When you light one candle from another, you don't diminish the first; rather, you double the light in the room.
Rumina Velshi
CNSC President & CEO
Today, on International Women’s Day, this could not ring more true.
This year’s campaign theme is #BalanceforBetter. How is it possible that in this day and age, we still don’t live in a world of gender balance and equal rights?
It seems that gender inequality has been ingrained into our DNA. Many societies are built on structures that promote inequality and discourage gender balance, where women are behind in their rights to vote, hold credit cards in their own names, work in civil service or drive cars. In some places, if you’re of a certain generation you were told girls just can’t be good at math’s.
Great strides in achieving gender equality have been made, but there is a lot of catching up to do. Women are still not represented equally in decision making roles, earn less money, and still tend to take on the majority of household chores. Echoes of conscious bias tell us women are underrepresented in many fields of technology and science. Is it true? According to a report published on the UNESCO website ‘less than 30% of the world’s researchers are women’, the study also found that female researchers ‘publish less than men, are paid less and don’t progress as far as men do in their careers.’
While it may take years to shift generational unconscious biases for the world at large, we asked ourselves, what can we do now and how can we celebrate the successes made by women, while the world calls for gender balance?
We spoke to several influential women, across a variety of industries, including tech, science, medicine, and more, please click through the individual Q&As to read their colourful, straight-from -the-heart answers on achieving #BalanceforBetter.
An interview with Louise Butler, Global Head of Brand Protection at Diageo
An interview with Lisa A. Haile, J.D., Ph.D., Partner, DLA Piper LLP
An interview with Fiona Naughton, Sr Director, Global Brand Planning PayPal, San Jose
An interview with Jenny Petering, Patent Attorney at FB Rice
An interview with Prof Tiziana Rossetto, Professor of Earthquake Engineering, UCL
An interview with Elizabeth (Libby) Zinke, Partner, Lee & Hayes
We also spoke to Susan Miller, small business founder & owner and Dr Samantha Deacon, Consultant Paediatric Radiologist.
Thanks to all the women who took part in our interview series for International Women's Day, we enjoyed hearing your thoughts on breaking new ground, gender equality, and the power of all-inclusive innovation.