 Hello from the World Economic Forum in Geneva. My name is Adrian Monk and welcome to this launch of the 2021 Global Gender Gap Report. I'm joined here in the studio by the reports lead, Saadia Zahidi, and online joining us are two of the data collaborators on this landmark project, which is linked in Sue Duke and Natalie Lacey from Ipsos. So we'll be hearing from all of them in just a moment, but before to get us going, I want to turn to Saadia Zahidi and Saadia. Can you give us the overview of this year's report and precisely how the pandemic has impacted your findings? Great, thank you very much. Good morning and good afternoon to our audience and great to be here with you, Adrian, and with our colleagues from Ipsos and from LinkedIn. I'll give you just a very quick highlight of the rankings first and then speak more about the impact of the pandemic. In terms of the rankings, Iceland is once again the number one country in the world, 12th year that it's in this position. At the very bottom of the rankings in 156th place is Afghanistan, which is actually a new entrant to the report and the first year that we've been able to have enough data to be able to cover the country. Across the rankings, the United States at 30 jumps up quite a few spots, in particular due to improvements in the new makeup of the administration. And China is in the top half of the G20 and is in fact ahead of all other emerging markets in the G20, with the exception of Russia. The United Arab Emirates breaks into the top half of the rankings, the first country from the Arab world to do so and the second from the Middle East and North Africa region. In addition to that, perhaps a couple of other highlights, the United Kingdom at 23rd in the rankings, amongst the top 10 Switzerland where we are based at number 10 position. And given the methodology of the report where we actually disconnect from the level of development of an economy, and we really try to look at, regardless of the resources available in that country, how equally are they being divided across an economy, both rich and poor countries have a chance to make it to the top of the rankings. And that way of looking at the gender gap actually reveals a very interesting picture. The countries that, regardless of their current level of development, are investing in ensuring that more women are brought into the labor force are likely to be growing faster in the future and likely to be more competitive. So that's sort of the overall picture. But there has been a big change between our last report from early 2020 to today and that is of course the impact of the pandemic. And the big shift that we see is one, there has been a sort of a rollback towards traditional behaviors inside the home and that then creates a double shift for women that are working in particular, especially when a billion school children were out of school at some point across the various countries in the world and that created that additional care responsibility. A second aspect is the sectors that have been the most impacted by the lockdowns across the world tend to be sectors that are also large employers of women. So the consumer and retail sector that has been impacted globally, the travel and tourism industry that has been impacted globally, these are all sectors that tend to be large employers of women and so that's also where you see an impact of the pandemic. Now there's also some future trends and that is related to the integration of technology into the workplace and I think we've all seen that. That has been accelerated over the course of the pandemic and more and more companies are planning to digitize and automate further and that of course also creates repercussions for women's place in the future of work. Thanks very much Saadia. You mentioned the double hit that women have taken from the pandemic and perhaps I can turn to Natalie Lacey who's COO at Ipsos. Natalie, how does your polling kind of illuminate that double hit that women have faced? Great and yes, thank you very much for the chance to be here and talk about what we're hearing from women who are polling around the world. Indeed, we are showing that the burden of care has disproportionately fallen to women. In fact, we find women around the world are now spending almost a full-time job doing childcare an increase of almost five hours from before the pandemic and this has taken its toll the level of stress that women are feeling is in fact higher than men and significant in terms of its perpetuation through the pandemic and continues today. Also, if we look at the financial and health impacts that we track those have both had a larger effect on women and in fact certain groups of women even more so throughout the pandemic. So as we come out of this, there is indeed a perpetuation of not only some of the gender gap issues but also the mental and emotional toll that this has taken. Thanks for that. We can turn I think to Dublin and to Sue Duke who's the Global Public Policy Chief at LinkedIn. LinkedIn obviously is tracking employment across the globe. How have you seen some of these effects reflected in the data that you're getting back? Thanks, Adrienne. A pleasure to be with you all this morning and I'd love to tell you a little bit about what we're seeing in our data. The LinkedIn data in today's report is drawn from our economic graph. That's LinkedIn's digital map of the labour market based on our 740 million members who are spread across almost every country in the world. The economic graph allows us to see in real time and in real detail right down to that granular skills level what the labour market looks like today and how it's likely to look tomorrow. As Thaddeus said, today's report is very clear. It's been a very tough year for working women. There are two findings that really jump out from the LinkedIn data. First, that marked decline in the hiring of women into leadership roles. Our insights show that we've effectively wiped out one to two years of progress across multiple industries. Second, that severe gender gap that's opening up in the jobs that are growing the fastest, including those disruptive technology roles. Those are the jobs of tomorrow, but we've barely seen a blip in female representation there since 2018. It goes without saying that we need women to have equal access to those jobs of tomorrow, but those roles in particular in cloud computing, in engineering, AI, data product, those are precisely the roles that will play a big part in shaping our future. I don't think any of us yet fully know what the world is going to look like post-COVID, but as Thaddeus said, one thing is already certain. We have seen our rapid acceleration and digitisation and technology being integrated into all aspects of our lives. We have to have women's voices, perspectives represented at that foundational formative stage, and playing an equal role in what technology has developed, how it's deployed, and precisely what impact it's going to have. Just those two trends alone show us very clearly that if we don't act today, we're storing up big trouble for ourselves down the line. Thank you, Sue. So we've got a lot of questions from journalists on the line and we'll come to your questions in just a second. If I can just go back, Saadia, to you. It's a very grim headline this year's report, and it comes at a very grim time with the pandemic still impacting the world, but are there any bright spots or causes for hope that you see looking at this global gender gap report? So I think one sort of cause for optimism is that what has worked in creating gender equality in the past is also going to work in the future, and let me try to break that down. The Nordic economies still making it to the very top of the rankings is not necessarily a given. The Nordic model, just like everywhere else in the world, was tested through the course of this pandemic, and the fact that that care infrastructure has held up and provided support to working parents, that the support for reskilling and upskilling and being redeployed into new roles and new jobs is more equally available to women and to men than other parts of the world. That is something to look towards and recognize that other countries need to do the same. A second element is, as I mentioned earlier, the United Arab Emirates, one of the countries that was towards the bottom of the rankings when we started out 15 years ago, making steady progress and breaking into the top half of the rankings. Again, a country that has put in a massive amount of investment in not just basic education, but really higher skills, development of skills, and university education for women, again, in a very consistent way, and then putting in place measures to integrate them into the economy. Additionally, I think as much as we have seen a rollback in progress overall, there still has been a shift forward. The pace of change has slowed down, but despite the pandemic and despite these obstacles for the majority of countries, there was actually still a movement forward. So some of the momentum that is in place towards gender equality we hope can overcome the current pandemic and doesn't turn into sort of permanent scarring of the labour market. Thanks, Sardia. So turning to questions now, we can go to Sashiko Harbu, who is the founder and editor-in-chief of Nikkei Cross Woman. Ms Harbu, can we have your question, please? Okay, thank you for inviting me. I am Harbu Sashiko from Japan. I have one question and opinion. This report makes me think that education plays a crucial role for the advancement of women, and I'm concerned about the future of work, particularly in the rapid de-exchange and business market. Today, education is close to gender equality. However, as a result, there is a few women's leaders in the digital field now, globally, and in Japan too. Would you think we seem to be on the right track with education in this context? I'm afraid that there will be no change in the women's future work if we are satisfied with these current educational indicators and don't change. How would you consider this point? Thanks for that question. And I think one of the things that the report makes clear as you've identified there is that whilst there's progress on qualifications and education, and that gap seems to have narrowed, there doesn't seem to be a similar closing of the gap on pay or on opportunities. Sadiya, how does that work? Are women now qualified and yet still being excluded from workplace opportunities? Thank you. I think it's a really important question because we can look at the broader statistics and imagine that enough progress is being made when it comes to education and skills development. But to your point, that hides within that, that broader data hides within it, actually pretty significant differences as to what women and men are training for. And the science, technology, engineering and math fields which are the main feeders of talent into the IT industry and broadly into the technology space, those happen to be amongst the very few fields where actually fewer women go in in terms of university education than men. And what happens afterwards, later on in life in terms of rescaling and upskilling and constant lifelong learning, there the picture is perhaps even murkier and harder to understand, but we know from the partnership with LinkedIn that there are actually significant differences as to the training that is happening later on. And so that's where there will need to be greater efforts on the part of the IT industry broadly, but also specifically in technology functions within all industries. Digital is absolutely everywhere. Digitization and automation of industries is happening across all sectors. So there does need to be that shift. I would say though, conversely, we also need to value different kinds of work. And I think we've all seen through this pandemic that the workers that were at the front lines, whether those were people in retail that was considered essential, so people who were working in grocery stores or people in the medical and health and healthcare professions, these are again very large employers of women. And I think we all saw how essential that work was. So what has traditionally been female-dominated industries, we also need to think about improving the skills level there and improving wages there. And that is another way to start correcting for the gender imbalances. Sue Duke, Saadia mentioned some of the data that LinkedIn have that's kind of pointed to this gap between educational attainment and opportunity. How does that play out? Can you explain a little bit more about what you're seeing in your numbers? One of the very unique aspects of LinkedIn's data is our ability to really zoom in down at that skills level and understand what are the differences and similarities between women and men when we look at what skills they have and what level of skilling they're at. And also when we look on the demand side and see what companies are hiring for what roles need what skills. And Saadia is spot on when it comes to those high-growth roles, particularly in the tech sector, the ones I mentioned in cloud computing, in AI, in data, in product, we are not seeing anywhere near the kind of female representation that we need to see if we are to achieve gender equity. Not only, as I said, because they are the jobs of tomorrow and we need women getting equal access to those jobs, but also because of the deeply formative influential roles, those particular skill sets are going to play. When we look to zoom into those, we see the numbers have hardly moved since 2018 in things like cloud computing. Women are a 14% representation there in engineering at 20%, data and AI just over 30%. And again, those numbers have not moved. We are not making progress there. We need to not only improve that educational attainment, but how it's showing up in the labor market so that women are availing of those opportunities in those clusters. One of the things that we see in our data consistently is that we're not fully tapping into the full female talent pool there. We often hear that it's a supply shortage issue, that women just don't have the skills in those clusters. That's not what we're seeing. What we're seeing is that the full potential of women is not being capitalized on. Equally, that comes when we look at that skills level between men and women. We see equal levels of skill when men and women have equal levels of skills that men are transitioning into those high growth roles. They're making that jump from a lower skills base into cloud computing, into AI, into product. Women at the same level with the same skills type, not making those transitions. And we need to really zero in on that and figure out how do we maximize women's potential? How do we help them pivot, make career? How do we ensure that they continue to rescale and are able to avail of those opportunities? Thanks for that. Natalie, is the education piece something that you see in the polling data? Certainly we do see the importance of education as one of the solutions to closing the gender pay gap and encouraging particular girls and young girls to go into these fields. So there is an acknowledgement of the relationship between education and future opportunities in most of the markets in which we've investigated this. The other thing that we see is a perception of whether or not this gender pay gap is real, and that's one of the important measures to being able to solve some of these challenges and address issues like the source in the education field. And while about 50% or one and two around the world do feel the gender pay gap is a real problem, we still have a sizable minority in many countries who actually do not even believe that this is a real problem, that it's either a false creation or that it's something that doesn't exist in their market. So there are many factors here in terms of opinion, but certainly the relationship between education for those who do recognize the societal importance of the issue is one that we see people able to make that connection. Thanks for that. Then we have a chance now to take questions from Natalie Olofors from Agence France Press and also Tim Cohen from Business Maverick in South Africa. Natalie, can we have your question first and then we'll hear from Tim. I'd like to see if you could give us an overview, generally speaking, of how the pandemic has hit women globally. What I would like to see is where the gender gap has widened the most and why? And, you know, I took the example of France just as a point of reference, which has dropped one ranking, but could you explain us why and could you explain us how the pandemic has hit women in large economies like the US, the UK, the Germany, Italy, the European countries? Thanks, Natalie. Tim Cohen at Business Maverick. Tim. Hi, everyone. I'm very glad to be with you today. I just wondered, you know, I was very taken with the report I read some time ago about the companies that had taken an active interest in making sure that they were addressing climate issues actually performed better than companies that didn't. And I was wondering if it was possible to extrapolate regarding gender disparities too. Sardia, you did mention it a little bit that countries that had made the most progress in closing these gaps were actually performing better to economically and socially. I wonder whether you could just expand on that a bit. Have you done a sort of correlation between the countries that performed best over the last couple of years, say, and the countries that performed worst? And is there any correlation between that and, you know, other measures of social progress? Obviously, you know, sort of closing the gaps is itself an achievement, but I was wondering whether there are other correlations. Thanks very much. Interesting questions. Perhaps taking Natalie's first Sardia, where's the gap widened the most and where has it been narrowed most effectively in this year's report despite the overall headline and also to Tim's points about companies that take the social issues more seriously, are we seeing any reflection in their progress on this issue? Sure. So on that first question, you know, there's a lot of nuance that we could get into. I just want to point out one caveat. We are not yet seeing the full impact of the pandemic in the data that we have. So when we're looking at a global ranking of 156 countries, we do try to rely on the latest available data and some of the estimates around the labor force and the impact on wages and the impact on leadership positions, we're only seeing the beginning of that impact. And so this is probably to some extent a slight underestimate of what may come in future years. And of course, it depends very much on how the outlook unfolds in terms of the pandemic itself, what happens with future lockdowns, what happens in the future with the revival of some of the sectors that have come to a standstill over this next year. So that is the big caveat here that we're not yet seeing the full impact in the data. That said, according to the ILO's estimates, women are losing jobs at a higher rate than men. And that matters because to begin with, women are less a part of the formal labor force than men are. And so we are starting to see a rollback in women's participation and the exact statistics from the ILO are women are losing jobs at a rate of about 5% and for men that's about 3.9%. In addition to that, for specific countries in partnership with LinkedIn, we're able to see, get a bit more of a deep dive and start understanding more dynamically what has happened over this last year and I think you'll hear more about that from Sue. But you can very clearly see that not only are women losing jobs faster than men but they're also being hired back at slower rates than men. And that again matters because it means we may not recover as fast as we would have expected if we rely on rates from the past. So on both areas in ensuring that job losses are not worse for women and ensuring that the recovery is more gender equal, both elements will be important. You pointed out specifically France that actually has been an increase, a small increase in score in France. The reason you see the drop by one rank is because other countries have moved ahead faster. Thanks for that, Saadia. Just turning to Natalie and Sue on that. Natalie, as you're polling showing anything about areas where, about features of areas where the gap is narrowing or particularly where it's widened this year and also perhaps to Tim's point about companies and maybe speak a little bit about Ipsos and what you're doing on this issue. Certainly, yes. So we actually analyzed in preparation for this report one is a financial impact measure and one is a health impact measure. There are a collection of indices about whether or not you've been impacted and also your concern for the future. We looked at that across many markets and when we look at the hardest hit markets, for example, Brazil or Mexico in particular, we see that the impact of the pandemic on women is significantly higher. If we turn to some other markets, we don't necessarily see the same gap. So there's not only a significant variation in those measures overall, but the gap by gender does vary and it's proportionate in many ways to the extent of the pandemic, which of course, as we just discussed, creates a problem not only now, but if we look at those other measures of the implications on mental health, on physical health, those are the other factors that will in some ways outlast the pandemic and we'll get to see how quickly we can bounce back. In terms of the relationship and what Ipsos is doing, we as a company are very committed to this issue. It's one of our corporate board goals. It's something that we track regularly and indeed, Tim, to your question about the relationship between company and corporate performance and these measures and could we extrapolate? There is a correlation and bringing together of many of these issues. So whether it be climate change or the extent to which companies are performing well on social metrics, we do see that that pays off in terms of the perception of those brands and how consumers and some may respond to those companies. Thanks for that. And Sue, what's your data telling you about these issues? That is right. We have been tracking this issue across the board since the pandemic began and one of the real advantages of the LinkedIn data is we don't need to play catch-up on what's happening out there today. We can see in real-time what's going on and our data is showing a very, very consistent story that women have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic. As Sadia said, we saw a real dip in hiring a real hit to representation of women in jobs at the start of the pandemic. Yes, that did start to recover at the second half of the year, but it's recovering slower than male hiring. So we're on the back foot there. The leadership issue is one that I'm going to underline again. That has not recovered. Women in leadership roles have not achieved pre-crisis level. We need to get women back into those leadership roles and see a recovery, particularly in some of those industries. We're basically, we've gone back to the levels we were at in 2018 and 2019. And again, we're not seeing movement in those fastest growing roles. We looked at eight clusters of jobs that are the fastest growing. Those are the jobs that are going to be around tomorrow, growing tomorrow, influencing tomorrow. And the picture there is not good. In only two of those clusters are we seeing women in a good spot. The other six, we are not in a good place at all. And as I said, when you dive in particularly to those high growth, high influential, highly influential, highly formative tech roles, we're in a really, really, really tough spot. And we need to bring those numbers up and we need to bring them up quickly. To address very quickly, Tim's question as well about that correlation. One thing that I think is very, very clear from this pandemic is that it's called into question and thrown up in the air, all aspects of how we live and how we work. And I think it's incumbent upon us now to seize this watershed moment to drive real impact when it comes to gender equality and sustainability. When it comes to gender equality, today's report, LinkedIn's findings, they're very clear about the changes that we need to make. We need governments and organizations to hardwire equity, diversity, flexibility into their plans to the recovery. And we need them to start doing that now and we need them to start doing that boldly. Sorry, can I just bring you back in on that? Yeah, can I just come in in relation to what we've just heard and also Tim's question. Yes, of course, there is a correlation between companies that perform well on ESG indicators and their broader performance. Yes, there's also a correlation between countries' competitiveness and how gender equal they are. But I think if we look at this in a forward-looking manner, it becomes even more important. Not only is it the right thing to do, but when it comes to companies, if they want the kind of creativity and innovation and dynamism that will be necessary to come out of this crisis, they will need all hands on deck. They will need the latest ideas. They will need diversity to make that work, whether it's a shift towards the greener economy, whether it's other kinds of new products and services, particularly things that are more relevant to people in the post-pandemic economy, businesses will need that. And the same is true at a country level. If there are too many job losses for women, you can see over time aggregate demand will go down and countries will have a harder time recovering than if they ensure that there is a full integration and recovery of all of their talent and across their entire labour market and not just for a segment of the population. So I think it is very important to focus on this from a both economic and fairness standpoint. Thanks for that. I want to take questions if I can, from Pranjal Sharma and from Jennifer Shankar. Pranjal, could I get your question first please? Thank you, Adrian and Sadia. Very, very timely report and I think it's a bit depressing as well. My question is for Sue and I was quite struck by what she said about the fact that while of course the report is established that the job losses are greater for women, and what I notice and from the question really for Sue is it looks like the bias that companies had against hiring women seems to have stayed from 2018 onwards as you say. If the qualifications are the same and women are still not being hired then clearly there's a problem which is not so much about COVID but really about the mindset of the people who hire in companies. So having said that and I think COVID has not changed the situation but it has not changed the mindset of companies. What then should be done to not just make sure that we come back to a normal situation but perhaps overcompensate for the problems that COVID has accelerated. Thanks Pranjal. Jennifer Shankar, editor-in-chief at The Innovator. Jennifer, your question. Thank you. My question has to do with the access to finance. I think there is a public recognition that there is an inequality in financing technology entrepreneurs and public commitments from venture capitalists. The venture firm atomico's 2020 state of Europe report found that progress had not only stagnated actually declined in 2020 with all men teams capturing 90.8% of all capital raised compared to 90.3% in 2019 and 85% of all funding rounds. So I'm curious to know if you have any insights into how that situation in Europe compares to access to capital and in other parts of the world. Thanks for that Jennifer. Just maybe to kick off on that with Sardia. Sardia, obviously we're seeing from some of the data that there's a hiring bias that women are suffering from but in terms of entrepreneurship there's also seems to be a barrier that the finance sector is putting up to actually funding and supporting women-led business. Is that something you're seeing in any of this data? Yeah, it doesn't quite come across in the global comparisons unfortunately just don't have globally comparable data to the problem that you're pointing out. But there is enough evidence even if it is not statistically comparable there is enough evidence from around the world that will show you exactly what Jennifer pointed to whether that's an advanced economies or whether that's access to finance in developing countries women are consistently at a disadvantage. Now in some places that will be fairly extreme that will be perhaps not even the ability to have your own bank account and in other parts of the world it will be more along the lines of what Jennifer is pointing to. Overall I think though the message is that this is not just about big companies big corporations or medium-sized businesses putting in place the right kinds of practices. We also have to completely change the possibility for women to be able to open their own businesses for small and medium-sized enterprises overall that will need support in this post-pandemic recovery or that there is a gender lens being applied and that can be mandated by governments but that also is the responsibility of those big financial institutions and venture capital firms and again to tie back to the point on you know there is a business case for this we know that the best ideas are not going to come from homogenous teams and that has been shown again and again and so if companies want a return on their investment they have to start looking at gender-balanced teams. Thanks for that and Sue we've spoken about the sort of real-time data that LinkedIn has tracking hiring but to Prangels question are there perhaps examples from your data of companies that are successful in hiring women and overcoming the kind of bias that we're seeing in the overall data and if so what are the lessons for other companies from that? We think companies need to get hyper focused on skills that means that what we're at LinkedIn what we're encouraging companies to do is to adopt a skills based hiring approach. We need to look past just formal qualifications and past experience and really zero in on what are the specific skills, the transferable skills and the potential of candidates. We want companies to start hiring based on skills developing talent based on skills moving people into leadership position based on skills and we feel very confident that if companies and organizations can start to do that we'll move past some of these legacy cultural issues that have been flagged particularly when it comes to these tech roles it'll mean for companies they're broadening their talent pools they're getting more diversity into their organizations and ultimately means a fairer level playing field for everybody out there trying to get a job men and women. Great and Natalie are you seeing this reflected in the polling that you're doing this kind of gap between what people are saying about hiring and what they're actually doing on hiring? Again certainly there is a natural tendency for companies and organizations that we survey or individuals to say that everything is equal in their environment it's what's happening elsewhere so there's often a misperception about what my is happening in my world versus what I see I think also the point about how women will start businesses and what will happen in the informal and micro economies is something that we'll be looking at over time as well and how women might be resilient and adapting in different ways and how that might cause a shift in terms of both the hiring within large companies but that entrepreneurship point and I think what Jennifer raised in terms of the funding and the ability for women to find other routes and really enable them to fulfill some of the entrepreneurship dreams that they have is another critical element to success moving forward. Thanks for that. Questions now from Delapo I know from the Guardian Nigeria and from Matilde Vareen at Luton Delapo can we have your question first please. Good morning everyone. Interesting conversation and straight to my question from the reports and from the graphs I've seen trying to find out from the African perspective what are the insights into what's made Namibia and Rwanda in the top 10 and also from what I can gather from some of the rankings it looks like it's more of a political stability, it's more like political stability we're utilizing the gender gap reports. What indices, facts and what are the methodologies that were used for these reports. Thank you. Thanks for that. Matilde Vareen from Luton Hi thanks for taking my question. It's a bit of a specific question. I hope that's okay. Looking at this data from Switzerland it looks like there has been a big drop in the health subindicator. Could you explain why? Thank you. Thanks for that. So Salia, two interesting geographic questions there. In Africa what's the kind of secret of success for Rwanda and Namibia and what are some of the factors that explain some of the rankings across the continent and then a very specific one to where we're sitting today in Switzerland on health outcomes. Great. Thank you. Thanks for the question. Most of sub-Saharan Africa what is quite different compared to other parts of the world is that while the outcomes on health and education are relatively low amongst the lowest in some cases compared to other parts of the world the region broadly does well in terms of economic participation. Now is it the right kind of economic participation? Does there need to be much more investment in skills and education and higher skilled and higher paid work? Yes absolutely. But in terms of the type of work that is broadly available there is a fairly equitable distribution across the labour force and that's what puts Namibia and Rwanda in the top 10 of the rankings combined with fairly high levels of political representation at the ministerial and parliamentary level. So that's what boost these economies upward that is not to say that there isn't a long way to go in addressing some of the absolute fundamentals and that relates to health and to education. In the case of Switzerland that's actually a very major drop in score that leads to a fairly big change in rank but overall Switzerland is fairly positioned pretty much where it was in the past because a very large number of countries are simply a few decimal points away from each other. It's a fairly technical point. A small change in score leads to a fairly large jump in rank but overall for Switzerland the performance does not change. Thanks Sadia. Coming to the close of a briefing but I want to hear from both Natalie and Sue and then some final thoughts from Sadia. Natalie if I can just turn to you first. For people looking at this report perhaps depressed by the headline what are the concrete steps that people can take in business to make a difference and make sure that next year their contribution is making a difference. One of the key issues of course is the recognition that this is an issue. So as I talked about there still remains a view among many people that this is not a challenge that they need to address or maybe that it's not the priority coming out of the pandemic amongst all the other things and as has been discussed the economic implications and the implications for society are significant. So I think acknowledging the point recognizing the value that needs to happen and the change that needs to happen to both recover what we've lost but also to address what existed before the pandemic. So it's not that we were in a good place before the pandemic and we are now in a place where that has been exasperated by the pandemic. So recognizing that it's not just about flexible means but it's about some of the broader initiatives within a country in terms of allowing entrepreneurs and women as I said to find the other means to fulfill their expectations and needs. Thanks for that. And Sue you know you've been sharing you're on top of day by day sort of changes in this landscape but what are the things that we've seen in this sector to help meet this gap and to help start the process of closing it more effectively than the timeline that we've seen in today's headline. We've been hyper focused on this issue since the onset of the pandemic Adrian we're speaking to our companies our members we're pulling data daily from our LinkedIn economic graph to really understand what's going on out there. And I think that's what we've seen in this report and this report really points the way to what solutions we need to put in place. It's not a mystery. We need those companies those governments putting in place these this flexibility diversity inclusion and equity short term that means things like prioritizing the reopening of schools putting in place flexible working options that we believe for both genders. Longer term, like I said we need to really zero in on skills based hiring skills based development skills based leadership. That means that we need companies looking at what not only what are the formal qualifications what is the work experience of candidates but what are their skills what skills are transferable and what is their overall potential and we believe like I said very very strongly if we can make that fundamental shift away from legacy historic focus on those formal qualifications and what's gone before to look to the future to look to that on top potential that we see very clearly in this report we are not tapping in to women's full potential to women's full skill sets if we can zero in on their skills and start developing those skills helping them pivot and rescale and retrain we can get women into those positions and thriving in those positions and that is going to be for the good of us all and for the better of our economies. Thank you for that. Sadiah you work on these issues day in day out. If you were a policymaker minister watching this briefing what would be your message to them if they said I need to tackle this gap I need to move my country up these rankings I need to do something about this problem top sort of two or three things that they could do now to help achieve that goal. Couple of things there one is the care economy and care infrastructure so it is the right investment for most governments to make especially as they think now about the longer term recovery because not only will that help make things easier for families and for workers but it has a broader return on investment and that is because the care sector is a huge job creator and so it makes perfect sense for governments to think about investing there. A second element is a strategic approach to ensuring that there is not just a broader pipeline of women going into those jobs of tomorrow but that the companies that are at the receiving end actually put in place practices today that hard wire gender equality into that future of jobs so those are two key elements that all economies need to be looking at regardless of where they are but I will point out there are still too many parts of the world where fundamentals like health and education still have massive gender gaps and that's where you see that towards the bottom of the rankings in particular a lot of work still to be done on some of those fundamentals let me also just add a couple of other things one I'd like to thank the team that worked on this report Roberto Crotti, Kusum Kalipal and Veselina Racheva for their hard work on ensuring that this data is visible to the world so that we are able to move forward and make progress and second as you know the World Economic Forum provides these measurements but we also work on some of these issues and there's three big areas which we're working on one ensuring that businesses have an opportunity to now use this moment to pivot and hard wire gender equality into the future of work and we're creating a consortium of companies that do so second working with governments to set in place what we call closing the gender gap accelerators and right now those accelerators there's ten of them that exist already around the world have pivoted very rapidly to ensuring that there's gender equality in the recovery and we are seeking a collaboration with more governments to set up more of these accelerators which is critical at this time and third we have a big initiative on the re-skilling revolution one billion people to receive better education better skills and better jobs by 2030 I'm delighted to report that we will be building gender equality targets across the re-skilling revolution work because to the point that we've heard in this briefing all of this has to be done on the basis of talent and objectively to ensure that everybody has equal opportunity to get ahead thanks Adrian Thank you Saadia Now you can find the full global gender gap report on the world economic forums website which is weforum.org if you go there you'll find a plethora of material on the report itself and you can see your country's rankings and dive deeper into some of the findings presented there if you go to the forums page on LinkedIn you'll find much more about it there too also on Instagram Facebook and Twitter thanks to everyone for your questions thanks to our guests Natalie Lacey and Sue Duke for joining us thanks to Saadia Zahidi and her team for their work in this year's report and hope to see you all for our next briefing coming soon thanks very much