'She-change' kicks off debate

By mandating that one in every five delegates must be female, the World Economic Forum (WEF) bosses may have given many attendees one more reason to look forward to the event. But the move has already been dubbed not-so-fair by a host of invitees and commentators.

WEF says the logic of asking the conference’s 100 corporate sponsors (who donate more than $500,000 a year to the organisation) or strategic partners to send at least one woman per team was simple: It is WEF’s way of promoting gender parity and ensuring that more potential women leaders benefit from the high-level schmoozing.

The move is expected to double the number of women invitees from sponsor companies. Last year, 17 per cent of the delegates were women and that’s up from 9 per cent a decade ago, when organisers began to seek out more women.

Since 2006, WEF has been producing an annual Global Gender Gap report to monitor the gender gap in more than 130 economies. The report said many leading companies were failing to capitalise on the talents of women in the workforce and also cited research which showed that closing the male-female employment gap could boost US economic growth by as much as 9 per cent and the euro zone by up to 13 per cent.

The organisation has also set a target that half of its Young Global Leaders programme should be women by 2014.

Some say the latest move, though symbolic, is the right thing to do considering that female progress in the workplace has moved at a glacial pace. It is true that of the world’s 500 biggest companies, fewer than 3 per cent have female chief executives, and fewer than 20 countries are led by women.

But the move has had its share of backlash, too. Critics point out that WEF itself, set up in 1971, should have first set its own house in order before mandating something like this. The Geneva-based organisation has no women on its managing board and just two of its 12 senior directors are females.

Also, of the dozens of panel discussions on the programme at Davos, only one concerns the gender debate, while Ernst & Young is the only firm to welcome the new arrivals with an evening cocktail celebrating women's empowerment.

Others say it is a reality that law can hardly change men’s minds, and any mandate like this is not going to have any meaningful impact. “What can WEF do if the corporate sponsors simply ignore the diktat? WEF can hardly take any action against companies which keep the show going,” says an Indian delegate.

He cites the example of Norway which famously embraced quotas in 2002 and began requiring that 40 per cent of all board members at state-owned and publicly listed companies must be women. And companies, which were slow in implementing this, were delisted.

It’s been a major success, so much so that it prompted Spain to introduce a similar set of recommendations in 2008, and both France and Britain are discussing following suit.