— By Irene Natividad

After the Global Summit of Women closed in Basel on July 6th, I headed excitedly to Lyon, France for the Women’s World Cup Final game between the U.S. and the Netherlands team with my husband, an avowed soccer aficionado who had been tracking the progress of the various women’s teams and ‘briefing’ me prior to the Summit. I can’t begin to tell you my pride in the U.S. team’s victory, not just because I saw their athletic prowess in display, but because they put an issue that has hurt women worldwide on to the public arena through sports.

Even as they were being awarded first place in Lyon, they yelled out ‘Equal Pay’, given the large disparity between’s the Women’s World Cup ‘purse’ of $39 million to be divided among all the women’s teams vs. the Men’s World Cup ‘purse’ of $400 million on the world stage; and in the U.S. between a base pay of $15,000 for women soccer players vs. $50,000 for men. So, even as they competed during these games, they also took the courageous track of suing the U.S. Soccer Federation, an act which became increasingly commented on by newscasters during the World Cup games. As they were being feted with a ticker tape parade down New York’s Wall Street post-victory, fans waiting for them were now the ones chanting ‘Equal Pay,’ signaling their support for the team’s fight for equitable compensation. This Sunday, a corporate sponsor (Secret) took out a full page ad in the New York Times making their equal pay case for them, while allocating more than half a million dollars to be divided among the players as a contribution towards what these World Cup winners should receive.

For a long time women’s rights advocate like me, this was, in my view, a tipping point. Basically, the U.S. women’s soccer team is giving us ‘tail wind’ on the issue of the pay gap. Now pay equity is in the public discourse as opposed to just being a topic for a limited group of people who fight for it. Whether they win their suit or not, negotiate effectively or not, the U.S. Women’s Soccer team has already done a remarkable job of alerting your average person that gender shouldn’t determine what one gets paid.

While I revel in this ‘outing’ of unequal pay through these women athletes, more still needs to be done by governments and business to create a level playing field for women. Are there any winning strategies on this issue? What can be done by a government or a company that is replicable so we don’t all start from zero? To answer these questions, I’ve worked over the years to provide a platform for exchanges of solutions, best practices addressing the economic challenges that women face, and that vehicle became and continues to be the Global Summit of Women.

Why “global”? Because no one country has a corner on good ideas. The problems women face are actually pretty similar across borders – integrating work at home and work at work; earning the same as a man for the same job; ending gender discrimination in the workplace that prevent women’s access to leadership roles and makes them vulnerable to harassment or sexual misconduct by powerful supervisors.

A major factor underlying the challenges women face is the fact that we are not in charge – not of countries, companies and major public institutions. I often think women are basically ‘immigrants’ to the corporate and professional world, whose culture, systems and language have been designed by and for men, who remain resolutely in charge. While women have overpopulated colleges and universities, which have landed many at the mid-management level, few are called to partnerships, senior management, let alone CEO status. Only 3% of CEOs of Western Europe’s blue chip companies are women. Only 5% of S&P 500 companies in my country, the U.S., have women at the helm. In a report I released at the 2019 Summit in Basel on “Women Directors in the World’s Largest Banks and Financial Services Companies”, we found a higher percentage of board seats held by women (24.7%) in these financial institutions than the percentage of women in senior management (14.8%). The only way I can explain this anomaly is that some companies find it easier to bring in women of achievement from the outside to the corporate boardroom, than it is to ‘grow’ one internally. In the U.S, this discrepancy is difficult to explain, since the majority of accounting degrees at every level are earned by women and the majority of mid-level managers as well as employees in banks and financial services, companies are also female. So, there’s a very large talent pool but no pipeline to leadership.

Part of the Summit’s response is basically to fix the leadership gap by providing some ‘tools’ women can use. Teach them how to negotiate better, network wider internally and externally, communicate better, work in teams, develop their personal ‘branding’, find a mentor or better yet, a sponsor skills-building sessions which we include at each Summit. All of this is indeed helpful in educating women how to navigate within a basically alien land where the work culture must be learned to survive and to thrive.

In the end, it isn’t women who need to be fixed – it’s longstanding policies and institutions. Well, Europe has taken the lead in addressing this leadership gap by fixing the system for recruiting board directors. Propelled by Norway, quotas for women on corporate boards are now mandated in 28 countries. It is a move abhorred by companies and many women achievers themselves who want to be ‘chosen’ for their abilities and not because of a law. As a strategy, however, quotas have worked. Among the financial institutions based in countries with quotas, the percentage of women directors is at 36.1%, higher than the industry average of 27.4%. So while Europe continues to stabilize its economy post-recession, it is also changing the face of board leadership going forward.

‘Quota’ is a dirty word in the U.S., so this legislative strategy will never work there, but there is a simple thing that can be done – to define achievement in terms of results as opposed to ‘face time’ at the office. Some companies are already doing this, but more need to come on board. Flexibility is valued by male and female employees alike, so this change in where and how work is done can benefit everyone and not stigmatize women. This will lead to a change in work culture that will enable women to weave work and personal responsibilities together without gaps in their career that costs them in the long run, including leadership roles.

For now, however, meritocracy hasn’t worked for women as exemplified by the U.S. women soccer players, who must fight for equal pay even after winning four World Cups, one Olympics and having 24.5 million TV viewers of their final game just in the U.S. alone. Excellent results still don’t yield equity for women. So, we must keep meeting at the annual Global Summit of Women not only to share what might work to advance women, but also to be inspired and to breathe the air of possibility as we hear from and connect with women who have broken that proverbial glass ceiling in every corner of the world.

Irene Natividad is President of the Global Summit of Women, and also of GlobeWomen Research & Education Institute.