Clik here to view.
Alison McClean, UN Women MCO Caribbean Representative as she delivered remarks.
The private sector has a central role to play in achieving gender equality and women’s equality.
This comment was made by Alison McClean, UN Women MCO-Caribbean Representative, as she delivered remarks during the KPMG Network of Women Cocktail event that took place at the Sandy Lane Country Club last Wednesday night.
McClean highlighted that achieving gender equality called for innovative solutions for women and girls, and “Who knows better about innovation than the private sector.”
“Private sector companies drive gains in productivity, competitiveness and innovation by developing policies and practices to improve gender equality at the workplace and developing gender responsive procurement and sourcing for women owned businesses. The goals of the 2030 agenda cannot be achieved unless women and girls are on equal footing with men and boys and unless we have the private sector onboard,” she said.
“In addition to gender equality being a fundamental and invaluable human right, women and girls’ empowerment is essential to expanding economic growth, promoting social development and critically enhancing business performance.”
She highlighted that the full incorporation of women capacities into labour forces would add quite a few percentage points to national growth rates, and further investing in women empowerment produced a double dividend of benefiting women, children and the society.
However, despite this knowledge, McClean reported that while research suggested that the private sector was increasingly recognising that advancing gender equality through business operations and value chains meant better talent, high productivity, more customers and a stronger bottom line, progress remained “spotty”.
“Research by the World Economic Forum suggests that at today’s pace it would take 108 years to resolve the economic gender gap globally, thus the time is now for businesses and markets to scale up actions, change practices and embrace gender equality initiatives,” she said.
She believed that one of the ways that the private sector could seek to promote gender equality in the workforce was to consider partnering with investors, pension funds, banks and other financial institutions, in order to develop products that could help and engage women.
