 So many people have been speaking about the climate crisis, but the real question is why is it that we're still not acting at the scale and speed that is necessary? For 150 years, we built up a world based on the assumption that we can exploit the planet for free and it translates to very dramatic impacts happening right as we speak. The climate crisis is a threat multiplier, which means it exacerbates existing inequities in our society. We need to remember we're on the same planet and this is the planet that we need to make sustainable for the whole of humanity. Making much faster progress toward all 17 sustainable development goals is the best pathway to adjust future for all and public-private partnerships will be absolutely crucial to this transition. We know that this transition will require a fast adoption of a lot of new technologies and the question today is how to find the appropriate way to find this technology. Younger generations are demanding a sense of purpose. They want to look at companies and say, I am investing with you all for this reason. The solutions are there. What we need is governments to regulate, to invest and we need business to act with values. History will look at us, people, politicians, corporate leaders. These times require not only solutions but speed. There is nowhere else to look than the mirror. We are the ones that need to do this. Well, what a fantastic group of people I have with me here for a really great conversation for the next 45 minutes. Thanks very much for joining us. Let me just start with a few thoughts before we get underway. I don't want to start from a negative perspective but I think it's helpful to set the tone. Folks watching, if you're watching this, you very likely know that there is something called the Global Gender Gap Index. This is a survey of 146 countries. It's its 17th survey this year and this year it found that there was a 0.3% improvement since last year. Not 3%, 0.3%, 4.1% since the first edition back in 2006. So, on the face of it, it appears that all of our efforts to try to address the unfair imbalance between women and men around the world are not having a good enough effect. And it's not in the working world. And that survey suggests that we are 131 years away from full parity. And I was thinking about this and you may be wondering why a man is hosting a panel like this. And I was thinking about this and I looked at that number 130 years and I have two daughters, twins and they're 11 years old. And I thought, wow, my daughters will never see gender parity. But wait a second, 130 years, my daughters' daughters, my granddaughters if I have them will never see gender parity. And then I thought 130 years, I think that means that if my daughters have daughters and then they have daughters, my great granddaughters may, at least in their working life, never see gender parity. And that is a challenge. That is an issue. If you've got something to say about this, we want you to get on social media. Everybody says this these days. And you can use the hashtag SDIM23 to make some comments and join the conversation. But let me introduce the folks here who are going to have the conversation with us today. Sitting next to me is Reshma Tajani, who is from Mums First, the CEO of Mums First. Right, great. Thierry Dio, who is from Meridium. And next to him, Claire Amakanze, who is from the Rwanda Development Board. And next to her, Randall Tucker, from MasterCard. Reshma, let's begin with you because that was a negative way to start, right? And you're all about the positive. So what are the positives about what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve and what you're seeing out there? I mean, I think the positive is that we've learned that progress isn't linear, right? That there's going to bumps in the road. And then I think it allows us, we're just coming out of a meeting on this, on the parity report thinking about, well, what does the future look like? You know, how do we have an ambitious goal from what we've learned? And I'll tell you this, you know, I spent 10 years of my life building an organization called Girls Who Code. You know, closing the STEM gap, teaching over 600,000 girls, reaching over millions. And you know, when we started in the pandemic, I thought we had achieved equality. You know, for the first time in our labor force, the vast majority were women. And when the pandemic hit, you know, it really showcased the fact that women across the globe do two-thirds of the caregiving work while they're maintaining their full-time jobs. And so if you have a broken structure of care, if you don't, when daycare centers were shut down and schools were shut down, everything fell apart. And millions of women in the United States and across the world were pushed out of the workforce. And I think what we learned here in the United States that, you know, there were key things, key structural changes that we had not made in our march towards equality that have impeded our progress. And so one, that's paid leave. The United States is the only injustice realization that doesn't have paid leave. So one out of four moms go back to work two weeks after having a baby. Second, affordable childcare. You know, we're the wealthiest nation that puts the least into childcare. So 40% of parents are in debt because of the cost of childcare. Pay equity. The reason why we have a pay gap is because for dads, every time they have a child, they make 6% more. For women, every time they have a baby, they lose 4% of their salary. So it really, I think, shown a line on so many of us who are doing this work saying, you know, this is about structural change. You know, we have to focus on structural change if we actually want to be free. And I think women leaders across the globe are having, not, I mean, we knew this, but we're taking a conversation in many ways that has like about care that has been in the margins and bringing it to the mainstream. We're taking a conversation about care that's always been seen in the social light, your personal problem to fix and putting it in an economic light and having conversations about the billions, if not trillions of dollars that were missing from the economy because most women work to work. Yeah. The point being, actually, there are economic benefits to addressing the issue of getting women to live their best lives, their fullest lives, as well as families. I mean, when you have labor shortages and tight labor markets across the globe, it's because you don't have the full participation, right? Right. And you don't have the full participation of women, you know what I mean, in the labor market. Yeah. So one of the things I think is important for us to talk about here, there's going to be two aspects to this, aren't there? There's going to be the big picture and then there are going to be the individual cases and the fact that actually people have different experiences in different places, different families even. From the Rwanda side, what are the specific, Reshma talked about in the U.S. What's the Rwanda picture, if you like, and what do you think that tells us around the world about what we need to address here? Thank you. First of all, Kia, I don't think we have to wait 131 years. That's great. I don't think we have to wait 131 years. Okay. It requires all of us doing our part to reduce those 131 years. When I look at Rwanda's case, we don't have to wait 131 years. Today, Rwanda is ranked among the top countries in the world when it comes to gender parity. We're always ranked among sometimes top five, sometimes within the top 10 in the world. But what did it take for Rwanda to reach that level of parity? I think one important aspect is that deliberate leadership for gender inclusion is important. Leadership that is deliberately making sure that gender inclusiveness happens and that requires people actually making sure it happens. It's not going to happen on its own. If you're a leader, if you're a president of a country like my president, very clear about gender equality. He'll make sure when he's appointing cabinet, women are represented. He'll make sure when he's appointing board members, women are included. CEOs of companies should do the same. Mayors should do the same. Deliberate leadership to ensure inclusion is important. I like to tell an anecdote of my president. Once he told us a story how people who he asks to give him names for appointment would tell him I can't find women. And he would say, fine, I'm not in a hurry. Whenever the women show up, I'll make the appointment. And women showed up the following day because they're there. Somebody just needs to be very deliberate about including them. That's one. Two, I think being innovative about how we solve real challenges. Some of the challenges that Ramsha talked about, one of them was paid leave, for example. In Rwanda, we came up with an innovation, something that we call the maternity solidarity fund. Because employers were discouraged from employing women, especially young women. Africa has a very young continent. I mean, almost everybody is below 30, so they're going to be taking maternity leave a lot. So employers were discouraged because they have to pay and they have to replace somebody when they go on maternity leave. So what the government did is work with a pension fund to come up with a mandatory contribution to a solidarity fund. Whether you're anyone who works, man, woman, 60 or 20, as long as you're working, you contribute a percentage of your salary to the fund. That fund comes in to pay whoever goes on maternity leave. That was a really good way to address the issue of paid leave and I think we should be innovative about that. The last point I want to say is, okay, you have leadership. You have all these policies and innovation that is including. What's important also is to monitor progress. In Rwanda, we've set up something called the gender monitoring office. Their job is to just monitor gender. Are you having enough inclusion in the mayor's office? Is the central bank having enough inclusion? Is the budgeting process including ways to address gender gaps? Somebody who's just monitoring and reminding everybody that you have to keep the policy on board. I think that's important as well. Yeah, Thierry, you spend your time. You spend your time. You're going to disagree with the way that I frame what you do, okay? So I'm ready for that. You spend your time persuading people that positive ideas like this actually are beneficial in investment terms, right? So there's a case, and Reshma already talked a bit about it. There's a case for why actually this is not just good for society, not just good for women and the people who are around us guys, but also actually has economic benefits and investment benefits. I mean, indeed, it's beneficial on two levels. For companies not having women inclusion is a loss. It's a loss in talents. It's a loss in many things, in efficiency and for investment. Is that just because you don't, because you need the people or is it also because of the perspective that women bring? Do you think? It's both. They are different talents. You also need the workforce and the inclusion. In many countries where you have an issue with it, there aren't enough people in the workforce. I've come from an industry, both financial industry where an investment manager in infrastructure, sustainable infrastructure. So we need people with a science background, engineering background, with financial background. This is almost like finding an egg in a big farm. It's really difficult and clearly bringing those talents especially women to this type of workforce is very difficult. So it takes commitment. And in 10 years, in an industry where we have probably 10% women participation, we 35%, but it took commitment from hiring intern massively women all the way to programs within the company to support them through their career, through their maternity, applying for example the best rules that we may have in France on paid leave including we do it in the US, we do it in our African offices, we do it in Turkey. And having the sort of highest level of support for women to develop their career and to manage their lives because maternity is not something that is very simple and coming back is not something that is very simple. So you have to be aware of that. And clearly this program has allowed us to really move the participation of women. And they're different talents. And I think when I think about gender parity I think it's also acknowledging the differences and it's true for all kinds of inclusion. It's also true for racial inclusion. There are differences. We all equal but there are differences. And those differences are positive contribution to what you're trying to achieve. And our investors when we think about inclusion and we are a benefit corporation by the way and one of our pillar is inclusion and especially women inclusion. Our investors see the benefit for their long term investment in our funds to have this positive impact as a good risk mitigation and a positive contributor to the volatility of their investment. When you invest in public infrastructure like ourselves the positive contribution that you bring to communities in this way for example all our assets we have mandatory sort of obligation for these to have women equity pay, hiring women at high level positions. It reflects on the community and that asset where you have a long term contract with government is usually less challenged by the community around it that if you were just not doing business. So actually it's a long term. It's good long term. It's good business sense long term because am I right? So there's a reputational risk if you're behind the curve of thinking as you look ahead there's a risk that you're going to lose contracts as companies and governments see that you think that you're not focused in the right way. Is there more to it than that or is that pretty much from a simple investment perspective? From a simple investment perspective if you're not giving to the community in a positive way you'll be out. That pretty much sums it up. I think from an economic standpoint we also like to think it's just common sense because if you look at human capital as a factor of production and you're utilizing... See if it was common sense then we would have done it already, right? Like somehow something's got in the way I mean we know what's got in the way. I mean if you don't use 50% if you have 52% of women in your population and you're not including 52% you're never going to optimize what you can reach so it's... So we've been getting in our own way but you speak and I had a question I wanted to ask. The piece that I'll add to this is for 20 years leading diversity equity. The chief inclusion officer at the multinational organization and when I was prepping for this I was thinking about 131 years or 130 something years I think it goes back to why are we even doing this work? Are we doing this work because because it feels good or it looks good are we doing this work because in organizations are we focused on building dynamic teams with a diverse perspective of people of different backgrounds and races and ethnicities and genders to problem solve and innovate. Because sometimes I think we're getting the problem statement what are we solving for? And so if you look at it from that perspective in combination with many of our company values are linked to inclusion that's a proof point of that but at the end of the day that should be making revenue have fiduciary responsibility to our boards and to our shareholders so it goes back to are you getting the perspectives and the viewpoints that you need in order to come up with the ultimate decision in problem solving as well as innovation? We're all here because we kind of think this is right likely given the title of the panel folks watching are watching because they think this is right but Randall and you all will be dealing with this but your job in some ways is to address the resistance that there inevitably is and figure out how to persuade and or even overturn that resistance what kind of resistance is there and how do you deal with that if there are folks who are watching who are wondering how can I do this? And so I think it's from the perspective of resistance comes from I think when people feel that something is being taken away from them because I'm focusing on these communities over here my personal identity I won't be able to advance get promoted do whatever to advance in my own career because you're so focused on people that maybe look like me or people that look like you the resistance the change happens in organizations in two ways you through the head or through the heart so the heart piece it's part of our value system I want to make sure that everyone has a level playing field XYZ and from the head piece is the business if women have contributing buying power of like three trillion dollars I think that's the stat why would you not want women at every level of the organization to give you that perspective on how to not leave money on the table and so for me it's this conversation of I can't be the way that I do it's a collaborative partnership with leaders within the organization to come to the right solution not me say you will do because no one wants to be told what to do but sharing the business case around what that looks like and guiding from the back is the way that I can I jump in here because I think you're asking a great question which is why haven't we gotten there or why haven't we just either achieved or sustained you mean gender progress my big aha is often times and I think from the United States perspective maybe I would argue from Europe it's not necessarily about educational attainment because in the United States the vast majority of those that are getting their degrees are women the vast majority of those right in same number one the vast majority of those that are high school valedictorians are women and then the vast majority of those entering the labor market are also women so Accenture did a study that in technology for example 50% of women leave in tech by the time they get 35 so the question is why are they leaving and why aren't we retaining them so our bit my big aha that I think I've had and I think this is a similar situation across the globe is because we have a broken structure of care they leave the minute they either become mothers or they think they want to become mothers and they look around they say can I do that here and the answer is normally no and I think so much of the even if you think about the way that we've built workplaces you know we've built workplaces where the you know the day is nine to five when schools start at eight and they end at three you're already setting up women to fail right for so long even when it came to paid leave it was something that women took men didn't take so women were doing the vast majority of unpaid labor and men were were not right so the home was basically set up for you to have imbalance which put pressure on us that when we were workers and mothers it's just untenable and society told us well it's your fault and not the fact that it is actually my workplace's fault it is the economy's fault it's the government's fault because you are setting me up to fail you know I don't I go back to work too soon before I'm ready because we don't have paid leave the vast majority of women are working to work because I'm getting paid 58 cents in every dollar and the cost of child care is more than any other line item in my you know what I mean in my household and so to I think that to get to parity we have to fix the structure of care that's interesting can I just take a risk here you know because I hear you so your argument is there's a structural challenge and we need to address it and I think that's clearly right but equally there's how does that fit with the personal challenges within a family for example the kind of your mothers first and families you're dealing with right like here I am right a father I'm thousands of miles from home my kids are back home being looked after the conversations in our family about okay if we have someone else look after our kids what impact does that have on our children who's going to be there are very basic conversations that happen and how do you move those forward so I think look I think in America two thirds Americans believe someone should stay home and take care of the kids but the reality is that two thirds Americans believe someone not somebody from outside like right the mom should stay home and take care of one of the parents in other words but the reality is in our economy with the cost of inflation if you can you need two income households or you need to support single mothers who don't have that supplemental income so the reality doesn't meet the economic reality so you need to have I think in a family in the household shared labor on the groceries on the child rearing on the picking up and etc and I think for most of us we don't still have that understanding and I think my husband asked me to marry him three times before I said yes you know what I mean because I knew that I wanted to do big things in my life but I married the guy that was going to support me to do that and when we had our first son I took paid leave and he didn't and it created such an unbalance that we're constantly trying to kind of figure that out again and I think that this is the reality for most families perhaps I can add a perspective to this because I agree but I disagree because it's not enough I mean I live in a country like France where we have everything you need you do the structure of the care fixing the care structure is not enough exactly and still France is not a gender parody, Sweden is still not a gender parody and those places have all the things that you say government pays for all kinds of things when you have kids for childcare for you can have two years of leave being paid in a distance salary men can take them and actually they force them to take them so all these things are there in certain society and yet we don't achieve that parody so I'm saying yes we need that as a basic but I think we have but we need more I think it's also the this is great but I also think I think it's Switzerland where they still have school days where they let the kids out from 11 to 2 so they can eat at home if you're a mother how can you actually work when you know that you have to take a break from 11 to 2 and the kids stay at school but I can say there's still these cultural biases that are embedded I agree but what I say is the care system I know places where it's very high it's very comfortable and yet we don't achieve it and coming back to the corporations and their responsibility in this is my own chief inclusion officer and I think every company should have their own CEO being the chief inclusion officer it's great for you then you can become a CEO I don't know I have a great relationship with our CEO but I think that that's a whole different can of worms but this job is seen to be done by everyone like this job doesn't have like a skill set or a criteria for actually doing I think everyone in the organization should have a responsibility for diversity, equity and inclusion there still needs to be a leader to help develop with that strategy so what you're talking about is the structural which Rushman is talking about how that connects with the personal and how we make a cultural change as well as a structure, all those issues but there's systemic change within organizations as well coupled with the piece that you're talking about from the home and like society within organizations our responsibility is to make sure that our people systems work for everyone our hiring systems, are we going to the right place to find women talent when we talk about growth and development of women in the org, not just women but everyone, how do we make sure that in talent review we're giving real candid feedback that we are having the conversation around why does this group seem to be at the high pole list not on that high pole list where's the balance how do we make sure that our women feel that they are paid equally and are paid equally because of the numbers that we're being transparent with what that looks like so I think it's a combination of systems that will help to to do everything right structure and it's the bias so for example we're just having a meeting that Forbes did a survey that when you're evaluating the performance of women 76% will talk about kind of she was too bossy, she was too aggressive the communication style whereas only 2% talk about the men's communication style that's a function of are you an inclusive in the moments that matter I think Terry raised an important point even though you create an environment where care is available even though you don't treat gender parity I think you're still closer than people that don't do it so you may not be there but you're closer than people that are not doing anything you're closer than the United States but I knew I think it's really important but I think there's an important part which is we need a lot more role models of women who are working and looking after their families I am CEO of the Rwanda Development Board I have a 2 year old and I have a 4 year old so it's been a busy last 4 years but I think having more women like this and in Rwanda role models there's so many CEOs who are doing exactly this, who are managing families and we talk about it, we create platforms where they can share their experiences their difficulties, their challenges and by doing that a lot of people are getting more open minded to having more women leading because they think it's possible and I think the role of role models just having more women I remember today we have 6 CEOs of 15 banks in Rwanda that are women 6 out of 15 but when the first woman became the CEO of the biggest bank and she's a mother and she was talking about that and people saw it was possible the next shareholder was able to appoint a CEO and now they are 6 normal so it's really important to normalize that women can do this I have a 3 year old and an 8 year old I've built one of the largest women and girls organizations in the world and I'm doing it again and I strap my baby to my back and I raised $100 million for Girls With Code and I think again, but us talking about that normalizing it such a powerful point Claire for the CEO as well I think what I wanted to add is you also need to include this in your normal performance criteria so we have a KPI and several actually an inclusion that comes into financial compensation for people it's cold it's not the heart but it works if you can measure and you can actually penalize or bonus this performance in terms of inclusion as part of the whole performance of the company as part of the personal performance of each leader then it's clearer I mean it's not a hard discussion it's okay we have objectives to reach this you haven't reached it so let's say your bonus is gone but you have to come to including something which initially comes from the heart and looking for economic performance into really okay this is a KPI it's part of your job it's part of your objective get it done I wanted to push you a little bit though because in a way I suppose I would say to not quite let you get away with the kind of all of us kind of saying and I know you wouldn't this is easy or this is because it's expensive just we talk about the structural changes that you need but I just know from my own family getting the care we've just talked about child care but it's not just child care it has to be the right child care it has to be someone then the person who's treated well so they don't walk out after six months which is a nightmare when you're trying to bring up child care all those things and I will let you rush around and let you get to that but just clearly you're extraordinarily successful you're getting something right but it costs money we can't pretend that's not the case it doesn't really cost money it's an organizational issue it doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money I mean we in many in France it costs the government a lot of money not necessarily me but when we organize for example special child care close to people's home where we have a network of places where they can drop their kids and we subsidize it but it's easier for us to do that to free the women's time rather than let them look for it or wait for a government spot somewhere so it's organization we also have a group within the company which is men and women together which is Gaia group but it's both men and women that are actually on a constant basis bringing proposals to really help us really improve so they come up with ideas and this is a regular working group that come up with and then we change things and then we adapt and because then you need you have a real feedback they are actually our sort of chief inclusion officer but it's a group of people diverse group of people really thinking about it and a permanent group that makes things move forward I think there's I do think that there's a perception that it's really expensive and one of the things that we're doing with mom's person partnership with BCG is we're collecting that data for companies like Disney, like Meridian others who have you know Google Salesforce who have been in-house child care centers who have been providing child care subsidies and what we're finding that essentially it pays for itself the savings that you get on workers not missing work having lower rates of attrition the average worker leaves at eight months it costs a salary after a place that person you provide this benefit for me I'm sticking with you right so but the thing is this is where I think this conversation about data is really important we've been doing these things like MasterCard provides incredible benefits but you probably haven't done the data analysis on the savings because you kind of know that intuitively but I do think that we have to put that out there in the world and really just prove the business case once and for all so this point about but it's really expensive doing it because it's the right thing is just put to rest I'm glad to be proven wrong here's the thing I think being in a corporate environment for so many years in many different organizations people find money and organizations find money what's important to them I've never had a budget said no to if it didn't have a really good business case and if the organization was behind what I would say is that what I'm really excited about at MasterCard is that we don't talk about it we don't talk about maternity we talk about it as parental leave and talk about normalization making sure that when a couple is going to have a kid the man can leave for 16 weeks a woman or whatever you identify as can leave for 16 weeks both and so I think part of the solution is having men leave and in our most senior levels of the organization they are almost expected to leave because they want to send a sign to the organization that it's okay and so it's not on the burden of the woman to actually feel like she has to do the traditional role but it's everyone's opportunity is it though that's in the good times in restaurant made the point early on that we got we had a setback with COVID you know you have these Black Swan events and you have hard times in corporate life and how do you ensure that these kind of programs don't get hit because ostensibly potentially they're the kind of thing that you push out the way when suddenly is it really part of your values but in the end fundamentally the finances are they are but I mean if you have a kid they're going to be someone's going to leave and so the work still will be done have you guys done that work looking at the benefits or we've done it somewhere but not to the level of detail as to what you're saying but as a company we want to make sure that this is not a fly by night the flavor of the month this whole concept of diversity equity inclusion even in this US context of it under you know going under fire ESG DEI this whole kind of woke thing it's core to our business and it's core to our values we don't feel that if you are leaving out a population of people in decision making and driving business revenue you are actually doing the right thing if we're leaving that perspective we're missing something and that's core to our beliefs and whatever it takes to get that perspective and that viewpoint that's what we're willing to do and I think master her is exceptional because you are right 40% of companies cut their paid leave and childcare benefits during the pandemic because they saw it as an OPEX expense not a cap X expense and that's also what happened with with D&I and that was a mistake but that's also what happened with D&I and the fact that it didn't really have value didn't have value and I think but unlike climate there is always seen as a board level a risk issue it's always seen as a cap X on an OPEX expense that's why it doesn't get touched and I think that's the thing that we have to learn from this as again we think about what are the ambitious goals for the future is we have to assume that not everybody is master card because D&I is a board experience which is very two or three times a year so it's a different conversation you know that too right and that's kind of as we are kind of telling our partners what to do and how to approach this how to make sure that we sustain and we don't have regression on these things it's these learnings right cap X on an OPEX, board level you know what I mean make sure you actually have data analysis and you can put numbers and KPIs on essentially the savings for the company don't do this because it's the right thing to do do it because it makes business sense in terms of the saving because there's a cost of hiring a new person but the cost of training a new person and the cost of getting to the same efficiency that you had is another year so in fact it has a lot of disruption might be one of the reasons why the number of economies have struggled to get out at the end of COVID and really get going again I mean all politics is local right and we're talking about lessons for everybody and that's good and that's what people are watching for but equally though I wanted to ask you do you think there are some specific things there that have enabled the kind of success you've talked about and then just once again are there lessons that are actually useful more broadly or actually do you have to face the fact that in different places there are different experiences and different tools will be needed to achieve it I think the principles are the same they may be applied differently but I think we've talked a lot about supporting women who go on maternity leave and the whole care system but there's a point that Thierry mentioned at the beginning which I think is really important which is we talked about internships and how they bring so many women internships we found that to be very important because preparing a pipeline of women who can grow in succession and take leadership position for us in Rwanda has been very helpful today we have 61% of our parliament constituted by women that's the highest in the world the constitution says 30% to get the first 30% when the constitution passed in 2003 was not easy but what has helped over time is that we created a decentralized system of governance from the village level to the district to the sector to the province and then to the national level we require that at every small segment of leadership women must be included 30% so if you have every 10 households 30% of women by the time you reach the national level those are the women that are growing through this system and becoming members of parliament at the national level but what that speaks to is supporting a critical mass of pipeline of women that can be mentored, can be exposed to leadership because if the time comes for them to take on those positions they are available to do that and I think that's an important part to also really emphasize we mostly have to start with the pipeline of 60% if you want to achieve 30% 60% pipeline in the internship program that we have with many universities we actually take up to 80% of the spots go to women and that allowed us today to be 35% so you understand how much you can lose in between despite all the efforts so you really need to get the pipeline to be the broader as possible and I think it's an example that you have to have targets not goals oh that's a holocam yeah I know that's a whole damn worry what I will say I'm not going to even touch it why is that a whole kind of worry oh stop there's a debate and I was over the summer I was working in Europe admitted from Switzerland to France I was in doing some work and it always came up in conversation are we going to mandate quotas because it was a hot time I don't know all of a sudden when I was in that part of the world this year are we going to do quotas and for us as an organization we don't what we do is has aspirational goals and we have gender parity that we're looking for which lets people off the hook though no it doesn't let people off the hook because if you have the system in place that has the fail safes in it because what we our philosophy has been you know if we put a quota out there and I don't care what background you're talking about is that person here because of the quota is that person at the same meritocracy as everyone else or they here because of the quota and does that person then have the stigma around I'm just here because of that and are they treated the same because of this thing called a quota and now you're a part of that everybody has to be bought in is what you're kind of I think meritocracy has to win out and I think the system has to make sure that the best person wins but you have to make sure that you have a diverse slate of candidates to choose from I think part of the issue is that we have the sameness in the slate of people that we're looking at but don't really make sure that we have that diverse slate of candidates to look for I mean I don't think it matters if you got in because it's a 30% quota whatever I think what matters is when you're the job are you performing and the quota is not going to let you off I think the performance is going to speak for itself so I wouldn't worry so much about how you come in and what I'd worry about is when you get the job are you competing are you competitive are you actually are you performing and that's what we emphasize and then this is the thing is that you can do what you're doing if you have real data to tell the story and often the data is not available and therefore if you don't have these quotas it's aspirational and people get away with a lot of things and I think there's a distinction between why the United States why the United States is so far behind in terms of its educational attainment versus its labor market participation versus its leadership roles whether it's in Congress or in starting businesses because we've had goals not targets and whereas other nations have far surpassed the United States in terms of gender equality because they have targets not goals an aspect that Randall is kind of I think kind of touching on inferring is what you might call the backlash issue should we worry about that or do we just push that aside I tell my young women at Girls Who Code like who cares what people think of you because the reality is is that you have to be twice as good to get there in the first place and then that can have an impact on you and I think at the end of the day I think we know that we are qualified enough, prepared enough ready enough and I think we have to stop trying to have to prove that to anyone and here's the thing there are a lot of white men who have gotten there because of privilege and not performance and they're certainly not asking oh am I only here because of that they don't care so why do we and so I just think this point has to shift because for so long you know we've operated in a meritocracy this perception that we live in a meritocracy when we don't and that hasn't gotten us any closer to equality we're like baby stepping it so I say blow it up try something new you're nodding I think the way that we would blow it up aren't just in two different ways I think that's the answer I'm almost asking you the same question again and perhaps I'm fairly is the backlash issue an issue that we should be worried about or should we just say okay I think yes I know exactly what you're saying I think it is for me as an inclusion leader I think it's an opportunity for us to really hone in on what's important and what's valuable do I care what it's called my work does it need to be DEA I could care less as long as you do the work what I care about is have we created an equal playing field for everyone and so how do we make sure that we're doing that if it's the way that we are capturing or our narrative of the work if it is so focused on the punchline or we're talking about black people we're talking about women we're talking about these groups but leaving out the overarching we want to create an environment where everyone can thrive and bring their best selves to work or wherever they are I think we're missing that piece and I think that's what's led us to what are we doing here right now Thierry does a backlash issue potentially have economic implications investment implications reputation or risk all those kind of things I think the backlash will go away to be honest with you it's not that important right it's better to sort of try and half fail with the backlash rather than not doing anything and I don't think the backlash will have such significant consequences but I think you know I live in a country where you can't put quarters okay the first time they did it was for women on boards but I also live in a country where you can identify people by race so you can't put quarters you can't measure so it's all aspirational and that's one of the reasons it doesn't work but I'm not saying quarter will work and I'm not even sure I'm four quarters but I don't think there's anything against it there's a lot of backlash that should prevent us from trying it there must have been resistance in Iran so how was that dealt with actually okay and the conclusion of this talk is everybody moved to Iran can this work because culturally for many years women want as included so it was more like are we confident enough that this will work more than resistance and so working on that confidence and showing that it's important and I think something else that is really important is to continuously demonstrate the benefits of inclusion keep selling look at Rwanda 61% parliament is women more than 50% cabinet is women most of the ministries and agencies are led by women but this is a country that today is ranked the second easiest place to do business in Africa the sixth safest in the world in terms of security and for the last 15 years one of the fastest growing countries in Africa if all the things are being attained and more than 50% to 60% are women surely the benefits including women so the next president will be a woman my president has said he hopes to be a woman I have no idea how to summarize our conversation you want to give me a few words each just to help me out a little bit I think the keep selling I think is a good word keep selling and keep doing it and keep being engaged be intentional be deliberate you have to make it happen if you want to be an inclusive leader always think about I don't know everything so I need as many perspectives around as possible and create an environment where all your employees feel that they can reach their greatest potential be bold try something different and focus on structural change terrific thanks so much I guess another summary would be get into the detail recognize exactly bring all of these lessons and also recognize what you are specifically dealing with in your organization in your part of the world and get into the detail and don't give up guys thank you so much it's been a terrific conversation and thanks everybody for watching