On Jan. 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participated in a panel discussion titled Progress Towards Parity. For the record, here’s a transcript of that conversation.
PARTICIPANTS
Lyse Doucet, Journalist, BBC;
Melinda Gates, Co-Chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation;
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer and Board Member, Facebook;
Jonas Prising, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Manpower USA;
The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister;
Zhang Xin, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, SOHO China.
Lyse Doucet: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Bienvenue. Merci d’être venus. My name is Lyse Doucet, and I’m a journalist with the BBC. What’s the job of a journalist? To bring you the news. So let me first bring you the good news. The good news is that you’re all here, and that sends us a message that gender parity, closing the gap matters to all of you, to all of us. But you’re saying, “Hey, journalists bring us bad news,” and sadly, I have bad news. And why? Well, to quote a recently-elected rather famous Canadian politician, “Because it’s 2015,” or because it’s 2016. Why are we here?
WEF has just published its global gender gap report, and it’s called The Tenth Anniversary. It’s like being in a bad relationship, and you really don’t want to celebrate your tenth anniversary. Why are we still here in 2016 discussing gender parity and doing it at a time when WEF is telling us that we are embarking on the fourth Industrial Revolution? Women are still struggling to keep up with the first three revolutions, and this is a revolution that we are being told is going to transform the workplace, transform technology, make old jobs obsolete and create new ones. And it’s going to get even tougher for women. But does it have to be?
How can we be sure that in this revolution women and men are going to benefit, and not just as people who work in the workplace, but men and women who are also mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, that we have a more humane way of working so that everyone can be – play a role in society? It’s an important conversation, and we have a very important panel.
Beginning with my Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister. Welcome. Bienvenue. We have Sheryl Sandberg who of course is the – on the Board of Facebook and also author of the very successful Lean In — and some of you may be part of the Lean In groups — and she’s also a Young Global Leader. Melinda Gates is also with us. Her official title is the Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Welcome to you. Jonas Prising is the Chairman and the Chief Executive Officer of Manpower USA. Ladies and gentlemen, he was only allowed to be on this panel with one condition: when he comes back to WEF next year, he’s going to be the CEO of Human Power. He’s going to change the name. You heard it here first. And last, but not least, Zhang Xin who’s the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of SOHO China. And that is not like a seedy district in London or a fashionable club. It is the prime real estate company operating in China. And you know what that means.
Okay, let us say where we are now and where – how we can get out from where we are. Melinda Gates, you recently spoke about another report that was done called the No Ceiling, Full Participation Report where they said that men were in the workplace, 50 – no, 82 percent, women 55 percent. Closing the gap, if I quote you correctly, “We’re not even close.” Why?
Melinda Gates: Well, I think – I think we need to look at these issues really across the broad spectrum — high, middle, low income countries. And to me, one of the most encouraging things is that the Sustainable Development Goals that were set by 193 United Nations countries here last fall, it was the first time that when the goals got reset, women and girls were at the absolute centre of the agenda.
And the reason for that is that we’ve all come to recognize — prime ministers, presidents, heads of companies — that if you want the world – if we want this increase in equity across the world, if you want the increase of your GDP, you’ve got to get the other half working and participating in the economy. And that means doing things like making sure that women participate in health, that they and their children have health around the world. That’s the precursor; you start there.
Then they have to have decision-making. That often means you’ve got to be able to go to school and get educated, so you can then have economic opportunity and participate in society. We know that when society gets that virtuous cycle going for men and for women, everybody’s lifted up.
And so we have a blueprint now as a world of where we want to go. We have a set of goals, but to me, goals are only wishes unless you have a plan. And so I think we need to have a really good repository of data, specific data to say this is where we are with women and girls around the world, just like we do in health. It’s why we’ve made such huge progress around the world the last 10 years in health. And then we need to take specific actions as a community. And that’s why I’m excited about panels like these because we get to discuss all the issues in all of those countries.
Lyse Doucet: Sheryl Sandberg, what’s holding women back in the workplace, top five?
Sheryl Sandberg: You don’t even need five. You need just a few. You need – one is our expectations for what is appropriate for women. What’s so interesting is that culturally we’re so different around the world, but there is a really deep cultural similarities to our gender stereotypes, which is that men are expected to lead, to provide, to be decision-makers, and women are expected to nurture.
Lyse Doucet: Still?
Sheryl Sandberg: Still. And that’s true in the office where we actually expect women to do more office housework. We expect more women to do more of the communal tasks in the office, and we don’t reward them. And when men do favours for other people, they get broadly rewarded in the workplace. And then at home, we expect, and women continue to do, the great majority of house care – housework and child care even when they work full-time. So having expectations that women will be results-focussed, contribute, providers, and men will be nurturers would change a lot.
The next is that along with this, we have expectations for women, and it goes with this, that they won’t lead. I’m going to do what I love to do. Men only – only men, please, raise your hand if you’ve been told you’re too aggressive at work. Only men. There’s always one or two. Don’t be shy. Women, raise your hand if you’ve been told somewhere in your career you’re too aggressive at work.
Lyse Doucet: Ooh.
Sheryl Sandberg: Okay, ready? Men, raise your hand if anyone’s ever said to you, “Should you be working?”
Lyse Doucet: Ooh.
Sheryl Sandberg: Anyone ever said that to you, “Should you be working?” No. No, okay. Women, raise your hand if anyone’s ever said to you, “Should you be working?” That’s the issue. And those expectations just continue.
(World Economic Forum)
Lyse Doucet: Okay. Well, let’s have a show of hands. Should women be working?
Melinda Gates: Absolutely.
Lyse Doucet: There you go.
Sheryl Sandberg: Well, they are working. They have to work.
Lyse Doucet: They always invite the same kind of people to Davos. I don’t know why they don’t bring in a bit more diversity. Jonas Prising, are women still making the coffee and tea over at Manpower, doing those nurturing roles in the office?
Jonas Prising: No, no, they’re not. They’re actively and extensively participating at all levels. And thanks for leading by this paradox which was gleefully pointed out by my fellow panellists in our room earlier of the CEO of Manpower Group coming here and talking about gender parity. But I can assure you I’m not here to allay my guilt at our name, which is a brand in 80 countries for 70 years, so therefore it might be difficult to change it, but rather here because from our perspective, as we look at the millions of job seekers that come to us that we deploy across the world, we can clearly see that in many, many economies, first of all, women are more educated than men in terms of absolute education levels, but they’re not participating at the same – same levels as women are in organizations. And at the same time, employers are complaining about skill shortages.
And as part of the fourth Industrial Revolution, what’s going to happen is that employers and countries are going to need more people with the right skills, not less. So to have women not participate when they do have the skills is clearly a sub-optimization of a massive scale. So there’s that aspect of the need for women to participate to make sure that we can drive great growth.
And also of course there is – there is a very important part around the decision-making that happens at Manpower Group. We fundamentally believe we’ll make better business decision if we have diverse – diversity in thinking and diversity of all kinds, and that requires participation at all levels and of course also an equal gender participation. That’s just going to be a better business for us.
Lyse Doucet: And you’ve brought in a new expression, which is a much better one than used to be called quotas or tokenism. You call it conscious inclusion for those who lead in the workplace. And I think I should point out here that the kind of attitudes that Sheryl Sandberg was talking about are held not just by men, but sadly, also by women.
Sheryl Sandberg: Absolutely.
Lyse Doucet: It’s – they’re held on both sides, so this is not pointing — with all due respect to the men in the panel, our very gender-balanced panel here at WEF — that it is women, we are also at fault for holding those ideas. So it’s got to be – people have to think about this and actively make it happen. It’s not going to happen organically.
Justin Trudeau, you made headlines worldwide when at your first press conference where you rolled out your — let me call it the 50/50 cabinet — the first gender-balanced cabinet in Canadian history and you were asked why that – “Why that gender balance, Mr. Prime Minister?” and you said, “Because it is 2015.” You received a lot of plaudits for that.
But because it is 2015, 2015 in Canada also means that Canada is twice the global average for women earning about $8,000 less than men for doing equivalent work. And I looked at the ratings, the global gender ratings in the WEF study — which I urge you to read — Canada’s still 30. We’re not doing that great for a country which talks about its greatness. What are you going to do?
Photo gallery: Justin Trudeau’s cabinet
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(Chris Wattie/Reuters)
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor-General David Johnston with the new cabinet
FRONT ROW, from left to right: Ralph Goodale, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Stephane Dion, Chrystia Freeland, Justin Trudeau, David Johnston, John McCallum, Judy Foote, Lawrence MacAulay, Carolyn Bennett, Kent Hehr
MIDDLE ROW, from left to right: Scott Brison, Marie-Claude Bibeau, Navdeep Bains, Diane Lebouthillier, Jean-Yves Duclos, MaryAnn Mihaychuk, Marc Garneau, Catherine McKenna, Bill Morneau, Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, Jane Philpott
BACK ROW, from left to right: Carla Qualtrough, Jim Carr, Kirsty Duncan, Amarjeet Sohi, Bardish Chagger, Hunter Tootoo, Patty Hajdu, Harjit S. Sajjan, Maryam Monsef
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Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: Well, there’s – there’s a lot of hard work to do. And the first part is recognizing it. And I was obviously pleased when people took notice of our gender-balanced cabinet, but people have to know that before I could say “Because it’s 2015,” an awful lot of hard work went into 2012, 2013, 2014 to get to that place.
We used social media and email blasts as a political campaign to reach out to communities with a campaign called Ask Her to Run, telling people to ask prominent women, you know, hard workers in the community, people they knew, people who had contributors – contributions to make, people who just thought they might be able to make a difference to think about running for office because study after study has shown that if you ask a man if he wants to run for office, his first question is likely to be, “Well, do I have wear a tie every day?” and if you ask a woman if she wants to run for office, her first question is usually, “Really? Why me?” And that idea that do you really think I’m qualified for it, and you have to ask more often, which you know, honestly is really frustrating.
So we said, okay, if we know we have to ask more often, let’s ask more often. And we – we got people to recommend friends, neighbours, in some cases themselves. And then we followed up with them and we asked them, we talked about running. And I personally convinced a number of extraordinary women to step forward along with a number of extraordinary men, to step forward into public office at a time when politics can be very, very divisive.
And I have to say, well, people here at the World Economic Forum know well Chrystia Freeland, who is internationally renowned. It took an awful lot of arm-twisting before she decided — because of family reasons, because of personal and professional reasons — that she should take this leap. And quite frankly, all of Canada and all of the world should be very happy she did because she’s doing an extraordinary job as – as a Trade Minister, but also as a strong woman with a really important voice on the world stage.
Lyse Doucet: But even with that effort and even with that in Canada, the percentage of the House – in the House is 26 percent. That’s one percent more than Afghanistan.
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: Yes.
Lyse Doucet: So I think we still – we still have to do – to do better.
Sheryl Sandberg: Six percent more than the United States.
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: But part of that, therefore – I don’t get to control who gets elected to the House, but I do get to pick who gets to sit in government. And the leadership decision of saying, well, you know what, I’m going to make sure that I can choose 50/50, and you know, the lead-up to our announcement of that cabinet, there were a lot of people making, “Oh, you know, these quotas are bad. It should be merit-based. You know, you shouldn’t be forcing it.” And then once I displayed the cabinet, nobody talked about merit anymore because the people in our cabinet, men and women, are extraordinarily high qualified.
Lyse Doucet: And I have to say Canadians and the world will be watching that gender-balanced cabinet because symbols matter, symbolism is important, but substance is much better.
This was to be a panel which mainly focussed on the workplace, but I think you’d all agree that if this is to change, there’s got to be leadership in the workplace, leadership politically and leadership around the world. And of course I should say leadership right in the home as well, between the relationships between men and women and children. But a lot of our experiences here are talking about western cultures. Let’s bring in the world’s real powerhouse, China, and Zhang Xin.
And I have to say I was doing a little bit of research before here, and I put into Google, sorry, China gender gap. And up comes an article on gender gap real estate, which is Xin’s area. I thought, wow, I hit the jackpot. Guess what I found out, ladies and gentlemen? Crucial information. They did a survey in real estate and they asked people what would you like in your house? How about kitchen appliances? Well, you’ll be surprised to hear that 32 percent of single men thought kitchen appliances were the most important thing in their home and only 21 percent of women. And when it came to granite counter tops — come on, who doesn’t want a granite counter top? — 24 percent of men said, “Yes, I want it,” and only 11 percent of women. What is changing in the homes we buy, but what is changing, more importantly in the real estate market?
Everyone talks about the Chinese economic boom, but many people don’t – and even in China, they don’t talk about, I understand, why women are not benefiting, except for high profile examples like you, in this economic boom?
Zhang Xin: I think, actually, China is a slightly different situation because we went through a cultural revolution, you know, and those are the days when Mao said women can raise half the sky. So I grew up with seeing every woman work. My mother worked, my aunt worked, everybody worked. There was no women stay at home. So what happened is that today, actually with the last 30 years of reform, you’re seeing two sides of the country. If you see the state-owned sectors or governments, you really don’t see many women, but if you see the private sector, which is the vibrant, the creative side and it’s the driver of the economy, there are an awful lot of self-made women entrepreneurs.
I run the real estate company, I can tell you this is sales – our sales team that are all people based on commission, so I see each sales as like an entrepreneur, the best performing sales are always women. So it just makes me think that women are more natural to be a entrepreneur.
Lyse Doucet: So you – the kind of attitudes that Sheryl was talking about and the raising of hands, if we did that same survey in China, you know, how many men think women don’t work, how many men have been told they’re too aggressive, how many women, would you get the same results?
Sheryl Sandberg: I mean I’ve – I’ve done it.
Zhang Xin: She must have done it.
Sheryl Sandberg: I’ve done it in China. The aggressive thing, you get the same results.
Lyse Doucet: The same.
Sheryl Sandberg: I don’t know about the – I don’t if I remember the working one.
Lyse Doucet: And given that you’re working in real estate and you run a very powerful company, what would – what would be the first thing you think would have to change to start addressing the gap because I’m sure there still are gaps in terms of gender parity in the workplace despite what you’ve just said?
Zhang Xin: I mean we – in our company, the senior management is naturally 50/50. Actually, it wasn’t because of deliberate – not like the Prime Minister had a quota of 50/50; it just happened that way. And of course the company is run by me and my husband, 50/50 partnership. So that – and some jobs are more for men, like construction jobs, engineers going around the construction, you don’t really get so many women who want to do that job, but also there’s some jobs like sales are naturally women. So I think it’s just if you do not have the bias and prejudice and you just leave it to the natural choice, you probably would end up 50/50.
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: I don’t know, I have – I have to disagree with that. In – one of the challenges we have in Canada is – is there’s a lot of young people wanting to go into the trades. And yes, right now there are a few more men than women, but you see a tremendous amount of young women who are excited about – I mean I went to a group of welders at one point, and you know, one was proud to wear a pink helmet. And then I talked to her and she was actually the only one taking the underwater welding course. She was the only one pushing herself further and harder than everyone else and all the guys were looking up to her, and not just because she was in a nontraditional role, but because she was – she was owning it and she was excelling. And just I’d like to get to a point where nobody notices that there might be jobs that more women do or more men do and just look at – at qualifications. And in order to do that, we have to be really thoughtful about how we shape society in a deliberate, and you know, wilful way.
Melinda Gates: And I would add to that. We need to look at women’s time because it’s – if you have the expectation that women want to work and should work and are 50/50 in the workforce, you have to also look at their time and where it’s spent. There’s a huge amount of unpaid labour all over the world. So every single day, if you look at the global statistics, women spend four and a half more hours than a man every day at home with tasks at home. They are expected to care for the elderly. They’re expected to care for the children. If somebody gets sick – if you – if you interview Harvard MBAs — two years ago, they did this — coming out, men and women had the same expectations about working, but when you said, “If you choose to get married and have children, who will take the children to the doctor?” both the man and the woman said the woman would leave her job for an hour to go take the child to the doctor.
So we have these unwritten expectations of women. So what we have to do is recognize what our expectations are and then redistribute the workload. I love some of the things that Sheryl talks about in Lean In about you really have to have the conversation inside your own family of what are our roles and expectations and who’s going to do what? And if you don’t have great policies, not maternal leave policies, but family leave policies, so that a man and a woman can take time off, we know that if a man takes time off at the birth of his child, he spends more time with that child and more time on household chores, that’s a redistribution.
You want to talk about the country that has it wrong the most? The United States. We need to change this in the United States. We only have two states today that have a family leave policy, and even those are skewed. We ought to have it in all 50 states. The tech companies are leading with it, but this has to change.
Lyse Doucet: But it is – but there is —
Sheryl Sandberg: We have a toddler – there’s a toddler wage gap in the U.S.
Lyse Doucet: There’s a?
Sheryl Sandberg: Toddler wage gap in the U.S.
Lyse Doucet: Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg: And different expectations. Little boys in home do fewer chores and get paid more than little girls. No, this is true. We assign our chores to our children in the United States — and it can be worse than other places in the world — where the boys are taking out the trash, it takes less time than cleaning the dishes, and they’re getting higher allowances. And so we start off in our homes with these very different expectations. And the time spent on these tasks is incredibly important and very different.
Lyse Doucet: But this is – this is really shocking. Back to because it’s 2015, never have we lived in a world where we are so educated, so well connected, know so much about the world, and I have to just anecdotally, I mean men in this generation do take – are more active in their children’s lives. They do – at least they recognize the need and women recognize the need to share, and yet we’re still having these conversations. If the statistics are correct that something like 33 percent of households in the United States, the main bread winner, to use an old phrase, is a woman, but she may also be a woman doing work in the home.
Sheryl Sandberg: She still does more in the home. That’s what the data shows very clearly.
Lyse Doucet: Okay. Jonas?
Jonas Prising: And I would echo Melinda’s – Melinda’s observations because when we look at pipelines, when you look at – you focus on women’s participation in anything as a percentage, you sometimes don’t make the effort to go in and look at what does that percentage mean? And what we found, you know, if you just focus on percentages, you can tick the box and feel good, but the percentages belie the fact that there are break points in women’s lives —
Melinda Gates: Yes.
Jonas Prising: — when the pressures build up too much at a certain age. Even companies that do very well on a percentage point, they’ll have 50 percent of the workforce up until a certain point and then there’s no migration into more senior leadership roles.
Lyse Doucet: And why is that?
Jonas Prising: And we can see those break points very much correlating with break points that you would expect in life, you know, when – when the first children are coming and/or when children are there, more income has been earned, but the pressures are building up again. So break points between – there’s a first break point around 30, 28, 30, and then a second — depending on which culture of course where you are in the world — but in the developed countries, you can clearly see break points. We think —
Lyse Doucet: But they don’t have to be break points if you’re not penalized at work —
Jonas Prising: Of course not.
Lyse Doucet: — when you go back.
Jonas Prising: Absolutely.
Lyse Doucet: And it’s recognized that women will go away because, unfortunately, one thing that so far we can’t change is that the women will give birth to the child and will need a certain amount of time off.
Jonas Prising: And what you need – but what you need to think about is that there are break points that then need to be mitigated —
Lyse Doucet: Exactly.
Jonas Prising: — so you can go past those and you can continue, you know, on the careers that – that women want to have.
Lyse Doucet: It’s very interesting the way this conversation is going. It’s almost as if if we are really to have significant changes in the workplace, it has to start with changes in the home and in society. It’s what Xin said, you need a kind of a cultural revolution. You need society to change before the way we work changes because it’s all part of our lives.
So let’s – we’re going to go to the audience in a moment for some questions. Let’s just – one comment from each of you, starting with you, Justin Trudeau. What would have to change first if we are going to make 2016 the year when we’re going to begin to close this gap even more?
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: There’s lots of things, but the thing I’ll pick is that men have to be a big part of this conversation.
Melinda Gates: Absolutely.
(World Economic Forum)
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: One of the things – like I’m incredibly proud to have a partner in my wife Sophie who is extremely committed to women and girls’ issues, but she is – you know, we’re of a like mind on it, and I agree with her on that. And I’ve been very thoughtful about how we raise our daughter. But she caught me – or she took me aside a few months ago and said, “Okay, it’s great that you’re engaged and modelling to your daughter that you want her in power and everything, but you need to take as much effort to talk to your sons” — my eight-year-old boy and my two-year-old’s still a little young still — “about how he treats women and how he is going to grow up to be a feminist just like dad.”
And by the way, we shouldn’t be afraid of the word feminist. Men and women should use it to describe themselves any time they want. (Applause.) But that – that role we have as men in supporting and demanding equality, in demanding a shift is really, really important. And there’s lots of other things governments can do and we’re trying to do but —
Lyse Doucet: That’s you.
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: — but me personally as a person and as a family member, yeah.
Lyse Doucet: Okay, so engage the men. Sheryl.
Sheryl Sandberg: Understand the motivation. We shouldn’t be working towards equality just because it’s the right thing. We should do it because it’s the smart thing, so from a company point of view or an organizational point of view, if you can use the full talents of the workforce, you’re going to outperform. So whether you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re the most entry level employee trying to outperform or the CEO, if you engage and really build diverse teams, you’re going to outperform, so do it because it’s going to help you.
Similarly, in the home, we know that couples with more equal – heterosexual couples with more equal relationships have better, stronger relationships, lower levels of female depression, happier marriages, longer term marriages, less divorce. We know that daughters and sons, but particularly daughters and sons too of more active fathers, they do better. They do better emotionally. They have stronger relationships with their parents. They do better in school and they do better professionally. So the reason to work towards equality if you’re a woman or a man is because it’s going to help you.
Lyse Doucet: Yes.
Sheryl Sandberg: And that motivation will carry us through.
Lyse Doucet: The arguments seem unassailable, which begs the question is why it’s not happening. Melinda, what would you do?
Melinda Gates: Well, one thing I want to bring up a point here, so that we’re not just talking about high income settings or middle income settings is one of the reasons we get to work as women is if we have access to contraceptives. And we know – I mean it’s why women came into the workforce in droves in the United States. We’re not as far as we need to be, but we have 220 million that are asking us for them. Why – not only are they healthier and their children healthier, but if they can space the births of their children, they educate them and then they can work in the workforce, the kids and the moms. So I want to keep that in mind. And part of this – if we’re really about a global conversation.
And the second thing I will just say in any country is role modelling. You don’t change mind sets by just talking about things, you role model. So it’s important for Prime Minister Trudeau to be here and to role model. It’s important for my husband to role model. It’s important for Mark Zuckerberg inside of Facebook to role model paternity leave so it’s okay. So it takes women role-modelling that’s right and it takes men role-modelling that’s right. And it’s going to take all of us doing that. And then expectations do change.
Jonas Prising: Yeah, so I think we’ve talked about the case why. Sheryl, you talked about the business case, the moral and especially the business case why this is the right thing. Of course the Prime Minister talks about the leadership and the kind of leadership that you need to have to shift social norms, not the kind of leadership that waves it as one of the prime priorities. And then of course the supporting mechanisms, you know, the contraception, but child care, we see workforce participation rate there is – varies enormously, depending on how robust and comprehensive child care support is, how easily accessible it is and how affordable it is. So to that end —
Lyse Doucet: Do you make that possible for your employees? What is your record?
Jonas Prising: Well, we operate in 80 countries, so in most of – in many of those countries, child support mechanisms exist and are provided for by the state to the – and in those countries where it doesn’t, we support our women leaders and employees to the degree that we’re absolutely possible, so that they can participate. And they always know that they can – can leave and then – and then come back.
Lyse Doucet: And how long is your maternity and paternity leave?
Jonas Prising: It depends by country, so it is all legislated and – and you know, as far as our policies are concerned, we always follow everything that – that we can, so that our women are able to come back as quickly as they’re able to. But I do think —
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau: For your employees in Canada, know that we’re improving. We already have a good system — better than the United States, not that that’s saying much — but we’ve – one of our commitments was to increase flexibility so that both partners can share it better, can be more parental leave over a shorter period of time with greater amounts or less amounts over a longer period of time to allow for maximum flexibility to reflect the realities of families. I mean that’s – that’s the big thing, that workforce is changing, families’ relationship to it is changing, allow for flexibility. And that’s one of the things we’re working for.
Lyse Doucet: But Jonas, I’d like to steal Sheryl’s phrase.
Jonas Prising: Yes.
Lyse Doucet: I hope you will lean in and you and other members of the global business elite will not just say, okay, Thailand’s – oh, this is the maternity leave in Thailand, this is the maternity leave in China. You should say, “This should be your maternity leave,” because you know that they – the levels are not great in a lot of countries.
Jonas Prising: And for all of the countries —
Lyse Doucet: And you’re accepting it as a given.
Jonas Prising: I am accepting it as a given and – no, I am promoting clearly the need to include as many people into the workforce as possible because that’s the only way that those economies are going to grow.
Lyse Doucet: Mm-hm.
Jonas Prising: But I think from – from taking all of those as necessary, but not sufficient, actions, from an organizational perspective, to see women rise through the organization, the purposeful and deliberate – the purposeful and deliberate navigation of the kinds of roles that we want women to have will eventually in the pipeline determine what kind of roles they can ascend to. So many women tend to be clustered in certain professions and/or in certain functions. And we believe for there to be more female leaders at the helm of companies — and there are only four percent of companies that are led by female CEOs — you need to make sure that you have women in technical roles, in business roles, in P&L roles because you won’t be able to make the shift late on in your career and just move over. You have to build a body of work and performance and of course results within the areas that you would need if you’re going to run a big organization, but that has to be —
Lyse Doucet: And great – and great role models and that others who join the (crosstalk) —
Jonas Prising: Great role models but – but it’s not only about role models. It’s enabling women to move into those roles and make it early and purposefully because the social norms and the corporate culture and the expectations may work against that, so you have to work against that, so that you’re able to put more women in the pipeline for those kinds of roles.
(World Economic Forum)
Lyse Doucet: I’m sure you’re going to change the company name. Xin, from you, one – what would you change from what you’ve seen?
Zhang Xin: I believe in quotas.
Lyse Doucet: Quotas?
Zhang Xin: I think quotas would be a effective way of breaking some of the old, long tradition and habits in bias. And I think that, you know, we talk about this gap in the numbers, of percentage, but what if we have some quotas? Like the Prime Minister have a 50/50 quota. That’s a quota, right? You know, he says this is 2015. Now I don’t know what’s the right number for quota, but I think that would be a effective way of breaking the bias against women.
Lyse Doucet: That is being used in boardrooms. Norway started off, what is it, 40 percent in the boardroom. Some resistence. In some countries, it’s working. Melinda, does it work, quotas?
Melinda Gates: I think different countries are experimenting with different models, so Germany has a quota system now for boards, France does. Other ones, like the UK, set a goal of where they wanted to go. They actually got there quite quickly, and they had less of a stock market drop by saying it’s the right thing to do, it’s an exp