 Hello, and welcome to our panel on women's leadership in times of crisis. I'm Francesca Donner with the New York Times. I'm absolutely delighted to introduce you to our three panelists. And once I've done that, I'm going to give you an assignment. So get ready. Our first panelist is Evelina Cristina Weaver-Cruz, the Prime Minister of Aruba. We also have joining us Wendy Clark, Global CEO of Densu, a global advertising company. And finally, we have Caroline Anci, the CEO and President of PACT, a global nonprofit focused on economic development. Remember, I said there was going to be an assignment. Here it is. We would like to begin this by asking you, our audience, to respond to a question. Which leadership qualities have stood out to you as leaders addressed the crisis caused by the pandemic? To respond to the question, you're going to find a link in the Zoom chat and you can participate in the poll. All you need to do is put in an adjective or two, think for a minute, and your adjectives will show up on the screen. So let's see what we get. Don't be shy, because otherwise we're going to look at this big blue box with nothing in it. And I'll have to make up, I was going to say I'd have to make up my own adjectives, but here's one, empathy. Anything else? It's staring at me. Moral leadership, communication, adaptability, assertiveness, transparency, vulnerability, moral leadership. Here we go. Giving direction, resilience, assertiveness. So the bigger the word, the more people are thinking about that word. Long term vision, that's a good one. Wow, these are all really excellent leadership qualities. Humility, clearly there were fantastic leaders leading us through the crisis. Compassion, kindness, trust, science-based leadership. It's interesting. Patience, ingenuity, vulnerability. Okay. I think we might be ready to, oh, they took it away. I was going to read a few more, but that's fine. We are going to move on and start with our panel. So I already introduced our panelists. And believe it or not, as I was thinking about what my first question would be, I labeled it empathetic leadership. And it's funny because I really didn't know how this word cloud would turn out, but that seems to be the biggest leadership quality that people are thinking about. I've heard talk of the importance of empathy and leadership countless times this past year. And this is for you, my dear panelists. We might say we have empathy as a leader and you are all leaders, but I'd like to ask you what that looks like for each of you in practice. And as we do that, I'd actually like to ask you what it has been like to lead this past year. Prime Minister, if I may, I'd like to begin with you. Well, thank you so much for the invitation and opportunity. Empathetic leadership, empathy for me means not only having sympathy for the other person, but to be empathetic is to try and put yourself in the other person's shoes. Try to understand how people think, what drives people. And I also agree definitely with all the comments given prior that empathy is the single most important quality that we would need in all our leaders. And I tend to believe as well that in female leadership, you find empathy much more present than in male leadership. And this past year has been very, this past one and a half year has been very challenging here in Aruba. Aruba is a small island in the Caribbean. Our main economic pillar is tourism and we were hit very hard by the COVID pandemic. The IMF has indeed declared that Aruba was one of the hardest hit countries in the Caribbean region due to our large dependency on tourism. So it was very difficult. We had to close the borders at a certain point in time in March of last year for a couple of months. And that has been the hardest decision that we had to take in Aruba. But we did it and empathy was very important. Not only, I don't say that only because I'm the prime minister, being a woman here, but other leaders in our crisis team were also, there was a large female leadership present in our crisis team. And together we tried to understand what it meant for everybody. It was a global pandemic. It hit every country differently. And within every country, it hit every citizen differently. And I think that that is what has helped us a lot in Aruba. We try to understand. We try to put ourselves in the shoes of the people, even those that we were not in agreement with, but to try to understand what drives them in order to take that into account when making decisions that have a long lasting impact on our island. Thank you. That was really thought provoking. You covered a lot. And I also heard a bit of decisiveness when we were thinking about leadership qualities. You had to go into lockdown. You had to do it fast. It was not an easy decision, no doubt. Wendy, if I might kick this question to you, what has it been like for you to lead over the past year? Yes, thank you, Francesca. And back to your question. I wouldn't build much more on the Prime Minister's answer around empathy. I think it was very clear that the one thing I'd say I think as a leader, when we lead with empathy, we are also patterning and showing away. It wasn't just leadership that had to be empathetic, but we also had to have colleague to colleague empathy. Right. We had as a community, we had to come together with our clients. We had to have empathy. So you pattern the leadership attributes that you want in that moment. And I think it was important. I started my job just over a year ago. So I started a job never being able to meet one person. I started on this camera. Sometimes I hate this camera and sometimes I love this. But that's how I started a job. I have 45,000 people in this company. I have met roughly until this week, about 30 of them. I'm sitting in the UK. I am American. I traveled here this week. This is the first time I've met more people in over a year. So that's incredibly challenging. But look, we were in it together. The transparency of the frustration I think we all felt and just working through that. But knowing we need to stay focused and deliberate and what we're trying to do for the company was really important. So those are some of the things I experienced. Yeah. And it sounds like also sort of really managing an extraordinarily distributed team in really unprecedented way. Caroline, let's hear from you if you have anything to add to these extraordinary adjectives. Thank you. Well, like Wendy, I also started when we were already in lockdown. So I've been CEO for 18 months and I think I've met four or five people. I think the pandemic kind of redefined how we think about leadership. We tend to think leaders must lead. I think in the pandemic leaders had to an extent follow as well, which meant they had to listen. I mean, I saw we have we work in 40 countries. We have 20 overseas offices. At one point, everybody working at home and people like a logical move really went up and down. So there were times when people wanted to do trivia and virtual happy hours. And then there were times when people just said we can't put on the camera. We don't want to put on the camera. We're feeling too low to put on the camera. And I think the job I found my job was to in a sense mirror some of those moods and go with that flow and be much more flexible, I would say. And amazingly, we were able to deliver everything. Every project was delivered on time. And with impact. And so that's meant we've now we're going through a whole process of reassessing. What does it mean to be an international organization if you can't travel and you can actually deliver without traveling? But I think the empathy meant really listening and picking up on the moods, which isn't so easy when you're not meeting people in person. But even on Zoom, you can learn to you can learn to read people. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think most urgently needed to be addressed? And I'd like to also ask, how has that changed or not changed post or during and post COVID? Well, sometimes it's difficult to remember how things were before the pandemic because of the impact. But indeed, I am the first female Prime Minister in Ruba. I have been sworn in four years ago on November the 17th, 2017. I'm also the second Prime Minister because I was sworn in yesterday for my second term. And since 2017, I have to say we had a lot of we had policy in place. We had stakeholders engagement, but it did not have the attention from the government that I thought it needed. So we tried to change this and together with you and women, we set up a plan to better our policies and to bring it to a national level. And of course, when you when you talk about national policy and on a national level, you have to have the engagement of the private sector. So it's not something that we wanted the government only the government to do. We needed our partners to do this together with us. And that is something that we decided before the pandemic. I'm very happy we did it because the first thing that we achieved was the broad acceptance that together we needed to do more when the government is not involved and you have a lot of stakeholders doing a lot of very good work. They do not tend to coordinate with each other and then you don't get the the efficiency that you want or the results that you always want. So the first target was to implement or to draft implement a national coordinated policy. And for that we invited the private stakeholders as well and it was a success. There was a lot of enthusiasm to work on this national policy. And then COVID hit and that made me realize that it was indeed the best decision that we could have taken before the pandemic to engage everybody because suddenly the government had to take care of everything. It's a small island a beautiful island. There was a very beautiful island but still a very small island with limited resources limited capacity. So the fact that we engage them before the pandemic hit helped us a lot during the pandemic. So I'm very very happy we did it. We all know that during the pandemic the most vulnerable group has been affected much more than the rest and women and children are part of this group. And we really post pandemic we need more engagement that we had prior to the pandemic because we risk losing a lot of the advancements that our generation and the generation before us has achieved for women. I'm standing here because my mother was not inhibited by being a woman and wanting to achieve everything that she wished that she wished. And she did it because my grandmother also thought she wanted to be a professional. She wanted to to teach and she did it until she was 79 years old or something like that because women believed in themselves. They allowed their their daughters also to believe in themselves and and that is something that we are risking now in losing because women have lost more jobs than men here in Aruba worldwide women were the ones that stayed home more with the kids when there were no schools women preferred attending with a family instead of pursuing their careers that that is the effect of the pandemic. So we need to realize that we are now a step behind compared to pre covid and we need much more collaboration much more partnership and engagement from all the sectors on the island in order to to eliminate this this this rear that we now have and in order to step and bounce back much much stronger than we were before before the pandemic. Thank you. You know I'd love to ask you a very quick follow up just in a few words. I'm curious and we do need to get to other so really a few words. Did you get pushback or their naysayers saying why focus on women even pre covid why why focus on women or during covid. We have too many other important things to do. Why not set this aside for another time. Did you ever hear that kind of thing or not so much. Well not so much. I have to be very honest just a little bit but enough for to allow us to explain why we are focusing on women as as we are doing. We have a lot of respect and support for this this policy and the way forward. I think that we gained that through the engagement that we try to do before covid so not too much pushback just a little bit but enough in order to keep the balance. Yeah it probably helped that the stakeholders were stakeholders and involved so interesting yes I'd like to draw on this thread a little bit actually and sort of thinking about collaboration and stakeholders. Wendy in covid my understanding is that you found yourself working hand in hand with companies you may also have viewed as your competitors and I'd love to explore this a little bit. You know what are some of the ways that businesses and by extension perhaps politicians and other leaders might set aside differences and think long term about doing things that make the world better for everyone rather than just thinking short term short term gains. But it's a great point I mean it's certainly around our sustainability and our social impact agendas. We've got to think outside our four walls. It's critically important inside our four walls to deliver on our commitments but that has to be a part of our overall desire to stare down some of these pernicious challenges that society is facing. And if we get a jump on something if we have a program that works if we have an initiate initiative that that helps us deliver on those targets almost feel Judy bound to share that outside the four walls because gosh the exponential power of us all doing something that works starts to get traction in you know staring down some of these challenges. So you know we've talked very much that we just made a reduction in flight emissions commitment for example we've done all the math and long work behind getting to that flight emissions reduction. We should share that that jump start someone else into making the same commitment. Those may be our competitors in our sector and in our industry. That's OK. That's OK. I don't want to compete and win on something that stands in the way of societal benefit. So in the very same way we made a gender commitment will be gender equal by 2025. All the work we've done behind that all the initiatives we have behind that we are fully sharing openly because we think that that's the right thing to do. So I think in a phrase you have to know when to compete and when to collaborate. Yeah. I'm going to ask you an outrageous gender follow up question. Get ready. OK. Do you stealing yourself. Do you think women are more collaborative in this way than men. I think I it is an outrageous question. I don't think inspired men are less collaborative but I think uninspired leaders are less collaborative. I think the traditional prototype of what we considered a leader for decades was hard nosed hard nosed pointy elbow and and one at all costs. I think in a more empathetic leadership style. Now again we know when and we can be very sharp and pointy elbows in the moments that we need to be competitively but not when there's a greater good at risk. Right. We have to look at the greater good and know when that is something that we can contribute to. Yeah. Caroline I want to go back in history with you for a moment. You and I chatted a few minutes yesterday about the 2008 financial crisis. And you know we found that companies with greater gender parity at the leadership level had performed better. And here we are in a different crisis of arguably far greater magnitude. We have reams and reams of research showing that more diverse teams make better decisions. But in your mind has anything meaningfully changed. And I'd like to really focus on this with you. Is this going to be the moment of change in the balance of power on gender. Is COVID going to be that moment of change. You know I think it might be but it's not going to happen sort of Deus Ex Machina. We're going to have to do things to support it. I think the interesting thing about 2008 is all the studies said better balance board better approach to risk. Companies did better. It didn't really change anything. I think what we're seeing now despite the bad news that the prime minister said that women have left the workplace. Women had to do the caring. We've seen rise in domestic violence. We've seen a lot of bad outcomes of COVID. We've also seen some very positive trends. More women stayed in university women. More women are going now to further education. Women are beginning to be much more visible in what are called supply chains. I'll come back to that. And I think that what we're seeing is the potential now for women to to really come into their own in this new kind of what I call balanced work not work life balance but a better approach to balanced work. And what does that mean. I think it means let me take one very significant development which is the ESG movement the movement towards environmental social good governance. A lot of that is about transparency of supply chains. People consumers now want to be able to say I know the cradle to grave journey of what I wear what I invest in what energy I consume what vehicle I drive what battery I use. And it's women who are very often at the end of those supply chains women in agriculture women in an area I know well which is extractive industries artisanal miners women in manufacturing production as citizens as consumers demand to know more about the life cycle of what they buy the role of women and women in development to is going to become more visible. And I think if you begin to put these changes together you see something quite new we thought back in 2008 it was the gender change would happen in companies when the CEO got on board or we thought there was a daughter effect if a CEO has a daughter suddenly they're going to be much more pro gender parity. What we're seeing now we're still seeing I think that role at the top but we're beginning to see the demand at the bottom because the war for talent in the private sector is having to rely more and more on women because it's the women who are graduating it's the women who have the skills. So if you have that pincer pressure change at the top pressure on staffing and war for talent at the bottom I think it could be. Yes I think it could be a powerful moment but but we can't just sit back and say it's going to happen because as the prime minister said what COVID has done is upended all the norms. We need to go to better norms. There are a whole lot of people who would like to take us back to 1950s norms and that is where we do not want to go. Right. Let's let's I'm going to take this back to the prime minister because you have been upending a few norms here. During COVID you established an economic recovery plan with a steering committee that is 75 percent women. That's very high and of course your usual multi stakeholder approach. I wonder if just in a few words because we're getting quite close to the end of our panel. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit how this works in practice and and whether there any learnings that other countries might draw from this or not necessarily even other other governments or even companies or who else might learn from this approach. You know we had no choice. Aruba was hit by the pandemic at that point in time. Everybody knew that we could not only continue depending on tourism and that we had to look at other economic pillars. So we brought people together and I take you now back to one and a half years ago in March it hit in Aruba. Everybody had to stay home. There was not a lot to do and we were looking for volunteers because we also have financial issues. So we were looking for volunteers and one hundred and twenty five volunteers. They volunteer themselves. They wanted to think they wanted to be part of the think tank brainstorming come up with ideas and it automatically happened. It so happened that 75 percent were women. It was not something that we were looking for. I was not you know asking for for women to sign up. It was just voluntarily done. And the the broad consciousness awareness that Aruba could not continue with business as usual that that was not an option. That is what brought us together. We have a strong love for this island. Everybody that lives here just loves it. The ones that visits us love it as well. And I think that that has brought us so close together that we could work on this this master plan. We developed a master plan to to it's called repositioning our sales and within this master plan we try to build a stronger a more resilient economy for a more resilient country taken into considerations all aspects of our limited capacity on the island. It you know things sometimes things happen easily. Other times things take more time or are more difficult. Well this happened quite easily. And I think that that has to do with leadership before the pandemic with the commitment of the people of Aruba towards Aruba before the pandemic that has helped us a lot to be very honest. I think that that is what helped us very much and you know that 75 percent being females in this in this committee. It did not bother anyone. Nobody criticized us because of that. Or there was there was no lack of acceptance for the plans and the and the proposals because we were women. I think that the Arubians are now accustomed to female leadership. Well I like that. I can't argue with that. I'm going to ask one final question of Wendy and then I'm going to do a tiny quick wrap up question because we have almost no time. Wendy I want to talk with you really quickly about the responsibility of the media in terms of portraying models of women and men to women and men. Do you think the media broadly could do a better job of portraying gender equality? Well yes Francesca I do and not only do I but consumers do also. And so consumers we've run some research with see her in the United States just as a proxy. Consumers believe that media and brands have a deep responsibility to portray women and gender equality in a way that is leading and in keeping with our ambitions. At the same time consumers don't see brands and don't see media doing enough around that. And so these are this is a strong majority in these cases. These are numbers upwards of 60 70 percent of consumers saying this. So we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of responsibility but we you know we also have a lot of power and opportunity here. So it's it's a call to arms for my industry and certainly for the marketers around the world to consider how we use our brand narrative and then for media and your industry Francesca to do the same. Yeah. No it's incredible how much power there is on the owners actually on the consumer. We've had a lot of threads on that in this even in this short conversation. It's really interesting. And I think the sort of the power balance is changing. All right. Are you ready for your final question everybody. This is lightning round. OK. At the beginning we asked our audience to name one or two leadership qualities that have stood out to you as leaders address the crisis caused by the pandemic. I would like you to mention one or two maybe good so we can end on an up note. I'd like to begin with you Prime Minister if you will one or two adjectives that stood out for you around leaders during the pandemic. Of course empathy and decisiveness but a lot of patience. I think that that is something very important. OK. Wendy Empathy is already taken. What's next. You can take it again now. Transparency resilience and hope. OK. And Caroline what stood out collaboration collaboration and long term thinking. Fantastic. Well on that really really positive note. It's nice to actually do something on a positive note in these very very difficult days of covid. I'd like to end this wonderful panel and thank you all for your time. It was fantastic to hear your stories and your experiences and have this excellent conversation. Thank you very very much.