? Don't. Okay. You can be loud. You can be loud and with a microphone. Shad. Donna again from USA Today is there a particular point at which women in the financial service industry sort of disconnect from that upward movement that movement into leadership where is that corporate cultural divide? Women still have the babies I mean it's a physical fact and so a lot of women when they begin to contemplate starting a family you know the traditional responses to been to mommy track them we're going to make it easier on you we're going to do this or that and we had in one of the workshops we had we had a founder of a private equity firm who's been quite progressive on these issues and what he said what he had done with some of his star women is instead of mommy tracking it making it easy for him he'd think of the toughest coolest most interesting deal and lure him back into the workplace with that deal and if anyone doesn't think women are just as competitive as men you know we are and we I and the and the other men in the room when they heard that they just loved that concept but but one of the things that was so interesting they said well we don't even know how to have those conversations with a woman in terms of what should we be do you know because they're afraid to you know for all the legal reasons and they're afraid to and so the this particular GP founders response was the men are the ones who actually need mentoring they need to learn how they can have these kinds of conversations appropriately the women need the sponsors the women need the ones that actually gives them the tough job and the opportunity but the men need mentoring and how to how to do this so I think again a lot of it the conversations have changed and it's easier but that is probably one of the biggest places where you start seeing women peel off a couple of the major firms have done some really interesting things in the last couple years one major lbo firm has put in a policy now where their women deal makers can well and their men too can take a caretaker a child caretaker with them when they travel and they'll pay for it so that really helps during that transition when you know you got young babies another has extended maternity leave quite substantially so there's a lot the other thing too is getting away from what I call a FaceTime culture you know a technology now it does not matter where you work and private equity historically has been a FaceTime culture you know you hang together from early morning to late at night well you don't have to always be there to be productive you can be at home you know baby in one hand cell phone in the other and still get business done so technology has has enabled that as well now we're really very very close to time if we're not over already but before we finish I'd just like each of you to give us your one priority for the year ahead what one thing would you like to see achieved I'm going to start with you Salia okay well we got our mandate this morning from the trustees for the global challenge on gender parity which is really where the forum does the bulk of its work on gender equality throughout the year and I think you know one one area will certainly be to continue to provide the measurement tools that we've been providing but a second is to actually provide more of a space for action and collaboration and that'll happen both at a national level and also taking the the the work that's been done in experiments such as yours and seeing can we help create a similar mindset or a similar set of work in other industries mora change happens from individuals and I think we need to have a little less conversation a little more action I think every individual that's been at the forum can do one thing they'll make difference to one woman and then we will have more change Theresa I would like to see our private equity partners commit to a plan develop and commit to a plan and one of the things that Melissa Mawn I are going to be doing after this is going around and speaking with a number of the partners and asking them what could they could what kind of plan could they commit to thank you very much and thank you for joining us for this lively energetic discussion this session is now over thank you