WBCFasterTogether: Building the Movement - 2021 and Beyond

You. Good afternoon and welcome to the Women Business Collaborative LinkedIn Live series. Faster Together today we're talking about building the movement 2021 and beyond. And we're joined by our CEO Edie Frazier. As you know, the Women Business Collaborative is an unprecedented alliance of over 60 women's business organizations collaborating together to achieve equal position, pay and power for all business women. It is the first business movement dedicated to equity and diversity and it is comprised professional women and men business organizations, public and private companies to accelerate change through collaboration, advocacy, action and accountability. By uniting more than 60 of the leading women's business organizations and and 435 champions, the WBC activates our vast network to attain immediate and long term results. Around nine essential action initiatives, the first three focus on executive women's leadership in business. They are CEO leadership and sponsorship of women CEOs, women in the C Suite and Executive Leadership with P and L Responsibility and Women in the Boardroom. The next three action initiatives focus on underrepresentation of women in business, women entrepreneurs and access to capital, Women in capital and finance and women in technology. And we have three action initiatives that are critical to equity for women in business, diversity, equity and inclusion, Gender and pay parity and women in the pipeline. Thus, our work focuses on ensuring more women CEOs in the C suiten boards, a demand for gender and pay parity, increasing access to institutional capital and capital for women entrepreneurs, driving more women as controllers of capital allocation parity for women in underrepresented business sectors such as technology and leveraging learning and development to drive pipeline promotions. Interwoven across every initiative is our call for inclusivity, diversity, transparency and equality for all women, including women of color, the LGBTQIA community and other disenfranchised women. Our collaboration and network is spearheaded by our board partners, advisory and leadership councils. The WBC reaches millions of business leaders across the United States and globally. We are committed to diversity. Our councils and Board of directors include more than 34% people of color. And it is this power of combining the collaborative approach with our women's business movement that's already creating momentum and accelerating the pace of change for business women. So with that, let's talk about where we are in 2021. Let's talk about the growth in terms of the organizations and champions. Edie, the WBC is going to be three years old next year. Can you talk a bit about our trajectory and our growth, especially in 2021?

Gwen first of all, happy holidays to everyone. Second, Gwen Young, thank you for your leadership. As our Chief operating officer. And as you said, our board and all of our stakeholders as we look back and first we'll just look back to our organizing meeting with all our organizations. Of our 501 after we formed in March of 2019, was the 1st of May, May 5th of 2019 with 22 of the women's business organizations. Look at today, 62, 63 of the most incredible organization partners who are all actively engaged in one or more initiatives with us. And two, the millions they represent. As you say, it's about action. So it's not only thought leadership, but it's really action. And why we have the hashtag faster together because we live that principle and that value of faster together with a sense of true collaboration in everything we do. And with that, as you said, the acceleration and the measurement of impact. As Gwen talks and as we go through our nine actions and we go through everything we do, we collect all the data and share it in a really broad matter. With that we know as Gwen and we put out a Release, we've grown 200% this year. With that, we're gratitude across the board that this is not any of us alone. It is about so many partners, board sponsors and the advisory and leaders championing. And we look back when and we had 3,600 people register for our summit and what we learned was the feedback. They used it for their employees and their customers for learning and development. Every day we're about learning and development and we're about accelerating and communicating. And we say celebrating because we could pick those companies that aren't doing a good job or we could criticize. Our role is to celebrate and to make certain. So whether it's our women CEOs when they get named or new announcements on each of our initiative companies hitting parity, boards hitting parity. We're about ready to use role models and best practices.

So do you want to pick up on what you said? Some of the things that come out of this collaboration are reports. We do a monthly report on the women that join boards of public companies, which we've talked about in previous LinkedIn lives. We do an annual report on the number of women CEOs and we come up with figures like 8.2% of Fortune CEOs are women. And last month 43.3% of appointments to the boards of public companies women. Can you talk about how important those reports are and those components of it, from the data to the insights to the profiles and how we hope that those reports and the work that we do together collaborative with Groups like Ascend, Aquilar, bolster committee of 200. How those will really move the needle, it's critical.

So I'll just take what Gwen said because we're putting so much time and attention to collecting the data and the role models and the action leadership, thought leadership. So that women's CEO report, as you said that we do with C200 and Catalyst and Ascend and WBC hit all women above a billion. And clearly not only the Fortune and the S and P Russell, but private companies. And what's so exciting is we average about 8% and we're moving to 10% and we'll move to 15%. And we've got in every initiative women of color because we had the first seat change this year in 2021 with two Black CEOs. But it's why so few. But we work together to really share. And every time a new woman CEO is named, we amplify that in collaboration with the four organizations. And Gwen, you've worked so hard with Equilar and we do have to salute that we have 16 board organizations working together. But with the report that we've been doing now for over a year, we have a history of data and what you just said hitting 43% women joining public boards and it looks like over 60% this past month being first time directors and and averaging a third of those women being women of color. First leading for many months with black women and now the last two months Asian women. With that we are able to see a major sea change that we are experiencing and again, naming every company, every board member as we go. So with those reports, because as you're working on looking at what the C suite means, what we're seeing in terms of pipeline white papers and as we look ahead for 2022, we've chosen two major subjects to add to what we're doing monthly on the boards and the CEO. But one of them is women tech execs. It's so broad with one, the data, two, the profiles. As we've seen, 23% women CIOs and we look at CISOs and cyber and data analytic chairs and the impact those are making on business management. How many are women? How many are women of color and where does the data and the role models take us as we see that sea change? And you and I put another more and more companies are announcing companies of purpose and with that we'll be doing lots of reports together for 2022.

Gwen, want to talk about this sea change. And so one of the Purposes of these reports is to show the data and to continue with our partners, with our organizations, with our corporate sponsors. The Call for Transparency so today we saw the list and companies since last year to closing diversity in their 10K filings showing that only 8% of the C suite executives are are black. We have a Target that by 2030 we want 10% of the C suite to be women of color. Can you talk about a bit about the importance of transparency and especially as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion?

Gwen, you and I share, but all of us share that one word, transparency, because for so many years we've been asking CEOs to sign statements of support and of parity and commitments or to submit data but not disclosing it publicly. So we at wbc, with our CEO awards and working with gender affairs specifically and with the companies have pulled the data. But the data is holistic. The data that we have pulled on each company is women and women of color, boards of directors, executive suite managers, supplier diversity data, what the brand looks like and what they are doing on ESG or purpose that ties to gender and diversity. Today you and I cited the big Washington Post report that took the top 50 companies in America and looked at it not only with black directors, but they looked at who the chief diversity officer reports to. Three of them to CEOs out of the 50, the kinds of incentives for disclosing the data and for awarding compensation to the teams for achieving certain goals. So with that we will see more and more companies voluntarily step up and really disclose their data and their stories. So we, as Gwen and we work together, will pick at least 35 companies this next year who will take not only their annual reports on diversity, but will really disclose with us their full reports. But also we equate that with the super roundtables, white papers and thought leadership. Let's just say it is the age of disclosure and with that, the totality of the comprehensive leadership which makes it the best places to work and the best places to stay. As we see giant seismic shifts.

I want to switch a little bit and talk about another set of our couple of action initiatives. I'd love for you to talk a bit about what we're doing in the women entrepreneurship space and the access to capital space because we have about 11 groups lined up and another 11 in the sort of controller of capital space. I'd love to hear what we're doing in that space as I'm sure many of our audience are entrepreneurs and wondering how we're moving the needle on the access to capital.

It's extraordinary and is with our enterprising women and our own Judith Goldcrant on our board now we are mapping out and we have lots of others, we have over 55 in on our advisory council that are entrepreneurs. But we're taking and our partners all the groups and we cannot cite enough how active wbenc, wpo, NALBO and all the groups are including WIP on public policy. But we also look at Golden Seeds and Springboard and the various groups CEO that are providing capital. And we're working on a giant map that will be put together with all of them signing off. So When Astia announces 200 million of new capital and others are announcing what they're doing, we will know they're looking for tech entrepreneurs, they're looking for specificity. So we've got a one stop shop as we do in everything with wbc. So such credit to beginning this mapping process of being able to see all those playing in the entrepreneurial space with 13 million entrepreneurs. We also live the diversity side. We're so proud that there are two groups just working on black entrepreneurs and and is focusing on where the capital is, the size of capital and moving forward. And then with Alex Young and others like Judith on our board on capital, we're looking as we look at all the venture firms and capital firms and with the investment banks, what is their progress and what are they doing on capital allocation. And the second on wealth management because we've been lucky to work with the Investment Advisory Council, we've been lucky to work with Morningstar and CFA to put out annual data about women and women of color and wealth management. It's not a great story. We've been stuck at 11%, Gwen, of those in wealth management and we see China at 30%. We know that if we can also show that the profession of wealth management is a caring profession of one where you need women to care about women and their families. We should see a sea change in the next several years as we work on that whole framework with all of our organizations.

As we move into 2022. You mentioned some of the other areas, the tech executive positions that are across industries. This isn't the tech sector, but it's these positions that are data scientists and artificial intelligence. You mentioned the importance of diverse leadership at the top as a part of the companies of purpose movement. But as we build this movement, what do you want to say to the audience? What are we looking forward to in 2022? We have our monthly CEO roundtables. We have our monthly executive roundtables. These LinkedIn lives will be every week. What's your call to action to the audience?

Edie it's our joint call of action. And as we work together every day, we want to see our numbers change. If our action is as we go through every one of our action initiatives and as we see CEOs change and hopefully we go from the 8.1% to at least 9.5% as we see that women of color, it's not only the black population but and the Asian population but so exciting to see the Latina population change and yet so far to go. Esther Aguilera shared with WBC yesterday that with Latino corporate directors there had been a four times increase, but it was such a low level at under 1% that we know. And the same thing with Latina and the corporate ranks. We have to make sure our demographics of this country has the democratic of the workforce with all the companies and with our entrepreneurs. So how exciting, Gwen, that we also measure and see some of the supplier commitments that we've seen company by company and the announcements. And as we look at the CEOs, we have to just salute the fact that we're so pleased that Mary Barra of General Motors, who we honored at our summit, is the new CEO of the Business Roundtable and how proud we are to work with them as we push change and that we've got two women, CEO, chairman of the New York Stacking Exchange and nasdaq. So as we go forward, what are we doing to really see every one of our initiative change? You and I, Gwen, probably think if we average 43% women joining public boards, that we might get to parity because now we are measuring every company that announces how close they are to parity on new board members and then their total numbers on boards. As we take that and look at every one of our objectives, like we're doing in technology, is how do we not only show the importance of the job because those technology officers, as we know, are sitting by the side of the CEO and they're sitting in the boardrooms going through data analytics, cybersecurity, AI and the threats, but also leading the way to change. So on every one of our initiatives, we go back and thank every group for what you're doing and is the reports that we're doing and the massive communications with clarity that is so compelling that we need to get out every day and say, wake up to the private sector. We're out to really build this pure parity, as we say, with equal position, pay and power.

That's perfect. The call for parity through transparency, achieving the data and targets. Please everybody go to our website, where, as we always say in these LinkedIn lives to keep up to date on what's happening in terms of the numbers, in terms of the work, in terms of the work of all of our partners and the WBC stakeholders. We look forward to joining you in 2022. We will have an incredibly dynamic LinkedIn Live series that will not only look at the data and work that we're doing, we'll look at issues such as allyship and mentorship and be able to follow the news and the progress that's being made by the private sector every day. Have a wonderful holiday. Thank you for being part of this call for equals, position, pay and power for all businesswomen. And continue to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Happy holidays.

Happy holidays. And Gwen, thank you. And thank you to everyone who's really participating. This is about we. So as we think of the hundreds and thousands that are stepping up with us, we're just grateful.