The ‘Seven’ present at the Women’s Forum, coming from different continents, shared their experiences and, through their motivational talk, they forced people to think: have we really developed or are we developing? When almost 50% of the world can’t be represented how can we even think that some of the nations are developed? Maybe the parameters or notion of development need to be changed.

Technology is genderfree and has affected women’s life in a profound manner. It helped the ‘Seven’ to come on a platform and also helped them connect to more of their kind and help them.

            Meeting Sandrine Devillard was an amazing opportunity to learn more about McKinsey’s global partnership with the Women’s Forum which she leads as Head of the McKinsey Women EMEA initiative and member of the Forum’s Advisory Board. Published for the 2007 Forum, Women Matter: Gender diversity, a corporate performance driver was followed up in 2008 with a new study, Women Matter 2 which offers new insights on “leadership behaviours that will be critical to address the up coming challenges” and women’s “edge in spreading those leadership practices within organizations”.

Question: Can you tell us a bit more about Women Matter 2 that you discussed at Thursday’s session on “Corporate performance: looking for the “women advantage”?

Sandrine Devillard: The idea was to follow up on Women Matter and truly understand the characteristics of a woman’s leadership. 9,000 leaders from around the western world, 6,000 men and 3,000 women, were assessed through a survey (a combination of self-assessments and third-party evaluations) in order to identify the frequency with which they adopted the 9 leadership behaviours that can reinforce a company’s organizational performance. Amongst the nine leadership behaviours, women showed a much higher frequency in 3 behaviours (People development, Expectations and rewards, Role model) and a slightly higher frequency in 2 others (Inspiration and Participative decision making), while men applied more Individualistic decision-making and Control and corrective action behaviours. Both men and women equally applied Intellectual stimulation and Efficient communication behaviours. This analysis enabled us to identify more precisely the contributions that men and women are more likely to make on the dimensions of organizational performance. Our conclusion is that women strongly contribute to reinforcing a company’s performance by strengthening five organizational dimensions, three in particular.

Q: One of the participants at the session felt you were trying to oppose women and men instead of proposing diversity. Is this the case?

SD: Absolutely not. The idea is not at all to say that women are superior to men as leaders! It is a scientific study that shows, with numbers to prove it, that although leaders all apply the nine positive leadership behaviours, men and women do so with a different frequency according to the behaviours, and therefore make specific contributions to organizational performance. This advocates not only for greater diversity, and therefore for more women in top management positions, but also for developing diversity of leadership behaviours in top management.

Q: Were you satisfied by the way the participants at the Forum reacted to Woman Matter 2?

SD: I was very pleased with the positive feedback I got from everyone. Some even told me that it was the most interesting thing they had learned about at Deauville, just after the financial crisis! People acknowledge that numbers and facts showing the strength of mixed teams are critical to make change happen. What is more, the second part of the study puts these numbers in the light of global long-term trends shaping the corporate world. 1,000 managers were asked to choose, among 14 of these trends, which ones they felt would most impact there company in the next 5 years and which of the previous behaviours would be most effective in preparing for these future challenges. Women apply  3 of these 4 behaviours more. What is striking is that when asked if they were prepared for these challenges, most managers felt they were not.

Again, I wish to remind that this does not show that women should occupy all leadership positions. Since women apply most of the leadership behaviours that are critical to address future challenges more often than men, we should therefore increase gender diversity in the top management but also diversity in leadership, in order to make the most of men and women’s complementary leadership patterns.

Q: Why do you think the question is addressed scientifically for the first time in Women Matter 2?

SD: Because everybody knows that 55 percent of graduates (undergraduate) are women, everyone thought that without doing anything, and letting the natural course of things go its way, things would resolve by themselves. But our projections show that if we don’t change our approach, the increase in the percentage of female leaders will rise from 8 to only 11 percent by 2035!  We need a drastic change because there is no silver bullet.

McKinsey has a long term plan to raise diversity in management. This includes changing the way we recruit, showing more flexibility, changing mindsets…There are 50 subdivisions of these measures that are applied to our offices worldwide. These programmes will take 6 to 8 years to show results. And, if the effort is abandoned at anytime, the trend reverses quickly back to what it is now. So it is a long term investment and I believe the programs in most companies are looking for faster results. That is why they haven’t always been effective. And this is what they are starting to realise with this study. I have spent 30 percent of my time, in the last year, presenting this study to companies and Human Resources, and even had to refuse some presentations!

Q: As a final question, what advice can you give to us, women and students, at the wake of our careers?

SD: I can think of 5 things. First, and most importantly, you should have a compass. You should know what you want, decide on your values and keep to them throughout your career. Especially in uncertain times like now! You must do this work of introspection and navigate accordingly. You should also find your leadership and have the courage to apply it, with people at every level. You should not be the one holding yourself back! Also, don’t opt out! A lot of women leave the business world after their first child. But it is usually also when your career is accelerating and you are offered leadership jobs. It is very hard to come back, so you must find ways to do both! Finally, I have found that women lack self-confidence, to the point where they can be the only ones focusing on the 20 percent of competences they lack to accept a promotion rather than on the 80 percent they have. As was shown in the first Women Matter, women have a heightened sense of the obstacles ahead. Some loose faith in their ability to overcome these hurdles. But it is always better to loose a fight than to not fight at all!

Salwa from Oman is a of the Women in Technology program, which is a joint project funded by the U.S. Department of State, Institute of International Education and Microsoft and which touches many nations of the Middle East and North Africa.  This project has already changed the lives of 4500 women and aims to touch more than 10,000 before 2010.  At the session, we were introduced to Abeer, a graduate of the program who is now majoring in Fisheries Economics at University and demonstrates how the program gave her access to further education, access to government (which in Oman is now all online) and the prospects of a better future. 

Mara Jacobsone of LIKAT in Latvia demonstrated how her industriousness, passion for IT and training individuals in IT and partnerships with Microsoft, government and other public/private foundations has enabled her to train more that 20,000 Latvian people (primarily those above the age of 35 who are not served by the modern school programs on IT) on the basic use of computers.  Mara has over 400 teachers trained in Latvia and sends mobile classrooms around the country to further the mission of her NGO. 

Lize de Ciercq, originally from Belgium and now based in Spain, takes the coordination of It programs for underserved Spanish and European citizens to a new level with her organization, Fundacion Esplai.  This foundation has now placed computer centers in over 60 NGOs in Spain and has also united hundreds of similar NGOs around Europe.  Lize and her colleagues plan to form an organization that will provide voice and a united lobbying front for this cause in Europe and around the world.   

Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential program (headed up by people like Sylvie Laffarge and Thaima Samman of Microsoft EMEA) supports these NGOs efforts in many ways – by providing training, supplies, support and funding.  In listening to the stories of these women and their organizations, I realized – something so simple as educating a person to use a personal computer can take society so far.  When we talk about solving the world’s problems, educating 31-year olds (not to mention 91-year olds) on the use of technology may at first seem a bit trivial.  However, when we think about how far technology can take us in the 21^st Century – to communication, better forms of education, job qualifications, leisure activities and much, much more – it seems almost criminal not to have prioritized this activity in the first place.  I have one comment- you go girls!  And way to go Microsoft for supporting this kind of program.

According to Clyde Prestowitz of The Economic Strategy Institute, the world GDP is 55 trillion USD; the debt liability is estimated at 65 trillion USD, and the large guarantees by U .S. European and other economies (though they amount to thousands in subsidies per tax payer) only amount to about 3-4 trillion USD.  The world is headed for a recession.  The U.S . economy will slow, the illiquidity and high cost of capital will continue, export economies will need to refocus on generating internal growth … and Americans will be forced to save.  We’re not very good at that. 

As the markets drop in value and the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism is declared dead on arrival (at least by many of the experts at the forum), the first inclination should be to mourn the lost value of my MBA education.  Didn’t we learn, after all, that markets function best when they are minimally regulated, private and left to the forces of free competition?  Wasn’t the basic premise of many a finance concept/model that markets are efficient?  Could we be finding today that some of this is inherently wrong?  Or that it is right but that the high highs of a free market are not sufficient enough to justify the low lows of one?

The battle cry now seems to be for government intervention; slow growth; low consumption; and a whole lot of regulation.  But then, experts caution, regulation often comes too late and too strong.  Now that the banks are failing, derivatives markets will certainly almost be regulated out of existence, but what type of oversight will regulate the next crisis of the future?  And in a world of scarcity what type of slow, sustainable growth can keep developing economies developing, pull the developed economies out of their major debt and let us continue on the path towards establishing a more prosperous world?  I wonder if the solution is not to reverse the pendulum to the opposite side of the spectrum but instead to find a more pragmatic approach in between.

Sandra was 7 years old when she moved to the suburb “El Paraiso”, located in a shantytown in Ciudad Bolivar (South of Bogota, Colombia).  When one of her old neighbours died of hunger there, she decided to fight loneliness and poverty to make life better for her neighbours and started to conduct small projects locally by helping people who were starving or children having problems at school . At 12, she managed to get funds in order to build a house for old people. When she was 13, she created the Foundation “Social Oasis”.  Her fight has never stopped. She really improved the life in her suburb by implementing new values like peace, truth, respect, by fighting against violence and by educating people, and is still doing so. 

Today, Sandra is 23 years old, she’s studying law at the University of Bogota and wants to become a lawyer. She is the President of “Social Oasis” and has the support of a few partners like Credit Mutuel which helped her finance some projects such as the Organic Farmhouse.

Although she is very famous for her commitment to this cause, she still remains such a modest, friendly, unaffected, hopeful and obviously, deeply involved young woman.

In 2002, Sandra Liliana Sanchez won the “Prix de l’Humanitaire International” (Madame Figaro).

In 2003, she wrote a book about her story edited by Michel Lafon, “Les oubliés de Bogota”.

In 2008, a documentary about her life “Le Paradis de Sandra” was made by Marianne Roussy.

“Chacun d’entre nous peut être une lumière pour quelqu’un et tous ensemble nous pouvons former un ciel constellé d’étoiles” (Sandra-Liliana Sanchez).

www.socialoasis.org

What do media bring to the consumer?

Do media bring what the consumer is asking for? as said Xavier Couture. Do “the consumers have the power now”? Or do media bring the user what they are “supposed to”, like objective information and knowledges about what happens in the world?

Many interesting issues and concerns can be underlined regarding this topic.

First, Xavier Couture observed a lack of personnalisation in the media, which leads to a sort of uniformisation. According to him, “it is easy to go to the same direction”. However, about the difficulty to know where to find the “real truth” and the emergence of blogs, Christine Ockrent said that “blogs are not media”.   She added that bloggers are people who write “what they think, what they know, or what they think they know”.

Relating to the more general issue of good quality information, it seems that nowadays, less and less people know valid information, which raises the question of the content the mainstream media bring to users. Anita Pratap pointed out that “the content of information is diluted”, that local issues are mainly stressed out in the detriment of global information and consequently people’s knowledge might suffer from this restreined information.

Regarding the role media play in the financial crisis, it appears that media didn’t foresee the current situation and failed as a consequence to their role of informing people. However, nobody can ignore that media have to go fast and that when facing complex topics, they have to simplify in order to make the information more accessible. Being too complex and not enough entertaining wouldn’t serve the interest of media. As Xavier Couture said, ”media have to be close to the consumers” and reply to their demands.

At the end of the day, it’s really difficult for media companies to find an equilibrium between going fast, replying to the demands of the largest part of users and at the same time covering all the conflicts, bringing all the relevant information (the good one and the right one), giving users knowledge and the taste for acquiring some more… Obviously, the media “have to be responsible” and “publish correctly the information” as said Xavier Couture even if this role is not easy to assume. However, they still remain the best way to “bring to a large number of people, knowledge and ethics”.

Finally, ”thanks to the media, we know more about the world today”, as concluded Christine Ockrent.

A lot of interesting points came up regarding why women have such a low representation in this field and whether increasing the participation would actually be beneficial. All the panelists (mostly related to the field of science) concurred on the idea that women can bring about a definite positive change to science and technology.

Nadine Leclair and Frances O’Sullivan - 2 of the panelists, brought this out by explaining how women are more inclined to have a better customer orientation in the use of new technology, how they can they can better integrate the team and how they focus on accomplishing tasks and bringing a project to fruit.

Claudie Haignerè from the European Space Agency was of the view that we have to go beyond visibility, it is equally important to ensure that women establish their credibility in the field too. This can be done by being more confident of one’s skills and abilities and not being self-deprecating.

Another panelist- Barbara Dalibard, said the right coaching is very important. Coaching not just for the relevant skills and knowledge , but also to change the mindsets and remove young girls’ aversion to science and research; and to ensure equal opportunities across genders, regions, and ages of students. Another opportunity arising out of a crisis she saw, was the movement of young students and professionals from the financial world to the area of science and technology.

A “leaky pipeline” was how Beatrice Dautresme viewed scientific education for women in today’s world. There are a lot of young girls entering the field but they gradually start dropping out and very few make it to the end.

Turning Cyberellas from Cinderellas.. the title of this blog, was the very interesting statement made by  Viviane Reding- the Commissioner for Information Society and Media from the European Commision. She was all for promoting the exposure to the field for women, not only at the university level but right from the schooling of kids; opening their eyes to the joy of creating things, focusing on the fun aspect and removing the fear of math and science, are instrumental in harboring the interest of young minds in the direction.

The best part of the session however was that some very objective solutions to all the problems discussed came out of the discussion, summed up beautifully by Maria Livanos Cattaui (the moderator) in the end.
I put down the major ones below:

• Creating a propaganda for science and technology among students right from the start and especially female students
• Ensuring more visibility for women who have made it big in the field and highlighting their achievements
• Creating awareness about research, engineering, science etc. as separate fields of study and the possibility of having good careers after education in these fields

By Geetu Sharma and Kanika Khurana

The reasons were very well brought out at the forum and to me it also reflects women’s under-representation in almost every profession. Nell Merlino, Co-founder and CEO of Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, USA, commented that unfortunately women tend to potray their weaknesses while men tend to boast their strengths. Most often, women need training on raising their level of confidence to that of their skills.  Fundamentally, women lack confidence and tend to underplay themselves.

Clearly, this is a structural behavioural difference in men and women and stems from our cultures, values and attitudes in society developed over hundreds of years. But this trend is now changing and I think the success of Women’s Forum 2008 symbolizes that change……

In this context of rapid innovation, it is interesting to take a closer look at how women’s lives have been affected by the multiplication of communication technologies. Does this differ from country to country? Are there different attitudes towards these tools depending on age or education?

In order to present our results, we decided to look at three different aspects of women’s lives: their personal life, their professional lives and the balance between the two.

Our survey is a combination of statistical country studies and personal testimonies from different women (MBA students, young professionals and leading business women).

In general, women are more and more technology friendly. The Internet, mobile phones and smartphones are “essential tools in everyone’s private lives” (Belgium) and “are not a privilege of the affluent but are largely accessible to the general public” (Moldova). They are contributing to the emancipation of women around the world. Because Internet communication is “gender-blind”, “it encourages women to speak out and participate to discussions about social topics in public forums and to start playing a more important role in social change” (China). In France, “communication tools help women promote their rights; they enable them to have better, faster access to information, and to create communities of shared experiences”.

From our interviewees, we also understood new communication tools have changed women’s management of their personal relationships. “They improve my relationship with my husband who has often complained about my frequent business trips” says Xiaohui Zhang (China). When asked what use they make of communication tools, all our interviewees mentioned keeping in touch with family and friends.

It must be noted however, that although the Internet is used mainly by young and high-earning women living in urban areas in developing countries (India, China), in contrast with western countries (8 out of 10 women in France embrace the use of new technologies and women have outpaced men as the majority internet users in the USA), mobile phones, cheaper and easier to access, have been adopted widely, crossing generational and gender barriers. One of the challenges for the future for all our countries is to give access to all women to the Internet, a gateway to personal development and to the rest of the world.

In their professional lives, women  feel that they are equal users of modern communication tools to men. “I don’t think professionally there is a difference” says Shoma Narayanan (India). They use them to keep up with their clients and colleagues, to search for information… Because they have accelerated the work pace, and have increased work efficiency, women perceive these communication tools to have had a positive impact on their companies. “They are definitely a time saver, says Christine Brouillet (France), the decision making process is so much quicker, especially for companies dealing with other countries”, she adds. However, stress and growing pressure to be available anytime appears to be the trade-off for this efficiency. “I am unbelievably swamped. I feel like I’m letting people down when I can’t get back to them”, says Kristin Groos (USA).

The work life balance of women also suffers from this contradiction. Although women think new communication tools have facilitated juggling between their work and their family, they also find it difficult to “unplug”. Smartphones, Blackberrys, especially, have led to an invasion of their private and personal space. “It has provided flexibility in my work/life balance, says Theresa Drew (USA), but technology eats into my private space. If I am at my son’s soccer game, I find myself regularly checking my Blackberry”. The problem seems even worst for women with working husbands.