 Thank you everyone for joining us today for the people that are here in the room and also for those who are watching this online. My name is Sadia Zahedi. I head the forum's work on education, gender and employment. Very excited to have you here towards the end of the day at the Sustainable Development Impact Summit of the World Economic Forum. We've spent the day talking about many, many challenges and how to address them, but in this particular area of education, gender and work, we've really started the day thinking about the future of work and how it is actually in our hands. We are not preparing for a future that will come and overwhelm us, but it really belongs to us and how we choose to act today. Some of those actions require thinking about the changes that are required on education and skills to prepare workforces better for the future of work and second, thinking specifically about the social impacts and ensuring that we are using our existing talent base well. And we're going to hear about two types of initiatives today that are attempting to do just that. We have an amazing panel to share some of these views and bring together a summary of some of the enriching conversations that have taken place. We'll start with President Luis Alberto Moreno, President of the Inter-American Development Bank. Followed by Vice President of Panama, Isabel St. Malo de Alvarado. And then followed by Stefan Castriel, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Upwork. Let me turn to you first, President Moreno. We've been working in partnership with the IDB and the World Economic Forum on an effort to close the gender gap specifically focused in Latin America. Why do you believe this is important? Well, thank you very much, Sadian. It's a pleasure to be here with the Vice President St. Malo and also with our colleague here. This is, in my view, one of the most important aspects of what we do. Because if you live 50% of the population out of the opportunities in an economy, you're not going very far. And I'll have to, you all have heard all of the economic analysis that has been done of the merits of inclusion and minding the issues of gender in any economy in the world. But if you look at Latin America, over the past 25 years alone, women's participation in the labor force increased by only 20%. And that represented about a pickup of about 16% of GDP growth. Today, 68% of women in Latin America are economically active, and this, by the way, is not unlike many of the OECD numbers. But, and here is the important issue, women unfortunately remain in low-skilled jobs and in low-productivity jobs. I would say fundamentally in the service sector. They're equally underrepresented when one looks at STEM jobs, and it's something that we've worked very hard on. We actually developed a very interesting project in Peru that is working in a number of countries already precisely to help women acquire STEM skills. And of course, the lack of women, especially in leading private sector activities. I'm talking here CEOs or members of boards. So we have to knock down these barriers. And this is what Sadi was saying, we have been working with the World Economic Forum on this very issue. We started with a very enlightened leader, with President Bachelet, who, before as many of you remember, led the program of UN Women. And we actually launched this program almost a year ago. We have over 40 companies that have joined the WEF initiative, and we have been very happy to participate. And these more and more is becoming a part of the conversation in Chile. And there's actually an action plan taking place, and this is really what this is all about. And the same we are doing in the case of Argentina. Again, earlier this year, with Sadi and Richard Sammons, we had the opportunity with the Vice President, with the President's Chief of Staff to launch this very program there. And they're actually going to start rolling it out in the next couple of weeks. And then finally, of course, what we're beginning to do today with Panama. So it's basically around creating a gender parity task force. And I know that leadership group that is being assembled will do the same that we have done in other countries, which is to have a very good diagnosis. But more than diagnosis, you need the action plan. And this is what we're basically doing today. We would like to move in other areas, but I deferred to Vice President Sanmallow to talk to you about some of the ideas that we have to work in other Caribbean countries. The IDB is putting a lot of grant resources behind something like this. And the reason we do it is because we're firmly committed to this endeavor. We believe it is transformational, and I really applaud the World Economic Forum, which is ultimately the essential part of the world where we can do this public-private type of interaction. So again, Sadi, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I do hate to provide one correction, but there are now 100 companies signed on in Chile. It's a good correction. It's a good correction. We're moving forward very quickly. Vice President, could you share with us a little bit of the history of gender parity efforts in Panama and then, of course, this particular effort and acceleration and what you hope to achieve out of it? Of course. And let me first thank the World Economic Forum and the work you're doing in IDB for the work and including Panama. Given Panama the opportunity of joining this coalition, I think it's great news. And we need to underline that gender is now part of the SDGs because it's not a rights issue. It's an issue of development. And I think President Moreno just said it very clearly. If we leave half of the population out of the efforts to achieve sustainability, we're just not going to get there. If companies leave 50% of the population out of the decision-making processes or out of productivity, we're just not going to get there fast enough. I heard once Christine Lagarde mentioned that if you were born today women, it would take you 170 years. It doesn't matter if it's 170 years or 100 years or 50 years. It's just we cannot wait that long because as part of that comes families, children's opportunities, companies opportunities to grow. It's just a very holistic effort. And Panama has this very clear Panama, has been a country we're growing very fast. We've grown steadily for the past 10 years. We will, according to the IMF, soon be the country with the highest per capita income in the region. And women have been graduating more from universities than men for many years and they're part of the workforce. We're part of the workforce but we're not part of the highest levels positions at the private sector, at the government. If you look at boards, women participation, and I was mentioning earlier, it's sad to hear when a corporation is proud of having one women present at the board. It's like, wow, something to be proud of. It's not something to be proud of, it's 50% of the population. And it's not an issue of rights, it's an issue of being smart about business, being smart about development. Now I am proud to have announced that we are joining this gender gap effort and at home we're trying to work with IDB and other government partners in order to have criteria, have targets, have more data in order to be able to take decisions and define public policies with more information so that we make sure to include women. We have not been doing it enough. We have also launched and participated with ILO on the Equal Pay Coalition. It has to be a very holistic approach. It has to be an effort from the private and the public sector jointly and I want to once again thank you and being that we're very excited about joining this effort and we're going to do everything that we can from our part to push the issue further at home and abroad. It has to be a global collision. Thank you very much and the World Economic Forum is of course a platform and we're excited to be a platform for the IDB's efforts on this issue and of course specifically with Panama now joining, following in the footsteps of Chile and Argentina and the work that's already been launched there. We've been talking a lot about the fact that there is already a very strong talent base when it comes to women. Women are in over 100 countries around the world, the majority of those that are coming out of university education and so they actually make up the majority of those that could be in the potential high-skilled labor force. That's the opportunity that we're in part trying to capture here through this kind of gender parity acceleration effort. There is another piece though and that is the changing nature of work itself and what that might lead to in terms of gender parity outcomes. Stefan, I will turn it over to you. You're the CEO of Upwork. It's an organization that, well, you can better introduce than me but it is in part demonstrating this new world of work and the changing nature of work and it would be great to hear your views on whether the future of work offers more or less opportunities for gender parity. Sure. So by way of background and this is not the topic to talk about Upwork, Upwork is a freelancing website. So we connect five million businesses on one side with 12 million freelancers on the other side doing it globally in 180 countries and offering professional opportunities to people who may live in a part of the world where the local job market is not as strong as some of the cities where we live in. You know, I think we are entering a time of change. This is what the World Economic Forum calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It's a fantastic time for society and a great time for the global economy. However, it also comes with potential disruptions in the job markets and specifically topics around automation and AI will probably make some jobs disappear. And generally we will observe an acceleration in the change of skills in the workplace and it's going to be critical to be able to adapt to those changes. So jobs will be destroyed, new jobs will be created. I don't think that anybody who has been involved in this task force believes that we are running out of jobs. However, there are a few things that are concerning right now and we are going to go towards a world that is more polarized both within countries as well as globally unless we make some changes happen. So this is a time for leadership. It's a time for flexibility. It's a time for leaders to engage and to experiment. And I would say specifically around two areas. One is around geographic inequality. This is very vivid within countries. We are observing this within the U.S. The coastal cities are doing better and better. The middle of the country is struggling. It's also true within many of the other OECD countries. It's also true globally between the developing world and the developed nations. We have aging workforces in many of the western countries and we have a demographic boom in many of the developing countries. And the first industrial revolutions were about moving the workers to where the work was. And this is no longer sustainable. It cannot be the path for the future. We need to create economic opportunities where people want to live and essentially reverse the paradigm, move the work to where the workers are. And I think this is a time for business leaders in particular to rethink how they organize work. To go away from the traditional model that was frankly designed for the assembly line, the model of the first industrial revolution, and organize around flexibility, organize around the fact that we don't know exactly what the future looks like, and empower workers to be able to be living economic lives that are successful, irrespective of where they happen to be living. So that's one part of it. The second part of it, which I think has been widely studied within the World Economic Forum, is this notion of the skills gap. There will be jobs. We're not running out of economic opportunities, but there's an increasing gap between the types of jobs that are available and the skills required for those jobs on one side, and the skills that people have, workers have in the economy on the other side. And that is something that needs to change. That is one of the SDGs, SDG number four, which I think highlights three absolutely essential components. One is this notion of lifelong learning. In a time of change where it has been reported that the half-life of a skill is five years, meaning the skills that people have today are going to be half as valuable five years from now. We can't expect people to study until they're 18 or 20 or 22 and then use the same skills for the rest of their lives. We need to change the model and create the expectation upfront that people will need to retrain themselves throughout their life, and we need to find funding mechanisms to do this through public and private partnerships. So that's one part of the SDG four, is this notion of lifelong learning. Second one is around equal access to opportunities, and that is in great part a financing issue. Student debt as an example in this country in the U.S. is untenable and will lead to massive disasters unless we address the issue. It's also tied to scaling issues. There are countries in the world where there just aren't enough teachers trained and we don't have time to train enough teachers to address the issue. So building scalable and efficient models of education are a requirement to get to this equal access of the SDG. The third part is the quality of the education system and I would say much has been said about what are the skills of the future. I think there's two meta-skills that are absolutely essential for the education systems to teach. One is creating this expectation of lifelong learning through what people call learnability, teaching people to learn throughout their lives. The second one is this notion of entrepreneurship. Realizing that we should not prepare students to take jobs but we should prepare students to create jobs and in particular make sure that people understand that they are responsible for their own success and their own career and they can no longer rest on society or be corporations to take care of them. They need to be empowered but also held accountable for their success in society. That's great. Thank you, Stefan. Unfortunately, Minister Raddebe from South Africa was not able to make it back on time for the panel but we're very excited of course that one of the other announcements that came out of today is that South Africa will be the inaugural country driving forward a very similar initiative to closing the gender gap one which is specifically focused on closing the skills gap, looking at basic education, at technical and vocational training, at higher education, and of course reskilling the adult workforce. Given that we have a little bit more time, let me actually go back to President Moreno and let's explore a little bit if we can this connection between the future of work and changing skill sets and gender parity. There are some studies including some from the forum that would say that women are ideally poised for this future of work because the care sector, the education sector areas where women tend to have a comparative advantage are the ones that will be growing and there are others who would say, well actually it is STEM related jobs that are going to be growing in the future and women tend not to be as larger part of that education pipeline as men. What are your views on this and how do you think this will play out in Latin America? Well this is something I think a lot about and I like the notion that you have this other track on really understanding and more importantly we know a lot about what's the problems of education in our countries, we know less about the changing nature of the labour market and the speed with which it's changing. So what is it that we know? We know that today you can optimize about 5% of jobs but more importantly all studies point that this number is going to be close to 40% in the next 10 years. How that shapes out in Latin America is something that we're still looking at because I don't think we have felt the kind of shake-up that you felt in the labour markets in more developed countries. Having said that, one of the things that we have and our main report that we do every year is precisely around skills that we have done this year and we spend in terms of dollar amounts or as a percentage of GDP about the same or more than some developed countries. The problem is we get worse results. Why do we get worse results? There's measurement issues. There is the gaps that become evident very early on especially third, fourth graders, those kinds of problems early on in say losses in math skills and all of the things that you need to prepare for basic education of the future. And certainly the other dynamic that is fascinating is that today you have more girls going to school than men but their skills that they're acquiring are not necessarily the same. So I really think one of the things that I was always discussing with my colleagues is will tell me something I don't know. I know we have a problem in education. We all know that governments spend a lot of time trying to fix this other piece about the labour market and the changing nature of the labour market is something that I think for the form is very interesting because it's going to require working with a lot of services companies that employ large amounts of people, the accentures of this world that have to reskill people all the time. And those skills will vary almost every day. And so I think that's to me the bigger question and I would love to think this through and in the nature of this public private partnership are basically at the core here at the forum. Thank you. And Vice President, are there any particular aspects of this change that is happening that you think will have implications on gender parity? Interestingly, Panama is one of the few countries that has actually fully closed the gender gap when it comes to professional and technical positions. But of course there's a very large leadership gap and a very large wage gap and a large labour force participation gap. Do you think things will improve or if we can take no action today, do you think things will improve or may deteriorate when it comes to gender parity given this change in labour markets? I'm always positive in terms of the future so I think that they will definitely improve. But let me elaborate a little bit more. We have already been looking at some gaps in terms of our economy and we're working very hard at providing the tools in terms of education and training in order to close those. Our economy is very varied. We have a very large financial sector and traditionally the workforce has been geared in that direction. However, with the expansion of the Panama Canal, for example, we see our country transitioning to strengthening our logistics sector, our service sector in that area. And in that regard, we are going to have to make some changes in terms of our labour in order to have more technical training that we already have. We are looking into that. We actually launched, President Varela launched very early at his term an effort to create a very high-tech institute for training for technology. This will be inaugurated next year and we do hope with that we have an air hub and we have an airline that covers the whole region and that continues to grow and we need to have more pilots and we need to have operators for our ports and we need to have the pilots for the canal and we need to have the workforce to be ready to take on more private companies that are willing to come to Panama and interested in coming to Panama because we connect the Americas and we connect the Americas with the world always more and more through our ports and our canal. So in terms of gender, these are professional areas that have been historically male. I think we need to concentrate even more in ensuring that there is no gender to professions and we need to work more on that and I am very positive that with our participation in these sort of initiatives and the creation of awareness and the work of the government in terms of promoting training equally in these areas we will be able to match that situation that arises in Panama as well as in the rest of the world. Great. Thank you very much. I'm afraid we're out of time so thank you very much to President Moreno, to Vice President St. Malo and Stefan Castriel. Thank you. Thank you very much.