Davos 2019 - Women in the New World of Work

Good morning here in the room and from afar, everybody who follows it on the web live. And welcome to a session I've been looking so much forward to women in the new world of work. So I hope you will have it like me that you'll learn a lot from this distinguished panel. Just prepping for this has been a journey for me. I'm glad that we're in this lovely and cozy setting because we're going to have a conversation. You're not going to hear a lot of speeches, you're going to have a lot of conversation. And I hope we'll all be on this joint learning journey together that will result in good action when we leave this room or turn off the web link. So I also want to invite you to tweet your heart out wef19 because we also got to make sure that this conversation gets outside of this room. So my name is Katja Iversen. I am the president CEO of an organization called Women Deliver. And as we say a little polemically, Women Deliver and a lot more than business babies. And we're an advocacy organization. We work to drive investments, political, financial, social in gender equality and girls and women. So looking at these issues is absolutely key. I'm also a straight time police. So as I told my fellow panelists here, I will be insistent, respectfully annoying, if we go over. In Women Deliver, we work on the investment case in girls and women. We know it's the right thing to invest in girls and women from a rights perspective, but we also know that from an economic perspective, it really is smart when you invest in women. There's a ripple effect that goes way beyond the individual woman. It affects families, communities, countries, economies, and Everybody wins. So 2018 was a pivotal moment for gender equality. We saw it here in Davos with some beautiful speeches. We saw it when the G7 took gender equality as one of the big issues. And we see it in many of the economic discussions today, much more than we have ever seen before. But we are still, despite the progress we're seeing, we're still looking at a workforce that excludes some places underpace and overlooks a good chunk of the available talent. And what team would win if you put half of it on the bench? So the data shows, the World Economic Forum report shows that we have a severe gender gap and that if we looked at the economic participation and it would take 202 years for women to reach economic parity. If we take the pace that we have now, and you know what, that's not just good enough so how wonderful is it to be in a room, in a setting where people actually have power to make change happen? I think it's great. And so we're going to talk about the trends, we're going to talk about what is the future that we want, not that just will come, but that we want. Because when you know what you want, you can go towards it and then on some of the solutions. And it's not going to be a blame game. We're not going to focus on the problems because we know them, but we are going to look ahead and see what can be done. So I could talk a lot longer, but let me just get over to what is really important and that is the how and the what and then the what now. So we're so lucky to have this fantastic lineup and it'll help us dig into the topic and you can all read a lot more about them on the app. So I will be a little brief, but we have Alan Blue, vice president, products at LinkedIn and one of LinkedIn's co founders and has really done some great studies about the gender gap in AI we have. And you know, can I just say, Mr. Blue, it sounds like a Tarantino movie, but you have not heard that.

Who do I get to be then? Some of them died very violently. I don't want to be one of them.

Jonas, you look like, wanna be pink or not? Wannabe pink. That's the question.

And Janet Fauci, chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting and great author, very inspiring and super public speaker. Heard her yesterday. And you often speak on the changing business landscape, the C suite of tomorrow, tech disruption and leadership. Jonas the Interrupter Prising, Chairman and Chief Executive Office of Manpower Group. You are a renowned expert on labor markets and where it's going, the world of work trends, and very passionate about the workforce. So Michelle Satlin, co founder and CEO of Cloudflare Satlin, you've been named one of the most, one of the top women to watch in tech by the Huffington Post and Inc. Magazine and also, if I may say, you know, kind of the living proof, one of the beautiful living proofs that young people are not just the leaders of tomorrow, they're very much leading today. And to see follow your career, it's been great. So let's jump into it. I'll sit down and I'll start with you, Jonas. So According to the 2018 Future of Jobs, the top emerging jobs in the Fourth Industrial Revolution include data analysts and AI machine learning specialists.

Yes.

And that's also where we have the growing demand for skills within this area. But what kind of skills training programs and really proactive steps must we take now to secure that, to secure that place for women in the new world of work?

Well, since we are talking about the world of work, maybe stepping back and you know where you started from, Katja? Women's participation in the workforce is 20% less than than men at a global level. And with the structural changes that are happening in labor markets, demographic changes, so slowing growth and or declining populations in a lot of the developed world, the impact of technology, individual choices and the way companies are thinking about their business, the fastest way to generate additional economic growth would be to include more women into the workforce and at all levels. So it's a macro issue and for that reason very important, especially since all of you know, I'm sure that women tend to be and are in many countries more educated than men at higher levels. So it's an underutilized human potential at a time when the world and many of you representing companies here are all looking for skilled talent to deploy into your organizations. When we then talk about, you know, you referenced here a number of technical IT related jobs that are specifically impacting the workforce in different ways, driving demand for a lot of skills. In the tech area, it is true that women are significantly underrepresented in that part. And the degrees, for instance in computer science today held by women is probably 18%. Sadly, it's down from 37% in the 80s. Now of course the numbers and the scale are different. Nevertheless, it is clear that women are underrepresented. And I'm sure, Michel, you'll talk a bit more about this later on in terms of what it's like in some heavy tech parts of the world to be a woman, because it's not that common, then the narrative is also that technology is going to disproportionately impact roles. Where women are overrepresented and off cited are business and financial operations, administrative office, clerical, you know, a lot of transactional work where AI and technology will have a disproportionate impact. While we agree that of course women are underrepresented in certain job skill sectors, we're not so sure about the underrepresentation and the impact there for the simple reason that we believe most of the technology impact will augment human capability. It's going to be a question of combining human skills with human capabilities. Although we can project what's going to happen, we don't know that it is going to happen. And at the Same time offsetting the over representation of the underrepresentation or overrepresentation in sectors where it's going to be impacted. We also know that women are overrepresented in sectors where technology is going to have a major impact and where there's going to be tremendous growth, for instance in health care and other activities. And there you could imagine that growth is actually going to occur at a faster rate even than in those that are overrepresented but declining. We just published a survey that talked about the impact of technology in companies and 85% of the companies said that we'll maintain the workforce or increase the workforce. So I don't think that story is done. But the question on the what can we do to help women enter into those areas? Of course, encouraging more STEM related activities. Early on, my own daughter chose a career, a STEM career, because she was passionate about it. She was worried about it, knowing full well that the representation of women in her chosen field of expertise is low. So she is of course looking for employers that have policies that encourage women to come in and fully participate and choose their paths. So I think that is an early on action we can take. The other action I think we can take is to really look at drive and desire because we think they are very strongly predicting success. Most of the tech hiring is done on experience and formal accreditation or degrees, which tends to favor men since they are incumbent and more represented there. But we've run a short burst skill enhancement program in India with 1500 Indian applicants, 60% of them women. The women were considered not sufficiently qualified, whatever that means. And we know that for women to apply fully to these jobs, they want to feel that they're over qualified. But in a short burst of 40 days we are able to place 97% of those women. So this idea that you have to have a formal degree and what I just said about computer science graduates, I'm not so sure that the future of education and the speed with which technology is changing is actually adapted to that. We think it's going to be much more of an iterative process, faster learning. And so therefore if behind today actually there can be pathways and ways of getting an acceleration that wouldn't talk about the 200 years to catch up. So I think whilst we should definitely recognize the issue, there is also cause for optimism as long as leaders address these issues. Because in the end I think it comes down to business imperative. It's not a program, it's not a, you know, sustainable development goal. It is real business strategy importance and if you treat it like that, as you would anything else, you can and should be able to move the needle in the right direction.

Thank you.

Thank you. And if I may jump to you, Alan, because you've been looking a lot AT numbers and LinkedIn, been studying it together with the World Economic Forum, and it shows that in the AI workforce is only 22% of the workforce are women. So one is, you know, what's the consequence of that and what do we do about it?

Well, so artificial intelligence, machine learning and so forth are becoming fundamental to the way basically all pieces of technology are built. So your phone has it, your bank has it like this, endless. I mean, it's kind of everywhere. So it's important as we go forward to make sure that we are designing and building all of that technology the right way. And the only way to do that is to have diverse leadership and diverse people come from many diverse backgrounds actually building that stuff. There are many tales, I'm sure many of you have heard them, about biases which are unintentionally built into systems because either the data is biased by itself or because the choice of the objective functions for a piece of AI are poorly selected, or the way in which you measure the results is actually replaced by the way you measure the success of the algorithm. So a broader variety of viewpoints when actually building artificial intelligence can actually put us in a place where that technology which is becoming so ubiquitous is actually being built for all of us and not just for basically a bunch of dudes who are the people who currently run the technology around these, around this stuff.

Just very quick, what are a couple of those examples where we see the inbuilt biases we've heard about? The one, the face recognitions in airports.

Yeah, so face recognition is a really good one. Original training for face recognition was based on celebrities who are primarily white and male. Therefore, that algorithm was very good at recognizing white men, but it wasn't good at recognizing anybody else. A 97% accuracy rate for white men, a 3% accuracy rate for black women. So that has to do with the training set which was specifically selected. Other examples include recommendation algorithms. If you use a feed and social media and so forth, the order of the items in your feed is determined by a machine learning system. When you choose, feed is supposed to contain and you base it on things which aren't actually for the good of everybody involved, you end up with something which produces a very either attenuated or very biased collection of results. I can give you a good example from a Search perspective. So when you actually search on LinkedIn, when a recruiter searches on LinkedIn for people who are. Have particular sets of skills, we return many people. However, because there are differentials in the profiles which are being returned, generally speaking, men's profiles will float to the top. Not a lot, but a little bit. So one of the things we have to be careful about is making sure that the results people see actually reflect the diversity of the people who are in the return set of results.

So the ripple effects of not having that diversity in the workforce, all of.

These factors are unintentional.

If I could just. I know not to interrupt yet, but I'm going to anyway, really quickly. I mean, to tie something Jonas said together. We've been doing a lot of thinking in and around resumes, you know, resume reviews and how we make sure that there's no bias as we look at using machine learning to that and exactly to your point. But because women tend to understate their capabilities and men maybe on occasion tend to overstate their capabilities, that is something that we've been doing a lot of thinking about. And so I think it's a really, really, really important example to highlight in this conversation.

But I will say that this is actually a gigantic opportunity where we are right now, because the people who are going to actually, the companies that are going to go out there and that are going to create solutions are much more likely to be willing to try something new in a place where their need is really great. And I have heard no less than five people in just a handful of conversations just in the last day here at Davos say, we just can't hire enough data people. We can't hire enough AI people. There just aren't enough of them for us to be able to do the work we want to do. So that means that everybody is prepared to do new things and to try new things and to look at the entire body of potential candidates in order to actually do that hiring. So we are at a place. This is true for all tech skills, but it's certainly true for the AI world, where if we really dig into it and we really try to fill all those roles, we're basically going to. I mean, pursuing women who can do these things and other groups of people who sometimes get excluded is actually something which I think is easy to do.

Easy. That's good. We like that. No, no, I understand. Yeah.

But very briefly, at LinkedIn, we have a project where basically we have an apprenticeship project for engineers at LinkedIn. And we don't. We Go out and scour the market for people who have non traditional backgrounds, in other words, people who don't have the right degree or don't have the right pedigree or whatever. And we hire them, we train them for six months, they become part of our team. And that just by its very nature brings in a massively diverse group of people. And the reason we're doing that, the reason we're willing to do it, is because we have such a strong need to hire in the first place, to the point of business imperatives.

And Janet, your survey that you've just done, Deloitte Global Human Capital Trend survey showed that 72% of respondents said that AI, robot automation are important for the workforce of today, but only 31% said that their companies were ready.

That would be a theme that you're.

Hearing because you're not going to. If we have here in Davos and people say we can't hire enough, we got to do it, that also kind of indicates that we're not entirely ready because we don't have it yet. So you're a female industry leader and you've been in the tech world for a while and you're ready to size it. How do we do it?

Yeah. So great topic and first of all, thank you for the opportunity to engage in this conversation in this forum because I think it's incredibly strategic from a business perspective and it's the right conversation to be having at this point, point in time. So really appreciate the ability to engage with all of you in this discussion. As I've been thinking about this topic, I've been thinking about it through a number of lens. One is how to help organizations broadly be successful in and around how to drive change and transformation in their organization using emerging technologies and AI. Very much to your point, which was very well made and sitting sort of at the center of the conversation. If I think about the things that are differentiated for women, there's a handful of things that I think are important to layer into the conversation. The first is as executives and leaders in our organization, regardless of gender, to go on your own learning journey in and around the emerging technologies and stay and invest in being current is incredibly important and very much to the point actually that has already been made on the panel for women. It's a great opportunity, if you haven't had the background in education, to jump into the mix and get current. I'm a technologist by background as well. I spent my career at the intersection of technology and Wall Street. So very male dominated and very required to stay current and fresh. But for those people who haven't had that requirement in their career to date, this idea of getting current and staying current in technology in, in this era of continuous learning is a wonderful opportunity for women to jump into the conversation. We've driven a program to create tech savviness across our organization. It was actually conceptualized by one of my women leaders and led by her because she saw not only the need for the organization, but explicitly wanted to make sure that women were in that conversation at the more senior levels. The second thing is to ready the organization. You certainly highlighted the statistics in terms of the disparity in what organizations feel they need and the readiness of their workforce. What I take confidence from and what we've seen change in the survey data over the last couple of years is the conversation has shifted to I need all net new people to I can invest in reskilling my existing people. So twice as many of our executives in a survey we just completed said that they were investing and reskilling their existing teams versus trying to hire all net new. And I think that's a really important part of the conversation. So how does that tie into women and developing women into being really effective in this dimension of the market? We talked a little bit already today. We certainly know and understand that helping girls get comfortable and confident in their technology and frankly, more broadly, STEM related capabilities continues to be a really important drum beat I think is very well understood as a topic. And many of us are investing myself personally a lot of energy into helping young women and girls get excited about the topic. We know that coming out of undergraduate education around the world is actually pretty balanced from a broad STEM perspective, less so in computer science as you highlight mathematics, but mathematics is very high. That happens to be my personal background, so I have some bias there. And when you think about machine learning and AI, math is a very, very organic and probably the best in many ways capability to that end. So keep your sort of eye and attention up for math. But what I want to focus on in this discussion is women staying engaged once they've started their careers. So I just sorted through some survey data which frankly I couldn't believe. And so I went back and looked at it again that in a number of countries the Percentage sits at 20% of women who have already chosen to matriculate into technology careers are strongly considering leaving. And a number of countries it's up at 35%. So I think an additional focus and dimension of the conversation needs to be in around keeping women who've gone through all of the challenges that we've been talking about for years in terms of navigating their way through being an 11 and 12 year old girl and how hard that is to keep focus on many levels, by the way, but to keep focused in conversations that are historically male dominated but creating environments where women want to be successful and continue advance their careers, incredibly important. I had just a quick anecdote. I was with a young woman recently who said that she was too two years into her career coming out of a technical background and could not get placed into a technical role on a program in her organization because she'd been automatically shifted to do some program management work which played to her strengths in terms of being a good collaborator and two years into her career was not being considered for more technical roles because she already was viewed as being behind and so she was tending to opt out. And the last thing I would say is important to think about is the idea of running a truly collaborative organization is increasing in importance in the conversation, as it should be. And technology and how technology is positioned in all of our organizations is not something that is off to the side or left of center, but needs to be in the center of a truly integrated conversation in the C suite among our teams. And we certainly know from lots of research and conversation that plays very much to women's strengths in terms of communication, in terms of how to navigate complex dynamics from an EQ perspective and making sure that you're thinking about either as women leaders or women in your organization are positioned to help think very deliberately in and around how they can help create a more collaborative environment to drive success in the organization. So those are a few of the things I've been thinking about and working on.

Thanks. And we have more that we'll come back to.

I'm sure you do. I can see in your eyes I.

Know you more thoughts but Michelle, so when we look at women in the world of work and where the world is moving and all the new tech solutions that you have also helped you and Satlyn have helped create it, it gives a much. It can also see, you know, it's not all doom and gloom because it also gives a lot more flexibility. You know, the in the office 9 to 5 world is being dismantled many places we see in so many new flexible ways of working. But you have been working in this for a while and I just want you to look at how can we strike that right balance with flexibility and all the opportunities that come but also with some of the social protection, you know We've seen numbers of how many will be individual entrepreneurs or hired in on a daily basis and all of that. So how do we strike a good balance in that future of work for women? Because that flexible work condition, many women want to take Atlanta jobs because we do know that the, the care work and the care load to still a large extent lies in women.

I would say women and men actually want the flexibility. I mean, I think women absolutely. But I increasingly see many, many men that want the same thing because I do think there's a big shift going on. You know, one of the things about the rise of technology and the tech companies, and again, there's been lots of things that we've gotten wrong, but I think in some cases it has helped define how you can have a more flexible work environment for its employees. And some people really value that and they flock to it and they're very loyal to it and they end up staying for a very long time. And I think that that really speaks this idea of having more control over your calendar. And often it gets framed as nine to five. Flexibility, work from home. I like to say control over your calendar. Do I have control over when I get to come into the office, when I get to go home? And it might be different on different days because, oh, actually at 3:00 clock on Wednesday, I want to be at my son's soccer practice. And oh, by the way, I have to go to this doctor's appointment. I don't want to check with anyone. And I do think that a lot of the tech companies have started to do a very good job of giving employees control of their calendar and that there's a lot of positive response to that. And when they go to look, say, okay, I'm ready to move on to the next place in my career. If another company won't offer that to them, they won't go there. Because once you have flexibility over your calendar, to have that taken away is very hard. And so if you're an employer in the room, I think thinking about how can I give my employees more control over their calendar? So they feel like if they're doing a good job and we have checks and balances and they're delivering in what they're doing on a daily basis and they're contributing where they are at 4 o' clock in the afternoon, let them decide, right? They're educated, they're smart. I think that that is a. I think that conversation, again, as an employer is really important because there are other companies doing it. I mean, if you work At Google, you work at Facebook. These people have tons of control over their calendar, and it's really hard to get them out of there unless they have that wherever they're going next. And so I'd say, as an employer, think of that. If you're an employee or you're thinking about you want to go into what you're doing next, you should be looking for that because it'll drive satisfaction in your work, in your work and what you're doing on a daily basis. And so when it comes back to staying in the workforce and being, saying, am I happy? Am I satisfied? I think a lot. Not all of it. Some of it comes back to do. I feel like I'm being treated like an adult and that I have control over, I want to do. And so I can balance all the things that are important to me, whether that's exercise, whether it's family, whether it's extracurriculars, nonprofits you're involved in. I mean, people have a whole broad portfolio of things that they're interested in. It's different for different folks. But I think, again, if you have control over what you're doing, and I think this is really important trend that's going to continue to grow, and the companies that do that are going to win in terms of attracting the best people to them. And if you can attract the best people to your companies, you have an advantage over your competitors. And I think that, again, that will look different for different companies. But I really do encourage you to think about it. The one thing I'll just say, as an entrepreneur, and it's come up a couple of times here, and this is, again, if you want to start a company or you're thinking about, oh, actually, this AI thing sounds really important, but I don't really even understand what that means. It's come up about fast learning. I always say, like, the rate at which you can learn is a huge advantage. And if you're curious, you can almost solve any problem. And if you don't know what AI means today, I'll take a step back. Cloudflare. We're a performance and security company. We run one of the largest global performance and cybersecurity companies in the world. We are a very technical company. Very technical. We're about nine years old. I started this company with no background in this space. And so my two business partners knew a lot about the space, and I knew nothing. And the idea is, like, on day one, I really couldn't really contribute to the problem set. I had other skill sets I was very good at getting things done, done. And so I found partners who valued that. And now today I know a lot more. But the point was, is when we started, there was eight of us in the room and it was seven engineers and me. And we go for lunch every day and the engineers would be talking about the code they are checking in, this problem they're solving on. And I honestly could not understand what they were talking about. I would keep a list of all the words they were using. I'd go home, I'd go back to my desk in the afternoon, I'd go Google them all, I'd look them up. The Internet is the greatest resource. All this stuff is free. You just look it up and you're like, okay. And the next day I'd start to try and use it in my conversation and then I'd say, oh, when you were talking about this, what about that? And all of a sudden again, it wasn't one week later, but I mean it was a month later, six months later, within a year, you're like, wow. Actually all of a sudden people are coming to interview and I'd start to speak about something, they're like, wow, you know so much. How did you learn? How do you know so much about this domain? And again, fast forward today I think I know a lot more. And Matthew, my business partner, likes to joke, Michelle, now you're one of the world's leading experts, but the point was, is I didn't start there. And so this idea of reskilling or the fast learning or these acceleration programs, they're real. And you can go to a six week program that manpower helps, you know, create. There's a ton of online education programs, but just do it. Don't ask, don't, don't wait for someone to say, hey, go try this, just do it and then start to do it. Because someone early on in my career gave me this advice of a little bit of your career is about being a bit of a puffer fish, where having more confidence than you are in actually what you know at the time and if you can puffer fish a little bit and lean in, you can actually get a long way away. And now I think the other side is if you lean too far in and then you become a fraud. So you don't want to do that. But I think pufferfish is actually a good analogy and I don't want to generalize, but I actually think it's a good analogy for more women too because a lot of the confidence and you think you undersell what you can do. And I think it's saying actually I knew more about this today than I did yesterday. So if you're curious and you have a high rate of learning, I just encourage you just to do it. And if you didn't know, understand everything Alan said, look it up online this afternoon. All of a sudden now you're like you know more about AI than 90% of the people out in the congress hall.

I think this is a wonderful non technical technical discussion and I really like the reskilling that's actually gone through all of you from what all of you said. So we have this term no regrets moves. What are some of the, some of the moves you can make now that don't want, that's not going to have, you know, kind of that will pay off no matter what. So in this space and I hear reskilling, but what are other non regret moves that we can take that we can take now? Because waiting to have the perfect plan, we've been out outpaced by technology then. So what are some of the steps that we should take now that you would recommend companies and governments to take?

I'll go. So I would be remiss if I just not put a enormous underscore in bold on what Michelle said is individuals. The move you should take now is commit to either getting or staying smart on technology and find whatever works for you to stay and get current. I just want to double underline and underscore that as organizational leaders we haven't talked too much. You hinted at a little bit in your example. The intersection of the AI conversation and the ethics conversation is a really, really important one. And I do believe if it's one that we don't crack the code on, it's actually going to slow down technology progress. Rightly so. So the one no regret bet I would encourage you to make is as you have either starting or ongoing initiatives, make sure that your teams, we all have a shortage of as much diversity as you'd like. I would pick your top talent, diverse population and put them on the most complex analytics AI topics you have where you believe that, that you could potentially be excluding someone from that conversation through what you're doing. So getting women prioritizing women into the fold there versus other places is where I would put my no regrets bet.

Yeah, I put my no regrets on so learnability. So as you know we know about IQ and how that is a good predictor for some things, not really a good predictor for job performance combined with EQ and we think lq. So the learnability quote, unquote, this ability that Michel was talking about to rapidly pick it up is, with the help of data, going to be something that employees or prospective employees are going to be assessed against. So it's going to be something that can help accelerate. So this notion of creating a culture of continuous learning within an organization we think could be very beneficial to women. Visible female leadership at all levels drives and creates a pull factor in terms of people with skills that you want to attract can see that it's all the way through the organization. And we feel, since it's a business imperative, we've made it very explicit in our own company. We are in the top 3% in terms of public companies. Fortune 543% of our directors are women, and 50% is not far away with a good path to that. Our senior leadership is well balanced as well. And 50% of our emerging leaders are female. And we've tried to work hard on this because you've heard us talk a little bit about biases, unconscious biases that are occurring. So you need to create a culture of conscious inclusion, which in the end takes for granted that the business imperative is proven. The moral imperative has long been clear, but it has to become a culture where it's socially unacceptable not to have diversity included at all levels. And you ask yourself, that sounds really nice. So how does that sort of play out in an organization? It plays out when you have male leaders setting, you know, preparing for a meeting, stopping me at the door of a conference room saying, you won't be happy. And quickly I'm trying to scan, think back, okay, why won't I be happy? Results are good, outlook is good, things are strategically moving in the right direction. Except in the room that I'm about to walk in, there is one female leader in a team of 10. So my leaders know that I walk into room like that. When we have our assessment at the end of the year on how things went, some of the operational stuff went really well, some of the financial stuff, too, some of the strategic initiatives. But this mark against and will be an impediment for progression in the company. So when you get that kind of socially, when you get that into your culture, the whole organization at all levels starts to move. And we have been surprised that when you. And I'm not saying we're perfect, number one, and I'm not saying we're there, number two, but I've seen enough to know that when you tackle it as a cultural issue blocking strategic progress like you would do on any other very important business imperative that you as a CDO have to push through. We can see the needle move and do so across the organization to a much greater extent than you know, we had programs around gender diversity, diverse rates that everybody had to have before anybody could be hired. So I think those would be three things, things that would be really good and you'd never regret them. Maybe some of it won't be for tech skills, but for sure you'll drive better business performance because you have diversity of thought. And as Alan said, diversity of thought in a rapidly changing external and internal environment is going to help you make better business decision and run a more successful business. Great.

Just building on that a little bit. Diversity of thought can actually also fit really well with a hiring project. So one of the interesting things that Silicon Valley discovered, this is about 10 years ago, but it's absolutely true, is that people who are good at doing data science, good at doing machine learning, artificial intelligence, don't necessarily only come from the World of the PhDs in computer science and so forth. To your point about mathematics, anyone who works in, who has training in mathematics, physics, biology, any of the hard sciences can be very quickly converted into someone who can contribute as a data scientist.

Even the social sciences, sometimes that's true.

Even the social sciences, but that group is a more diverse group. And those PhDs a PhD in biology, that's where you really can tap into a tremendous amount of diversity because women are substantially represented in the the people who are studying biology.

Parity with men.

50 parity, exactly.

Social science and maths are parity.

Still pretty rarefied error though for the record. PhDs in biology it is.

Master's degree is just fine too, or Dick and Jennings, because the mode of thought and the training is very well parallels really well the way that artificial intelligence and machine learning works. So if you're a company, I highly recommend you copy one of the models where people are doing this retraining and just get out there and just pull all of those hard science people who are interested in a job working on data science and give them the necessary training they need. You won't regret it.

All right. Three things you can all do and it depends on what your lens you're looking for. If you're an executive in a company, you should make sure you be talking about this in your leadership conversations. I am shocked that some men just don't want to say the wrong thing when it comes to gender diversity. And so by just talking about it in your leadership meeting weekly. And whether it's about a business strategy and what we're doing about this, it actually gives people more comfort that then they go take to their teams and whatnot. And again, just talking about it actually matters a lot. And giving your team the language and a safe space to help improve the way they talk about gender balance within your organization. No one's going to tell you that they don't know how to talk about it, but by talking about it, they get better. So if you're an executive in a company, that's one thing. Second thing is organize a dinner, invite the 10 most powerful people you know and ask them all to bring somebody who is undiscovered and ask them all to bring somebody who's undiscovered and help bring them into those conversations, because it'll give them the confidence they'll have the networks, and then it's up to them to help follow up. And if you are the ones who are getting invited, say yes and go and show up and do a good job and then follow up after. I know some folks who do this in D.C. and New York, and it's actually really powerful to help bring another set, younger, younger or, you know, the younger generation, people who maybe aren't working in the industry, to help start to connect in that world. And then the third is, if you are thinking about where you want to go next as an employee, like, if you're thinking about what am I going to do next in my role, you should be asking the person who's trying to hire you about how are they thinking about getting about gender balance in the workforce in a very professional way. Because by the employees, candidates asking the hiring manager and the recruiter, then it gets fed back into the organization is, wow, we have to take this seriously because we're not going to be able to hire this person because I need better answers on it. And so I think it's both from the employer perspective, but then also as an individual, the sorts of things you can do is you can go through an interview process to help move the conversation forward. And I will say that I think that the fact that the conversation has come forward and it's a very diverse topic. Last year, Prime Minister Trudeau, he speaks a lot about gender balance. I'm Canadian, and so I grew up in a world where, in a country where it was just very common. Last year, he was here at Davos Speaking, and I was sitting next to an entrepreneur from Israel, from Tel Aviv, and Trudeau was speaking about how important it is to have women Leaders in your company and all these sorts of things. And he turned to me, he's like, wow, I really need to think more about this. Do you know anybody I could hire? And so I think by talking about it, I kind of feel like everyone should know this by now, but there's a lot of people in the world and not everyone knows it. So I think continuing to talk about it is important.

I love the flow of this because we start reskilling, learning, visible female leadership, visible male championship around it. Talk about it some more, the conscious, the consciousness around it and the diversity of thought. And then we went for dinner. I love it.

Everyone likes to have a dinner, right? Have a dinner with a great group of people.

Yes, but great, really great ideas and very tangible things. Some of them are really big. But. But, you know, you can be a champion. These are things that we can get. Great. I love it. So if we take a little bit of a tech. Tech view on it because, you know, we. We could paint a really doom and gloom picture of how we are in a downward spiral, a vicious cycle. But we can also say, how can we actually utilize the technology in a positive way to close the gender gap? You mentioned a couple of things, Alan, where you said that, you know, mail came higher up on the searches. But hey, if we can make some conscious choices, how can we use technology to close that gender gap?

I think assessment. So data will be more available and the issues that Alan talked about will be addressed. And the use of assessments, you know, not only on hard skills, soft skill skills, but learnability are going to become more sophisticated. So we think the technology, as the technology advances, the ability to scrub for the biases that are evident today in the existing assessment tool, but also in just general hiring, as most people like to hire people that talk like themselves and look like themselves. So if you neutralize that with the help of technology, your hiring biases will go away and you can fully look at what are the best predictors for performance and growth potential. And I think that's where there's a lot of promise in terms of understanding and bringing in a more balanced recruitment of women at all levels. Because I think, as you've heard, we know that men tend to overstate their capabilities and confidence in their ability and women tend to understate it. So if you don't have a conscious inclusion mindset, you're going to take this as an interpretation. Your interpretation is going to be, well, she really doesn't want it that badly, and he really wants it a lot and is probably going to work harder. So therefore, whereas in reality that's not true because it's just a different mindset that you have to compensate for. And I think technology will help us do that to a much, much greater degree than is the case today and help us make fact based decisions as opposed to just emotionally based decision and based on what we have as a bias.

That was also some of the things you touched upon. Janet, can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Yeah, maybe I'll pivot just a teeny bit. And I read a lot and I skim a lot of what I read, by the way, for the record. But a book that really engaged me that I think was really important in this conversation is Mismatch by Kat Holmes. So if you haven't read it, I would at least do a. And she's got a couple YouTube videos as well. And she comes from a design perspective. We haven't talked about design much today, but she talks about inclusive design and how to think about as you're designing, whatever you're designing for your employees, for your customers, for your clients. How do you think about that? Through a lens of inclusivity versus exclusivity. And it was a very, very powerful conversation that she lays out both the history of how many wonderful inventions were invented out of people trying to solve problems where not everyone was on the same playing field, but how you advance that to the technology conversation for today to create not only an even playing field as we've been talking about here for employees, but a much broader worldview in terms of inclusive design as we think about how technology continues to evolve our world. So that was a new frame for me that I frankly hadn't thought about sort of through quite that lens that I found really compelling.

And Alan, you have a comment on it.

So there's, I think there's a large number of things to say here. So I think a lot of it has to do with technology actually can support flexibility. So flexibility in learning. So there's a lot of experimentation going on. As we all know, in the world of online learning, video based learning, non real time learning, technology enables those things in terms of being able to work remotely in order to be able to manage your time more effectively, spend the time that you need to spend splitting between whatever it is, your other set of responsibilities, family, whatever it might be, and the work you do, being able to do that remotely matters a lot. So there's a set of basic technologies which enable us to work in more flexible ways, which I think is going to be valuable for everybody. Even when I think about the future of work for somebody who is, let's say somebody who's been working a retail job and wants to move into a job which is more high tech, getting the flexibility from that job necessary to be able to go do the training you actually need is like essential. This actually brings us to the question of government and so forth, which is outside of the world of technology.

But may I pick on that? Because that's actually where I'd like to also. Just before we kind of go into the next little fire round, picking up on governments and picking up, you know, kind of the fourth industrial revolution, what do we need of private public partnerships to close the gym, the gap? I'm keeping it focused on the agenda because, you know, we're starting to talk about structures, legal and opportunities and barriers. What are the public private partnerships and needs that we have?

I mean, I think education sits at the center of how I've been thinking about that topic and creating opportunities either for skilling or reskilling in collaboration between governments. And I actually think when private organizations actually come together, so many of our organizations work closely together in terms of how do we bring the things that we are the best at. So we work with a lot of technology companies on how to help reskill, retool or partner with community colleges, for example, partner with veterans, for example, to help bring them to the workforce. That's a place where we've been putting a lot of emphasis and I think is a critical part of public private partnerships.

To that end, there's this organization in the United States called Path Forward and I think this is brilliant. It's for professionals who have been out of the workforce for more than two years. And it's because they could have been carried for a loved one, it could have been because they had kids helping them get back into the workforce through what they call return ships with the private sector. And it's a four month return ship where both the person who, the professional who's been out of the workforce for more than two years can come try and say, do I like coming back to the workforce? And the company can say, see whether it's a good fit. And at the end, if there is, there's a great. I think that this is the future. This is about tapping this part of the workforce that's out but want to get back in and giving them an on ramp back in. And again, a lot of those people happen to be women, but there are also men who maybe took time off to care for loved ones. And I mean, we participated in it. It came out, it was spun out of a company out of New York and now it's a nonprofit that does this. And so if you're a company in the United States, I encourage you to look into it, path forward, a wonderful group of people who organize it. If you're international, you can start the same sort of concept in your country, whether it's through the government or just start as a non profit and help go around because, because again, which country doesn't need that? People have been out of the workforce who are already trained and help them get back into the workforce. And it's a win win for both the company and for the employee. And I think that's the future. So I'm a very big fan of that concept.

You know, when I look at, when this gets debated a lot, if you, you know, the, you know, so I think, you know, we have to look at the participation as a whole and all kinds of governments and, you know, initiatives from companies try to tackle parts of them. Yet when the evidence, the evidence is very clear, you fix elder care and you fix childcare, women's participation in the workforce increases. The problem is it costs a lot of money to do it. So therefore, you know, other initiatives encouraging people with bonuses to have more kids and you know, doing all kinds of stuff just don't work. Because the main driver is to free and give women the opportunity and the choice to participate and men to participate in the way that they want to do into the workforce. But if you don't solve those basic fundamentals, you are going to for sure have less women participating in the workforce to their fullest potential. So whenever I hear these debates around, what else can we think of that could make it easier for women?

Pretty straightforward.

I'm like, it's pretty straightforward. It is expensive. So you have to figure that out and you have to be committed to doing that. But also all countries that have that as a base layer have much higher participation rates, parity and participation rates. And then men and women can choose whatever version of participation that they choose and that they want to have. But that's the fundamental solution that needs to be put in place.

Thanks a lot for pointing that out. And that is some of the things that needs, it's not just in terms of the workforce, but in gender equality. Some of the absolute basic that needs to be there. I'm going to take it to a little bit of a different place before you get your last tweet. Remember wef19 hashtag so we Spoke a lot about what can we as company leaders do? What can we do in the workplace? We all people, you know, a lot of the gender gap comes from things that's not happening in the workplace. What can we as individuals, as parents, as mums and dads and friends and aunts, what can we go? What do we need to do in terms of when we look at the workforce, of the future, when we look at the gaps and they are different than many, what can we do as people, as persons, Individuals? Your best advice?

Well, I can start. Mine's pretty simple and short, which I know you like. Katya, is I think just be supportive and encouraging. When someone says, hey, I'm thinking about, I'm going to go start this idea. It's so easy to find all the reasons why that's a big, bad idea. But saying, wow, that's really cool, good for you, or I'm thinking about trying to apply for this job. Instead of saying, oh, are you qualified to do that? Just saying, that's great. Like, if I could be helpful, let me know. I think just sometimes just being supportive and saying, that's great, you can do it. I mean, whether you're a parent, a friend, a relative, it's amazing. People find all the reasons not to do something and it's just, I don't know, it's a human flavor, I guess, versus the reasons to do something. And so sometimes being that person in someone's life who says, that's great, go do it, you might not even know the person very well, but can make the difference between them doing it and not doing it. And I think back to people in my life who I didn't know well and who made some comments and it's like, because of them that I had the courage to go try and start a company and pack up my stuff in a U Haul and move something where it makes no sense on paper. But I did it anyway.

Thanks.

So I was going to go someplace similar, maybe with a slight twist, which is to both carry yourself with confidence and commit to building confidence in others. You gave great examples of how to do that, but I do believe that's in addition to all the things we've talked about in our organizations and as individual learners. But confidence is the thing that I think is incredibly important in this conversation.

Role modeling on that.

Yeah, I'd encourage anybody to. Whatever you're passionate about is a very good predictor on what you're going to be good at. So just as Michel says, even if it seems unlikely, if they are Passionate, encouraging somebody to do it. And we're going to be working a long time. Whatever decision you make isn't going to be the decision that you're stuck with for the next 60 years of your working life. A lot of people will have plenty of choices to work in different ways, in different fields, learn new things, and encouraging that, you know, the decision doesn't have to be made now and be valid for the next 45 years. It's likely to change many times. And I think that's really, really good. And it's, you know, it's the way it's going to be. So acknowledging that and not having that be a fear factor, I think can maybe also be helpful.

Alan, I have a quick.

So mentor somebody. I think one of the key pieces for the key pieces in any of this, especially when you're talking to somebody who's young, at the beginning of their career, making a change in their career, considering a new path, is in general, they don't know what's going on. And they need to see. I mean, I know for sure. I mean, everyone I know who's been making a change, the most valuable thing they can do is find someone who can actually help them think through that change. And just by asking somebody, you are modeling a behavior which is vital to professional success. Calling on somebody else makes you smarter, more capable, able to do it more quickly. And what's more, if you're showing that you're asking other people, other people will have the confidence to ask as well.

Thanks. I have one as well. Before we go to your tweets. So research shows that girls feel, you know, as valuable as boys until they are by 4 to 5 years old. When they, they feel as strong, they feel as smart, they feel equal. When they are seven, they already start feeling inferior. They don't feel as strong, don't feel smart. So that's also as parents and as upbringers, we have to be aware of that. What is it that you are saying to your boys? What is it that you're saying to your girls? Are you encouraging, you know, math and play and science. Are you, you know, kind of. So that's just one that we can all take in our interaction with even small children. And so, and then it's of course, the narrative, how do we speak to boys? How do we speak to girls? That comes in and it comes so early. You have one tweet and it's, what's it? A little more than 140 characters. And how your thought on how the best Way to leverage tools like AI to close the gender gap and make sure that women are equally represented in the future work. You got it, Jonas.

I can see that.

Hire more, promote more, lose less. Hashtag womenleaders, Hashtag learnability.

Love it.

Oh, you go.

No, no, no, go ahead.

I'm working on getting it down.

Go ahead, go ahead.

No, please, please, please. 140 characters, very.

2019. When ethics and technology come to the center, women have to lead here.

Hashtag women who lead.

Hashtag women who lead.

You got it down, Alan?

Sure. So. We rely more and more on machines helping us make good choices. Women need to be there to help machines make good choices.

Lovely. That's really good. While there are more men than women in the workforce, there's no better time to be a woman in the workforce. I'm optimistic for the future.

Hashtag WEF19. Thanks.

There we go.

So. I don't know about you, I feel very inspired. I also feel less anxious because we got good people on it and we got good people on it to really look at consciously how do we close that gender gap? You get now 15 seconds to think about what you're going to go home and do.

Michelle?

Yes, please. Thank you so much.

I can say write it down to yourself, go home and do it. But. And I also urge you not to let this conversation stop here because you know, words that not lead to actions are worthless. So really take it home and look at what in your situation, in your company, in your government, in your situation, your family, what is it that you can do to make sure that women are equally included and leading in a global workforce and in general. So women Deliver has a little occasion where we can be discussed more. We are the hosts, or I'm the host with Prime Minister Trudeau of the world's largest conference on gender equality in 132 days. Not that we are counting or anything like that, but it's 7,000 people on site in Vancouver, Canada, and 100,000 off site. And one of the discussions we're going to have is in the private sector pre conference is about the future work because we really need to keep the not only conversation going, but the action growing. So I encourage you and invite you to join us in Vancouver or online for those debates and really to take action on this because it takes all of us. It's everybody's business. It can't be business as usual. Thanks a lot. If we scale up the status quo, we'll never see the change we need. Thanks a lot to a great panel. Thanks a lot to a great audience.