"People and their talents are among the core drivers of sustainable, long-term economic growth. If half of these talents are underdeveloped or underutilized, growth and sustainability will be compromised. Moreover, there is a compelling and fundamental values case for empowering women: women represent one-half of the global population—they deserve equal access to health, education, earning power and political representation." - K.Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum.
Over the last several years legation of women on corporate boards has revised up across most of the markets and market capitalizations in contempt of gender diversity quotas existence. It is interesting to note that markets with gender diversity quotas are represented with higher female board proportion than those without mandatory quotas.
Since 2008 proportion of women in management body has increased in all presented index firms. The Norwegian OBX Total Return Index has the highest 37.9 "Female Percentage" among all indexes and the lowest 8.3 % is represented by Indian S&P CNX Nifty 50 companies. There should make a point of index step change - the percentage of women on boards in India has risen approximately twofold from 4.4% to 8.3% whenever "Female Percentage" of OBX Total Return Index had escalated from 33 % to 37.7 % in 2012 and has been growing by 0,01 % each year to 2014.
As already mentioned, for the recent period from 2008 to 2014 women participation has increased in all index firms in all markets:
- percentage of women on boards has risen proportionally by about 3 % for index firms in non-quota markets
- in quota markets, large capital firms have the highest proportion of women on boards and the largest increases in gender diversity over the 4 year period analysed from 2011 to 2014. Such statistics can be explained by law requirements in these countries
- the highest "Female Percentage" was and remains in the household & personal products industry and the lowest was in the energy industry
- the percentage of new female nominees has almost doubled in the past seven years at U.S. large capital companies.
Politics sphere also touches upon a gender diversity. Percentage of women growing as more and more women have risen to positions of power. During the last two decades, the share of women parliamentarians in the world has doubled, increasing from 10.8 percent in 1997 to 21.2 percent in 2016.
Politics has long been considered as a 'man's world.' Even today, women remain significantly underrepresented in legislative and executive branches of government globally despite research that suggests a strong connection between women in leadership and economic and democratic gains.Today one-fifth of the world's parliamentarians and less than one quarter of national leaders are women. Rwanda, Cuba and Bolivia have the highest share of women parliamentarians, however, Europe has traditionally maintained the highest representation of women in government. As of June 2016, the ratio of men and women lawmakers in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, and...
Global intelligence on the future of the world in the palm of your hand KurzweilAI News Date of Event: Wednesday, October 28, 2015 Description: The Center for Future Studies NEF of the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazilian Node of the Milennium Project, will be presenting the SOF. The Millennium Project connects futurists around the world to improve global foresight. It is now an independent non-profit global participatory think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project...
In relation to Barack Obama's recent visit, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a wide-sweeping reform to address the female foeticide problem, which has been growing in India over the last few decades. As fetus imaging technology has developed, a great number of pregnant women started checking the sex of their unborn children in India. If it is a girl, they simply terminate the pregnancy. As a result, while overall ratio of females to males (feminity ratio) in India is gradually improving, the same ratio among newborn babies is deteriorating dramatically. In mid-1970s there was about 94 newborn girls per 100 boys, and now it is...
Female foeticide is an ever-growing menace in Indian societies, and there is ample evidence. Censuses and surveys bring about seriously threatening statistics and figures. According to the latest Census 2011, the overall sex ratio in India is 940 females per 1000 males. This may seem insignificant – why’s 60 less girls such a big issue? However, consider the massive population of India of over 1.22 billion, and do your math right and you’ll see the gravity of the situation. A deficit of 60 females per 1000 males, translates into a deficit of about 37 million (3.7 crore) females in India – and that is a huge figure. In a natural world,...