World Betting on India and Power of Half a Billion
Closing the gender
gap will add about $28 trillion to the world’s GDP by 2025
Andrea Jung, the first Asian-American woman to become
CEO of a Fortune 500 company, told an audience of woman achievers that the
world was betting on India to take the initiative to empower its half a billion
women as it makes extraordinary changes at a dizzying pace elsewhere.
“Fix it here,” the former CEO of Avon Corp. and the
current CEO of microlender Grameen America, said in her keynote address at the
ET Women’s Forum in Mumbai on Friday.
“I mean, the world is betting on India,” she said.
“You’re making such extraordinary change at a dizzying pace. So, on this issue
of powering the half billion (of women in the population), on all of these
issues that still remain in terms of women’s empowerment, fix it here. You can
do it faster than anybody else. If not here in India, where?”
As one of the first women to break the glass ceiling
and occupy a US Inc. boardroom seat, Jung acknowledged that India had set an
example on this front but more needed to be done.
“I know in India it’s mandatory that all companies
have one woman on the board,” she said. “That is progress and is a good start.
It’s not the end because I can tell you from experience, having been the only
woman on boards, it’s not enough. There is strength in numbers… One is not
enough, but the gender gap is not just a gap in the boardroom or in the
C-suite. It still permeates unfortunately in so many levels of society.”
Grameen America is a microfinance venture on the
lines of the venture pioneered by Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh that empowered
women by giving small loans.
Citing Coca-Cola chairman and friend Muhtar Kent,
Jung said the most powerful emerging market in the world was not a country. “If
it were a country you would be right here (India) where we’re standing, but the
most powerful emerging market in the world is women--they are still
underserved,” she said. “They do not receive the same financial capital in the
United States.”
Jung explained her case with numbers. “One US dollar
out of $23, that is 4% of dollars going to entrepreneurship in the United
States of America in 2016, went to women,” she said. “That’s hard to believe,
but when we look at health care, or at education, equal pay is 78 cents (for a
woman) on $1 (for a male) for the same job in the United States of America.
That has gone up by one penny from 77 cents several years ago, but it is still
78 cents on $1.”
Closing this gap will be a game changer, she said,
citing a McKinsey report that said this will add $28 trillion to the world’s
GDP by 2025. “So, it’s simple mathematics. It’s the only way for societal
progress,” she said.
Jung spoke of her experience as new company boss and
the gender stereotypes she had to battle.
“25 years ago, even when I had risen all the way to
the top, I would walk into rooms in the US, Asia, Latin America and Europe and
often people would not be expecting a young 39-year-old Asian-American woman,”
she said. “They would say, why don’t you just wait here and when your bosses
come we’ll start the meeting--very nicely and respectfully I had to say. That’s
fine, we can wait for them but I’m the boss,” she said to audience laughter.
Jung said she was a proud descendant of Chinese
immigrants who grew up in a traditional Asian household. “My grandparents came
from China, and they got off the boat in America.”
They couldn’t speak English and had little money.
“They were clearly in poverty,” she said. “My
grandmother, not my grandfather, was able to access a small microloan. There
was no Grameen but she accessed the microloan as she knew how to cut hair and
so she started a (hair) salon. One generation later, my father went to MIT, two
generations later…”
Satish.John
ET19MAR18
No comments:
Post a Comment