The end of the conference...

...but the beginning of action steps.

We've heard about the gender gaps, we've seen the research, we know the business case, we've learned what other countries have done to close gender gaps. Now it is up to everyone to make sure that other people know about these gaps--and that we take concrete steps to close them.

What will you do?









Thank you so much to conference chairs Iris Bohnet, Laura Liswood and Saadia Zahidi. Thank you to the Women and Public Policy Program at HKS and to the Council of Women World Leaders staffs. It was a privilege to be a part of the program and to share my thoughts over the past two days. I hope that it was helpful--and more importantly, I hope that you feel galvanized to action.

"Breaking the Glass Ceiling from the Top"

I will state my bias right up front: I worked with Catalyst over the summer and I absolutely consider myself a Catalysta. And so should you.

Ilene Lang, the president and CEO of Catalyst, just shared a small sliver of the research Catalyst is doing that is changing the makeup of organizations and board leadership. And as she says--even though the values-based argument and a person's sense of fair play may be the most important motivating reason for addressing gender gaps-- financial and "bottom line" measures are a good way to help sweep others along.

So here's the bottom line: it just makes good business sense (and that's in a dollars sense of the word). According to Catalyst research, Fortune 500 companies with higher percentages of women on their boards see equity returns 53 percent higher than those companies with the fewest number of women on their boards, as well as 42 percent higher return on sales and 66 percent higher return on investment.

Granted, this is a correlation, not a causation. But given the other compelling reasons--not to mention our current economy--what part of 15.2% F500 board seats held by women makes any sense (or cents) at all?

"Filling the pipeline is not enough."

Most likely, the women and men sitting in the conference room right now all know this already, but it bears repeating. Thanks, Barbara Annis, for reminding us.

Organizations, are you paying attention?

Math is Fun.

Scott Page, professor at the University of Michigan and a self-described mathematical wonk, just used complex mathematical theories to explain why diversity equals greater efficiency and productivity (and are those not the reasons for which businesses exist??). And you do not need to be a math wonk to understand the basic ideas.

His conclusions ("levers"), from metaphor to mathematics, on why diversity is so relevant (and so important):

1. Prediction: different people have different models and patterns through which we see the world (the official term "Pile Sort"). The greater the diversity, the lower the error.

This boils down to: crowd error=average error-diversity (I promise his math was much fancier than mine, but the basic idea still holds).

2. Production: If you assume that production depends on types of workers, that each has positive but diminishing returns, and there no synergies, on average the more types of workers the more productivity you'll see.

The basic idea: if you don’t know the problem, you should at least know to be diverse.

3. Robustness: An update on Darwin's survival of the fittest--Fisher’s theorem, which says that the more variation in the current population, the higher the fitness in the next population.

The basic idea: this applies to people...and to companies.

4. Innovation: Experimental tests have shown that when a myriad of different (smart) agents with similar backgrounds are put to a task and compared to a randomly selected group of agents (not previously tested for intelligence) with diverse perspectives and heuristics, the diverse group almost always outperforms the group of the best by a substantial margin.

The basic idea: Different people, different (and better) results.

Introducing the Student Blogger at the Conference

My name is Varina Winder and I am a second year student in the Masters in Public Policy program here at Harvard's Kennedy School. I am also the co-chair for the Women and Gender Caucus at HKS, an auditor in Iris Bohnet's Closing the Global Gender Gap class, and a summer 2010 recipient of the Roy Family Fellowship. I spent the Fellowship with Catalyst, writing a white paper on creating Employee Resource Groups for women talent in Latin American businesses (the blog for which can be found here).

I was absolutely thrilled to receive an invitation from the Women and Public Policy Program (or WAPPP, as it is affectionately known)--both to the Business Case Conference itself and to sharing my thoughts on the conference's progression via this blog. In the interest of full disclosure, I am very much interested in the nexus of gender, business, policy and politics and I bring a heavy bias with me to the conference.

I absolutely believe that there is not only a moral and ethical case for bringing gender and diversity to organizations, politics and societal discussions, but that there is also a business case. Thus, the conference, to me, will serve as a way to provide additional evidence for my convictions and to hear the thoughts of people from a variety of backgrounds--from Goldman Sachs to the World Economic Forum to academia to the White House Project. I am also excited to see my summer boss, Ilene Lang, and to meet some of my biggest role models (including, hopefully, Laura Liswood, the Secretary General for the Council of Women World Leaders and one of the Conference Chairs).

I will be posting my thoughts and reactions to the panel discussions and overall conference over the next two days. Thanks for staying tuned!