APEC and Women in the Economy

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the APEC Women in the Economy summit in San Francisco. There were a number of extraordinary people who spoke, but the keynote was from Hillary Clinton (a link to her speech including a video).

Some excerpts from her speech

... will adopt a declaration for the first time in APEC’s history that will affirm this organization’s and each member economy’s commitment to improving women’s access to capital and markets, to building women’s capacities and skills, and to supporting the rise of women leaders in both the public and private sectors. .... Now there will be a temptation on the part of those observing or covering this summit, perhaps on the part of those of us attending it as well, to say that our purpose is chiefly to advance the rights of women, to achieve justice and equality on women’s behalf. .... I believe our goal is even bolder, one that extends beyond women to all humankind. The big challenge we face in these early years of 21^st century is how to grow our economies and ensure shared prosperity for all nations and all people. We want to give every one of our citizens, men and women alike, young and old alike, greater opportunity to find work, to save and spend money, to pursue happiness ultimately to live up to their own God-given potentials. ... a McKinsey survey, a third of executives reported increased profits as a result of investments in empowering women in emerging markets. Research also demonstrates a strong correlation between higher degrees of gender diversity in the leadership ranks of business and organizational performance. The World Bank finds that by eliminating discrimination against female workers and managers, managers could significantly increase productivity per worker by 25 to 40 percent.

I was inspired at the level of commitment to integrating women productively into the economy, as declared by Hillary Clinton. If you read her entire speech, she articulates the business case as to why we want women participating, something that I hold dear.

I was attending APEC to participate on a panel organized by Marvell's co founder Weili Dai. Weili wrote a great piece in the mercury news about Women in the Economy.

The panel included not only Weili Dai, but Deborah Forte, President of Scholastic Media; Kathy Hill, Senior Vice President of Cisco; California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren; Professor Claire Tomlin, Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley College of Engineering; and me. Ginger Lew, Senior Counselor, White House National Economic Council and Small Business Administration Administrator, introduced the panel.

The panel received a fair amount of press coverage including this one from the Daily Herald.

What was most compelling to me was that Corporate Executives, including Kathy Hill from Cisco, and Weili Dai received a lot of coverage as they articulated the need for women in our technology economy, include the following quote:

The lack of women in technology will hinder U.S. companies’ global competitiveness, leaving a valuable source of female workers untapped, Cisco Systems Inc. executive Kathy Hill said at a recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco.

This conference included women from around the world whose passion and job is to create the opportunity for women to thrive in their own economy. I left inspired, and with hope that there is global momentum to have women at the table of business, and perhaps even of technology.