 The G20 Central Bank Governors and Finance Ministers met in Cairns this week to discuss how to reach 2% growth targets by 2020, but my question is what if the answer to increased sustainable and balanced growth in the global economy was women and investing in women and investing in gender equality measures. So I've been joined today by 68 world experts on gender equality and gender and economic governance and we have had the most fascinating discussion. We had Minister Cash this morning explaining the employment minister's meeting outcome of 25% of the global gender gap being closed by 2025 and we've also got members of the business community and academia. So it's been a fascinating day and I'm confident we're going to come up with one page of recommendations to give to the Sherpas that's going to help them meet their growth targets but also help us to protect women's rights at the same time. So gender equality doesn't necessarily mean that all women should work or no women should stay home and look after children nor elderly parents. What gender equality at work means is that women should have the same range of choices as men. It doesn't mean that they make the same choices as men but they have an equal range of choices in terms of the types of jobs, the career paths and opportunities to balance work and other pursuits. And the G20 agenda was to deal with the problems of the financial crisis that started in 2008 and I think if you want to look at the most vulnerable you have to look at women and children. So looking at the vulnerable groups that were devastated by the financial crisis you have to deal with women because women are the faces of poverty and problems that came from the financial crisis so I think that's a very important group. Secondly, the G20 agenda wants to now include economic resilience, economic growth so that countries do not fall back into this crisis mode and even if they are faced with crisis they're resilient enough to withstand it and so for both reasons women are very important and if we don't take care of women in the economic resilience and growth sector we won't have the kind of resilient growth that we want to see in the G20. I think the G20 is important not only because economically it's a critical group of economies in the world but also because of the diversity that we have among the best and indeed the worst performance in terms of gender equality and I think showing both the importance of concrete political commitment and political leadership for example through the 25 by 25 target which has been discussed among the employment and labour ministers showing how that can be done indicators to ensure accountability and monitoring is very important I think to show the world that progress is indeed possible. If you look at Korea's history we've seen a tremendous economic development and we have seen large numbers of women come into the labour force and be educated but they're not empowered so women's pay is only a 64 cents to a man's dollar women's participation in the national assembly is less than 15 percent so unless you have concerted efforts for education employment and empowerment together women will really cannot be active player in the country's economic development with the increasing interest in gender equality around the world there's a whole range of experimentation innovation underway but I think a good example in a challenging context like Liberia which is a post-conflict very poor country is a program targeted at adolescent girls and seeking to bridge the transition from school to work by providing skills not only traditional vocational skills like for example craft skills but also metalwork welding and combining that with life skills so life skills in terms of reproductive and sexual health in terms of building up confidence in making life decisions and that's been shown to have important impacts not only in terms of income which is clearly very important particularly for poor girls and women but also in terms of expanding their horizons increasing their confidence and their aspirations. I come here as a practitioner I'm now Queen's Council so I have achieved so I'm a little example to people out there that you can do it I just want it to be easier for people in the future than easier than it was for me and I'm very grateful to my mentors I think the agenda across the world in any sort of business political economic financial legal sector is dominated by men and really what will achieve change is to put women in those places at the top to make sure that we are part of the conversation at top level I'm not suggesting all the women move in and all the men move out and if you like a lovely happy family is a mum and dad and all the children coming along the way if you can think of it in that way the table needs to have mum dad and all the young people having a conversation about where they're going and what they're doing it's a bit of an easy way of looking at it but that's really what global governance is about is having is governing everybody so everybody ought to be part of the conversation in my opinion