 Well, in New Zealand we actually have a real history of progressiveness around gender diversity. But the unfortunate thing is we're now stagnating, so year on year the statistics aren't changing much in terms of women at high levels of leadership and participation in the economy. For example, only 5% of CEOs and chairpersons in New Zealand are women. So a greater balance of gender diversity and any kind of diversity actually at the senior leadership levels of organisations has been proven to drive greater levels of innovation within a company and creativity, greater levels of motivation within the company, and really importantly, stronger financial performance. And more broadly in the world, greater participation of women in their communities in their countries, so in instances where women are more equal in their countries in their communities, you see greater democracies at play. You see less instability, less conflict, and really healthier functioning environments. So what all that leads to from my point of view is a bit of a revelation about this topic. So beyond it being unfair and beyond the debate around equality for women in the world, which is obviously still paramount, is now you start to see that when women participate more fully in leadership roles, whether it be in their communities or their countries or businesses, you see greater success. And I should say now what I'm not saying is that women should dominate in those roles and only women should lead because the studies really back up the fact that greater balance of diversity of any kind in leadership roles is what where the magic comes in in terms of success for companies. They all go through things like high levels of innovation and creativity are driven through companies, much stronger financial performance through companies, greater team psychological safety, willingness to experiment, team retention, and there are many, many different ways this has been proven over and over again. I guess one of the most interesting things that I found when I was researching this topic was that analysts and shareholder agencies now are specifically looking for the gender index within a company. So they're looking at the number of women on the board. They're looking at the number of women participating at the leadership team level because that's so proven to predict the financial success of the company. What we're really talking about though is not women for women's sake and not women to fill quotas and not women to make sure that it looks right on the balance sheet. What we're talking about is qualified women who are clearly right for the job being put in place so that there can be greater diversity of perspectives brought to the table. There are many studies that have been done over the years that look at the issue of bias in the workplace and in fact so many that people now talk about the admiration of the problem. So many of the studies stop short at just saying there's bias and there's a problem for women because bias exists. What I think is a better way to think about it is social scientists say bias really exists as young as the age of three. When we're all little we understand and pick up from our families who's the in-group and who's the out-group and it begins. So anybody that says that they don't have bias is probably not telling the truth because we all do. How this manifests itself for women in the workplace is that there are in-built gender stereotypes that a lot of people have about women and when they're being interviewed for jobs or when they're going through performance evaluations people use bias which is really a cognitive shortcut a way to not to have to make so many decisions how do I quickly make a snap decision about this and they default to things you hear it talked about all the time in the literature like the motherhood penalty. The mother and they start to think through but is she a good mother should be good to her children or on the flip side is she committed to the job is she really going to be able to deliver now that she's had children and so those kind of biases come into play. There's the likeability penalty when women lead it's uncomfortable for many people because they were brought up to think that women should be behaving in a certain way and not necessarily leading in the way that women lead and so it's those biases that tend to trip up women along the way but there are many companies that are doing a lot of work in this area New Zealand Defence Force, New Zealand Police a lot of the banks in New Zealand are looking at bias whether it be conscious or unconscious and trying to really work through that and make sure that that's not an inhibitor for women in the workforce I think the most critical thing is that it's led by the top so that the CEO of the organisation is informed educates people and is very clear about the business case of a diversity within that organisation I think the error is to try and put that to the HR department and say it's an HR responsibility so I think first of all CEO led direction on that I then think a link to the business strategy is really important so a lot of the companies that I've been talking to look at this as a competitive advantage and a potential competitive advantage so yes it's about equality, yes it's about fairness and inclusion but actually if they get it right you can see the effects that it'll have on the business I think first and foremost I would give advice to young women in business to really understand themselves and understand what's unique about themselves so in the past I think we all used to look to establish set models and ways of leading and compare ourselves to those and say could I do that and if I can't see myself in that situation then I can't be that person or I can't have that job whereas I think what's happening now is there are much more progressive role models for leadership out in the world and I think understanding, you know it sounds funny but understanding your unique power, your superpower and building around that and becoming your own leader is really important advice I also think taking on big challenges is important I think you know there's a famous statistic that men jump in when they're 60% ready and women wait until they're 100% ready and I think the men are right to do that and I think you know a lot more young women that I see I talk to and say jump in take that challenge you can actually do it now and then there's two more things that I would advocate for young women now resilience is as important as it ever was I think Hillary Clinton describes it as you know taking criticism seriously you might learn something but never taking it personally because it will get personal and I think delineating between the two is really important and listening and making sure that you're resilient enough to listen to that criticism and process it in the right way and the other thing we spend a lot of time talking about is confidence and this is a real problem for a lot of young women coming up in any industry because they fundamentally can be doing an incredible job they can be nailing all aspects of the job but you see it time and time again on performance reviews where people end up saying I just wish she'd be a bit more confident and the problem with that is that can actually sound like another criticism for them I think it's if you do these things that I'm talking about a finding who you really are and what you could uniquely bring to the table rather than comparing yourself to others and working really hard and being resilient then I think you can overcome some of those confidence issues that I'm talking about