But a growing body of evidence demonstrates women and gender-diverse people are disproportionately vulnerable to the changing climate and the consequences it brings.

Women are 14 times more likely to die in a climate change-related disaster than men. Women represent 80% of people displaced by extreme weather.

Although extreme weather events such as fires and floods might appear to affect everyone equally, the evidence shows crises exploit existing social faultlines. This means people who are already socially marginalised suffer exacerbated impacts.

What does this look like?

Women are acutely impacted by environmental crises because they experience pre-existing social and economic disadvantage. Another reason is they tend to take responsibility for caring for other vulnerable groups, such as children or older people.

In a meta-analysis of 130 studies, 68% found women were more impacted by climate-linked health issues than men. Maternal and perinatal health is particularly effected by climate change hazards such as extreme heat. So too is the health of older women.

Most disturbingly, studies across Australia and around the world have revealed gender-based violence consistently increases during and after disasters. Both the most recent National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children and the associated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan briefly recognise this. Even still, policymakers and service providers are yet to comprehensively grapple with what this means for women in an era of multiple and compounding disasters.

The impact of climate change on housing and living is also experienced in gendered ways. The Climate Council estimates that by 2030, 520,940 Australian properties, or one in every 25, will be “high-risk” and uninsurable. Rising costs of living, homelessness and under-insured housing are all affecting Australian women, who are particularly vulnerable to losing food security and shelter.

Over 2016–21, men’s homelessness increased by 1.6% while women’s increased by just over 10%. The Australian housing crisis is being exacerbated by the climate crisis, and these impacts are distinctly gendered.

Leadership drives results

Research demonstrates women and gender-diverse people bring crucial perspectives and leadership to tackling these problems. They’re not just helpless victims.

Evidence from across a range of sectors demonstrates gender-diverse leadership results in more effective and equitable approaches. Larger numbers of women in politics and policy-making results in stronger climate action policies, more ambitious climate targets and more pro-environmental legislation. Despite this, at the COP28 climate talks in 2023, only 15 out of 140 speakers were women. Only 38% of party delegation members were women.

Gender diversity in industry leadership also yields environmental benefits. Research by the World Economic Forum shows that a 1% increase in women managers in a company results in a 0.5% decrease in carbon emissions. Boards with higher gender diversity receive higher scores on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance measures and have fewer environmental lawsuits.

Companies with more than 30% women on their boards display better climate governance, climate innovation and sustainability performance. Yet, as of 2022, women hold just one in four executive leadership positions in ASX300 companies. At the current rate of progress, it will take a century for women to constitute 40% of chief executives among ASX200 companies.

Women and gender-diverse people are also in the minority in renewable energy industries. Only around 35% of the clean energy workforce is female. These women are predominantly in jobs such as office administration, accounting and cleaning, rather than trade-qualified or engineering roles.

In the recent federal budget, the government announced $55.6 million for a Building Women’s Careers Program. It also pledged $38.2 million to increase diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and industries. These are welcome developments.

But gender inclusion and equity need to be centred in major initiates like the Future Made in Australia Plan and the Net Zero Plan. This would help achieve urgent climate change mitigation targets and to ensure the associated economic benefits are genuinely inclusive.

Deep social change will be required to adequately address these issues. This is not just a matter of making space for more women to take up leadership positions, but requires grappling with the fact gendered social and economic inequality is caused by discriminatory gender attitudes, leaving women and gender-diverse people vulnerable to environmental impacts. Moreover, the kind of unpaid care work so often performed by women has been systematically undervalued, but is foundational to our economy, society and environment.

Fuelling disaster recovery

Women also have a key role to play in preparing for and recovering from climate-fuelled disasters.

Research shows women tend to take on emotional and relational roles within communities, sustaining networks of care at the local level. Community-level care is crucial to helping local communities stay strong in the face of increasing disasters, the impacts of which often exceed the capacity of emergency responders. Our disaster response policies and agencies need to recognise the often gendered nature of community resilience work and deliberately support this kind of “soft infrastructure”.

Climate and environmental issues do not affect us all equally. Women and gender-diverse people are acutely affected. We need targeted policy responses that recognise this vulnerability. In addition, women and gender-diverse people offer distinctive and much-needed leadership styles. These approaches are urgently required if we are to rapidly transition to a renewable economy.

The gendered impact of climate change is well-recognised at the international level, including by the United Nations. Australia has ambitions to host the COP31 global climate change conference with our Pacific neighbours in 2026. To be in the running, Australia needs to demonstrate it recognises and takes seriously the gendered nature of climate and environmental issues.

Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy works for Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA). WELA has just released a new report on Gender, Climate and Environmental Justice in Australia, funded by Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and Equity Trustees.

This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original story here. 

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These were always obstacles for women who run their own businesses, long before COVID-19, especially women with small businesses and the self-employed. But the pandemic exacerbated them. 

A recent survey of 147 women entrepreneurs in Ontario by the non-profit PARO Centre for Women’s Enterprise shows that the pandemic added to the burden on women entrepreneurs, slowing their business growth and taking a toll on their mental health.  

Besides coping with pandemic-related restrictions, staffing shortages, supply chain issues and inflationary pressures familiar to most businesses, women entrepreneurs have had additional obstacles. These include gender biases when it comes to obtaining financial support for their businesses, having fewer mentors and networking opportunities than male entrepreneurs, a shortage of affordable childcare and eldercare options, which often falls on women’s shoulders, and lack of access to mental health services. 

The challenges for women entrepreneurs in rural and remote areas are even greater due to isolation, lack of proper infrastructure, unreliable internet, and lack of access to all health care services.  

Finding solutions to these problems is not just important for women entrepreneurs; it is essential for the country’s economic growth.  

Studies show women-owned businesses contribute over $150 billion to Canada’s economy and employ over 1.5 million people. Creating a climate in which women entrepreneurs can more fully participate in the economy and thrive benefits everyone.  

To foster this environment, governments at every level must eliminate systemic gender biases embedded in their policies and practices, especially around financial support for small businesses. The PARO survey revealed that the pandemic made it difficult for almost 30% of female entrepreneur respondents to meet their financial obligations. About 5% said they lost their business altogether. 

While the federal government provided financial supports to businesses during the first two years of the pandemic, many women entrepreneurs were not eligible for the supports or were reluctant to sign up for loan programs that would result in more debt.  

The federal government has also developed support programs specifically for women in business – a great first step. However, many women entrepreneurs are excluded from these programs because they do not include micro businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) or solo-preneurs (self-employed workers), which are the main business models for women entrepreneurs. 

The federal government must design support programs that specifically target micro-businesses and solo-preneurs, enabling women entrepreneurs to obtain financing more easily.  

Governments must also champion women-centred organizations that mentor women entrepreneurs, provide networking opportunities for them – and, importantly, financial support.  

Women entrepreneurs often face systemic barriers when they apply for loans or grants through traditional lending institutions, which sometimes still view women-owned businesses as a ‘hobby’ or a ‘side hustle,’ and either reject a woman’s application or attach overly stringent terms to the financing.  

Government policy changes must also address the specific barriers that Indigenous women entrepreneurs face.  

Indigenous people in Canada start businesses at a rate that is nine times higher than non-Indigenous Canadians, with women driving much of the growth. However, Indigenous women face significant obstacles, including racism, poverty, violence, and a lack of infrastructure, adequate health care and educational opportunities.  

Policies and programs to address these issues are essential, as are better access to grants and non-repayable loans, mentoring, training and networking opportunities designed for Indigenous women. 

High costs and wait lists for childcare also continue to be a major roadblock for women entrepreneurs, despite the introduction of $10-a-day childcare policies. Governments must encourage more childcare centres to register under these programs, allowing for more childcare spaces at affordable rates.  

Policies and programs to help with eldercare responsibilities must also be developed. 

Access to mental health supports is also essential. Many women responding to the PARO survey said they experienced anxiety and depression during the pandemic due to financial stress, isolation, caring for children and/or elderly family members, and worrying about how they would maintain their business.  

The federal government needs to work with municipal and provincial governments to ensure that timely and accessible mental health services are available to all Canadians, especially those living in rural, remote, and Northern communities where services are often sparse.  

Women entrepreneurs are resilient and determined, but they need a more inclusive environment to reach their full potential. Governments need to act now to eliminate the obstacles impeding women business owners. Our economy will reap the rewards. 

Rosalind Lockyer is founder and CEO of PARO Centre for Women’s Enterprise-Ontario, PARO Canada, and board member for Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada. 

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In an age of corporations taking stands on social issues, some companies reacted to the news with strong statements supporting a woman’s right to choose. 

Before the draft decision leaked, a growing list of companies, including Apple, Salesforce, Citigroup and Yelp, had already spoken out against new state laws restricting abortions or announced they would change their benefits to help employees travel to ensure access. 

On the same day of the leak in early May, Amazon announced that it would provide up to $4,000 to employees to travel for medical treatments they couldn’t get within 100 miles of their homes. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Starbucks, followed suit, saying they would also cover travel costs.

“It is a great thing that companies are willing to do this, and I think it really defines what social responsibility for companies looks like,” Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women, recently told Fortune.

Though Amazon has said it will help employees in affected states access abortion services, Popular Information reports that the e-retail giant has donated almost US$1 million to anti-abortion political committees since 2016. Some of the other top contributors to anti-abortion committees include AT&T, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, CVS, Google, Walmart and Verizon.

It is a great thing that companies are willing to do this, and I think it really defines what social responsibility for companies looks like.

-Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women

And many of the United States’ largest companies have stayed quiet on the issue. After the draft decision was leaked, Yahoo Finance reached out to the 72 largest corporations with women CEOs to see how they planned to respond to potential changes in abortion laws (and whether they planned to expand their benefits to employees in affected states). Only two responded: CVS and Citigroup. 

Even though more than 61% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, many companies are reluctant to comment on the issue. Some analysts say corporations may be waiting to see the final decision before jumping in. But others believe that Disney’s treatment by Republicans in Florida after it (belatedly) voiced its opposition to the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill could be having a chilling effect. The Florida State government stripped Disney of a special operating status. 

By no surprise (and likely fearing the same kind of backlash from the right), Disney has been silent on the draft decision on abortion. 

Citigroup may be about to face a similar punitive action from state legislators in Texas for its policy covering travel expenses for employees seeking out-of-state abortions. Texas State Representative Briscoe Cain has said he will introduce a bill that bars Citigroup from underwriting municipal bonds in the state unless it backtracks on its policy. 

While many companies may not want to wade into the latest hot-button topic in the United States’ culture wars, they may have little choice in the weeks and months ahead, as the midterms approach, and reproductive rights are sure to be a ballot box issue. 

“Employers who profess to uphold abortion rights need to prepare a plan for supporting their employees as they carry the fight to the next stage this summer and into Election Day 2022,” writes Tina Casey on TriplePundit. 

UPDATE, June 28, 2022:
Since the Supreme Court released its decision overturning Roe v. Wade, more companies have come forward saying they will cover travel expenses for any employee unable to access abortion services in their state. On Friday, Disney, Meta and others announced they would adopt such a policy, as trigger bans started to go into effect in a number of states. Patagonia went a step further, promising it would pay for the bail of any employee arrested while peacfully protesting the court’s decision.

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Born and raised in a small village near Sidon, Lebanon, Dagher immigrated to Canada a little over thirty years ago during the last few years of the country’s crushing civil war. When she arrived in 1989 as a 17-year-old new mother, she was fleeing political strife and a challenging arranged marriage. She didn’t speak a word of English.

“I’m incredibly proud of all the hardships I’ve gone through from being born and raised in a war zone and spending most of my early life in a bomb shelter to coming here and learning everything from scratch.”

Dagher had studied accounting and finance in Lebanon at Middle East College, but finding a job in Canada was initially challenging. Her earliest role in telecommunications was as a Bell telemarketer. By the end of her fifteen years there, she had climbed through the ranks to a director post.

“I don’t have a master’s degree in technology or engineering or anything like that, I was just determined to succeed no matter what.”

Dagher left Bell to take an executive sales director job at Dell Canada before eventually becoming vice president of the computer firm’s data storage division. In 2019, she joined Cisco Systems Canada—the networking hardware and telecommunications equipment and service provider—as president.

“I got to where I am today because of my determination and the passion I have for technology and people,” says Dagher.

This passion for people shows up in her leadership. “My style is very simple,” she remarks, “it’s servant leadership.” She believes in empowering her team and is adamant about the importance of building and supporting the people she works with. “People join organizations, but people leave people,” she says matter-of-factly.

But she agrees that it’s not that easy for women to succeed in the tech sector. While it’s even more challenging for someone with her earlier history, the industry has a long way to go. Dagher’s three-pronged recipe for success for women in the corporate world: advocate for yourself, find a mentor and raise your hand.

“I’m incredibly proud of all the hardships I’ve gone through from being born and raised in a war zone and spending most of my early life in a bomb shelter to coming here and learning everything from scratch.”

She also stresses the importance that failure had in her life, clarifying that she was always keen to learn from it. “Giving up,” she goes on, “was never an option.”

Dagher likes to pay those lessons forward. Case in point: She heads a Cisco career development group called Connected Women that makes sure young female employees and interns feel like they belong and can have influence within the company.  “Our summer internship program is very well paid and we’re very proud of it. We fly them out to San Jose [Cisco headquarters] for a week or two of training and they actually work on innovative challenges,” she explains. The competitive program last year saw 700 applicants for 22 positions.

And with her own experience with forced displacement, Dagher made it a point for Cisco Canada to be involved with Lifeline Syria—a not-for-profit organization that assists in sponsoring, welcoming, and resettling Syrian refugees in Canada—by training and hiring refugees in the tech sector.

These days, the private sector’s foot-dragging on environmental issues is what worries her most. “We’re not moving fast enough. Not enough companies are jumping on it, and a lot are still parking it in the back.”

In an era of accelerated progress, technology is at the heart of every industry disrupting business as usual. If, as a tech corporation, you’re not thinking about the environment and sustainability in relation to your technology, Dagher argues it will be very difficult to succeed.

“At Cisco we take a lot of pride in ensuring we are part of giving back from a responsibility perspective.” For one, Cisco’s Bridge to Possible campaign highlights all the ways in which the company aims to connect people, places, ideas and things through a secure network, and to minimize emissions generated by transportation. That includes enabling workers at companies around the world to work from home and call in through WebEx technology instead of driving into the office.

“We’re not moving fast enough. Not enough companies are jumping on [sustainability], and a lot are still parking it in the back.”

Cisco’s sustainable procurement practices aim to eliminate one million tons of greenhouse gases from the company’s supply chain by next year. Circularity, like for other tech companies, is also a critical point. The company’s products are designed to be maintained and upgraded, ensuring that they remain within the market and away from landfills. Nearly 14,000 metric tonnes of those products were returned and recycled last fiscal year.

Dagher’s achievements are hard to miss. She was named 2019’s Woman of the Year by Women in Communications and Technology—a national association that provides opportunities for networking and professional development for women in these notoriously male-dominated industries.

She is the kind of successful immigrant that Canada loves to embrace. She worked tirelessly within the challenging corporate system to rise to the top and now makes sure to help others in return. “I’m a very proud Lebanese and a grateful Canadian,” Dagher likes to say. As an Arab immigrant woman myself, Dagher is a role model. I tell her that I recently obtained my Canadian citizenship and that interviewing her is moving for me. “Ahlan wa sahlan ou alf mabrouk [welcome and congratulations in Arabic]” she responds warmly.

“You can be anything you want to be here if you have determination.”

The post Women in leadership: Cisco’s Rola Dagher says giving up was never an option appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Analysis by Corporate Knights with Thomson Reuters Datastream shows that the average age of a Global 100 company is 87 years, while the average age of companies in the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) is 63 years.

And the Global 100 index, which is equally-weighted and mirrors the industry composition of the MSCI ACWI on a percentage basis, outperforms the benchmark, says Corporate Knights CEO and editor-in-chief Toby Heaps. “From inception (February 1, 2005) to December 31, 2018, the Global 100 made a net investment return of 127.35%, compared to 118.27% for the MSCI ACWI,” he points out.

The Global 100 companies have better governance than their peers – they have a lower CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio than the ACWI (76:1 compared to 140:1), an important measure in an age of increasing income inequality and growing concern about it. They also pay more taxes, on average 18% of EBITDA compared to 16%. Companies perceived to be avoiding paying their fair share of taxes through financial engineering are coming under growing pressure from consumers, policymakers and regulators.

The Global 100 firms are greener, too – they have double the carbon productivity (weighted average of $238k in revenue per tonne of CO2e vs. $157k for the MSCI ACWI ETF); and derive much more of their revenues from clean (positive green or social impact) goods and services (26% of total revenues vs. 9%).

They also have more women on their boards (average 27% vs. 19% for the MSCI ACWI ETF); and are more likely, by some distance, to have a link between sustainability measures and executive pay (58% have a link against 19% for the ACWI).

A fifth of the list (20) are IT companies, with the financial sector the second biggest (17 companies), followed by consumer discretionary, health care and industrials. Collectively, these five sectors account for almost three quarters of the Global 100.

While the U.S. is the largest single country represented, with 22 companies, Europe accounts for just over half of the list (52). There are no companies from China or India.

The Global 100 methodology has seen further refinements this year, with all companies ranked against Corporate Knights Industry Group peers based on a modified FactSet taxonomy rather than, as previously, against GICS Industry peers, to allow for better “apples to apples” comparisons.

And this year, half of every company’s score is determined by its clean revenues. Last year, only a few sectors were ranked in this way – energy, utilities and financials – but a fleshed out taxonomy and more complete data now enables all sectors to be evaluated on this basis.

Winner Chr. Hansen is profiled in a separate article, but other stand-out companies include Banco do Brasil (#8), whose US$50 billion green loan book accounts for almost one third of its total loan book – far and away the highest percentage for any bank.

Mining group Teck Resources (#37), traditionally seen as a steel-making coal company, is reinvesting its profits to build up its copper and zinc units, both elements being crucial to the low carbon economy.
Neste (#3), an oil and gas refiner from Finland (one of seven Finnish companies in the index) now earns 25% of its annual US$11.7 billion in revenues from refining biofuels and aims to lift that to 50% by 2020. The company’s five-year return of 328% to September 2018 compares to 7.25% for the S&P Global Oil Index.

Click here to return to the 2019 Global 100 landing page.

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Women are increasingly driving the global economy. According to a 2009 Harvard Business Review article, women controlled $20 trillion in consumer spending each year. Morgan Stanley reports that women control $11.2 trillion of the United States’ investable assets, too — assets held in one’s bank account, stocks, bonds and certificates of deposit.

Furthermore, investing that takes environmental, social and governance — ESG — issues into account has grown in popularity as women seek more meaningful investment options than traditional investors have. Commenting on a recent surveyof high-net-worth individuals, Jackie VanderBrug, a senior vice president and investment strategist at U.S. Trust, said just over half of respondents expressed interest in social and environmental impacts of their investments. For women and millennials, that rate jumped to 73 percent, according to VanderBrug — suggesting that as women invest more, ESG investing could become the norm.

Increased market attention to social and environmental issues is helping these issues gain broader public recognition. But the most important thing we can do to maximize women’s influence on finance and sustainability is to place more women in positions of power in boardrooms and C-suites.

One study from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, that looked at ESG categories across more than 1,500 companies found that companies with more women on their boards were more likely to address and reduce environmental risk through actions such as measuring carbon emissions, avoiding biodiversity disturbance and investing in renewable energy.

At the executive level we see companies such as Estée Lauder Companies Inc. — where women make up close to one-third of the executive team — committed to managing and understanding environmental, social and economic impacts throughout their value and supply chain, focusing on energy, waste, recycling and workplace safety. In a message to stakeholders, Pamela Gill Alabaster, vice president of global corporate responsibility for Estée Lauder, wrote that the company is planning to implement new governance structures, develop climate change policies and weave sustainability across its brands. Alabaster went on to note that Estée Lauder is continuing to increase how it transparently communicates on progress with its stakeholders, a critical component of long-term corporate improvement.

Estée Lauder is not alone. A Barclay’s report in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit highlights that gender diversity — specifically, the presence of women in senior management — is a main indicator of a company’s commitment to ESG criteria.

Estée Lauder is also one of the leading companies on the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Index Fund, headed by Sallie Krawcheck, former president of the Global Wealth & Investment Management division of Bank of America and a notable promoter of gender diversity in the workplace. Krawcheck is working to ensure that the positive influence of women within companies grows. The Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Index Fundis the first of its kind dedicated to companies highly rated for advancing women. Every company in the fund has at least one woman on the board and 99 percent have two or more, resulting in women holding 32 percent of total board positions and 25 percent in senior management — compared with worldwide averages of 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

According to Kathleen McQuiggan, senior vice president of global women’s strategies for investment firm Pax World Management LLC — part of a partnership forming Pax Ellevate Management LLC, which manages the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Index Fund — “If you have more women on the board, you see more women in senior management. It’s a simple cause-and-effect scenario.”

That’s exactly what the Thirty Percent Coalition is trying to accomplish. The group of over 70 women’s organizations, institutional investors, corporate governance experts and others is committed to placing women in 30 percent of board seats across public companies by 2016. Sponsors of the coalition include big brands with big dollars, such as Avon, Wal-Mart and Prudential. Members include representatives from companies such as Trillium Asset Management, an ESG-focused investment management firm, and the Sustainability Group, a wealth management firm that centers on a commitment to sustainability and human dignity founded by Amy Domini, an investment advisor focused on ethical investing.

In 2014, for the third time, investors who support the 30 Percent Coalition — and who represent more than US$3 trillion in assets — sent letters to 100 prominent companies calling on them to boost the presence of women on their board. Efforts so far have resulted in about 20 major companies adding women to their boardrooms.

Meanwhile, it’s never been easier for consumers to support companies committed to gender diversity — and the ecological and social consciousness it brings with it. The BUY UP Index, for example, is an app that rates brands and the companies behind them based on their gender diversity in the boardroom, C-suite and workforce as well as on their philanthropy and how they market to women. Amy-Willard Cross, founder of the BUY UP Index, states, “It’s important to bring capital to women, or to women-owned companies, not just sell us stuff.”

As more women become embedded in high-level investment, executive positions and boardroom decision-making, the conversation is shifting toward one that incorporates sustainability as the new norm. Therefore, it’s critical that those with the ability to promote gender diversity in companies continue to do so. And it’s just as important for the rest of us to put pressure on them to recognize the benefits of gender diversity. As we do, we can help usher in a future where, as U.S. Trust’s Jason Baron puts it, “no discernible distinction will exist between investors in ESG and investors in general.”

The post Want a more sustainable world? Let women lead the way. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

BNP Paribas Investment Partners, the Paris-based fund manager, is lobbying the pharma sector in support of the AllTrials campaign, which was started by U.K.-based Sense About Science, a charitable trust. The campaign is pushing for much greater transparency around clinical trials, a necessary and crucial step in the process of drug development. Unfortunately, around half of clinical trial results have never been published. Perhaps not a surprise, trials with negative results are twice as likely to remain unreported as those with positive results. At the same time, industry funded trials that have been published are much more likely than independently funded trials to show positive results. Helena Viñes Fiestas, who heads sustainability research at BNP, said some companies have faced enormous fines by not disclosing clinical trial data. As recently as 2013, several pharmaceutical firms paid over $10 billion in fines for not fully articulating secondary effects they were aware of. Companies have also been criticized for wasting significant amounts of money conducting unnecessary trials when such funds could be better directed towards research and development and trials that have greater potential.

Ottawa moves to protect Canada’s “brand” abroad

Canada is introducing a new social responsibility policy aimed at protecting the country’s positive “brand” in overseas markets, and mining and energy companies that don’t toe the line could find themselves cut off from government support. That includes financing and other supportive services from agencies such as Export Development Canada, not to mention the many Canadian embassies around the world that help companies gain a foothold in foreign markets. The news was reported in Friday’s Globe and Mail, which said that International Trade Minister Ed Fast is also appointing a new corporate social responsibility counselor with added powers to assure policy compliance. In addition, the federal government is requiring that resource companies comply with new transparency standards, by reporting, for example, payments made to foreign governments.

Viking women failing to crack glass ceiling

Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland are hailed as being more civilized societies because of the equal opportunity provided to women. As The Economist points out, the state provides world-leading coverage for childcare and maternity leave, and more women graduate from Nordic universities than men. Take a tour of their respective parliaments and women are equals or dominate the chambers, and mandatory quotas on corporate boards assure women are well represented. In the C-suite, however, and even among senior managers, women aren’t faring so well. As the magazine points out, Denmark, for one, was ranked 72^nd by the World Economic Forum when it came to the gender gap in upper management of publicly traded firms.

Barclays, MSCI launch green bond index family

Barclays and MSCI have come out with a new green bond index family that measures the global market of fixed income securities issued to fund projects and initiatives that have direct environmental benefits. Securities must pass an independent and objective assessment by MSCI ESG Research to be included in the index family. The assessment looks at how proceeds of the bond issue will be used, whether projects meet criteria, how funds will be managed, and how results will be reported. Additional fixed income index criteria are then applied to this screened universe to identify index membership on a monthly basis. “The availability of market standard indices is important in establishing clear, broadly accepted guidelines for the new issuers rapidly entering the market,” said Sean Kidney of the Climate Bonds Initiative. “The stature of Barclays and MSCI will help to bring attention to green bonds.”

NYC comptroller Scott Stringer leads board accountability project

The man who has auditing power over New York’s $75 billion annual budget and oversees the city’s five municipal pension funds – which together represent $160 billion in assets – is leading an initiative that aims to bring better corporate governance practices to the boardrooms of big U.S. corporations. Specifically, Stringer wants to leverage the huge shareholder clout that the country’s public pension funds have to push through long-needed governance changes. Corporate Knights’ managing editor Jeremy Runnalls chatted with Stringer about the Boardroom Accountability Project, which was launched last week with a coalition of large public pension plans. Its goal: pressure companies to let shareholders that control at least 3 per cent of company shares to nominate their own board candidates. “The fact is that friends of friends are still placed on boards and then often make decisions that are not in the long-term interests of shareowners,” Stringer told Runnalls. “I think this project promises to transform the dynamic between shareowners and corporate boards by giving investors real power to nominate corporate directors.

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Having made our way through Lagos’ dingy airport, we were transferred by van to a hostel. As night fell we drove through a seemingly never-ending street market, a sea of Nigerians selling every conceivable thing out of baskets balanced on their heads, carts and mobile stalls. It was my first taste of the so-called Third World. I had never seen humanity on that scale and it was overwhelming.

Living in the West, the population explosion that has taken place in the last century reaches us in the form of numbers. Lagos, 10 million people when I visited it, is now home to 21 million. By 2100, the United Nations expects Nigeria at an estimated 914 million to be the world’s second-largest country after India and before China. The UN’s most recent projection envisions the world population in 2100 at 10.9 billion. That’s the medium variant; the high variant projects 16.6 billion, the lower 8.3 billion, depending on fertility rates, over which demographers bicker endlessly.

It all seems pretty abstract. But as the world’s population, currently at 7.2 billion, continues to grow, we’re becoming more aware of its impact: climate disruption, plant and animal species extinction, land degradation, ocean acidification, the spread of toxic compounds, increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, groundwater depletion and resource wars. It’s a depressing litany for which history offers little consolation; we’re not talking about the rise and fall of a regional civilization, like the Mayan or Egyptian, but the potential collapse of a global one.

Humans are good at denial. We’re also good at blaming others. And as British environmentalist and occasional Corporate Knights contributor George Monbiot points out, the rich white Western men that dominate the population control conversation are more inclined to blast the breeding habits of far-away brown people than to acknowledge the impact of their own overconsumption. The uncomfortable fact is that I, with my trans-Atlantic, first-worldly existence, will have consumed a whole lot more of the world’s resources in the last 20 years than probably all the yam vendors on that street market combined. In fact, Paul Murtaugh, statistical ecologist at Oregon State University, estimates that an American born today will produce a carbon footprint 86 times that of a Nigerian down the generations.

This fact can’t be taken to condone population growth in the developing world, providing it remains poor. Population-curbing support to the developing world is indeed worthwhile but it won’t solve the problem of overpopulation, let alone begin to address the arguably more egregious one of overconsumption. Begging the question of what, if anything, will.

Humankind is not grappling with this problem for the first time. Ever since populations began blossoming in the Industrial Revolution, cautionary voices have been raised. Writing in 1798, Reverend Thomas Malthus predicted that with human numbers increasing exponentially and food supply growing arithmetically, mankind was headed for a catastrophic crunch. Being a man of the cloth, Malthus’ recommendations were of a moral nature – abstinence and delayed marriage – but his morality did not extend to the poor or “defective” whose reproduction he thought should be forcibly prevented. Otherwise and less desirably, Malthus believed that war, disease or starvation would take care of the overpopulation problem.

While the Malthusian catastrophe was averted by advances in agriculture and birth control and his thinking subsequently roundly denounced for its pessimism and inhumanity, the notion that the unwashed masses threaten the well-being of the rich has proven remarkably tenacious. And his basic tenet, that human population will ultimately outstrip global resources, has gained currency with time. During the postwar boom of the last century as the world’s population growth peaked, reaching a 2.2 per cent annual increase in 1963, the World Bank, UN and major American philanthropic foundations made population control in the Third World top priority, more or less deaf to calls that what was needed as much as contraception was development aid aimed at reducing poverty and child mortality and improvements in women’s health and education. Soon developing countries were taking matters into their own hands. When Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1975, her son and advisor Sanjay implemented a sterilization program – initially voluntary and then forced – in which over eight million Indian men are said to have been snipped. In 1978, China introduced its one-child policy, which was only eliminated fully last month. It was credited by the Chinese government with having prevented the births of 400 million people.

The extent to which these measures kept the numbers down is debatable. Many, including Karan Singh, India’s health minister under Gandhi, maintain that it was advances in development more than sterilization and abortions that put Indian population growth in check – consider the difference between fertility rates in developed southern states like Kerala (1.6 children born per woman) versus impoverished northern ones like Bihar (3.4). Likewise, demographers of China will point out that fertility rates were already in decline when the one-child policy was introduced, and that with urbanization and poverty reduction, the population was bound to drop.

Not only is their efficacy questionable, such coercive measures cause collateral damage. The selective abortion of girls which has drastically skewed China’s gender balance, the notorious abuse of power by local bureaucrats trying to fill quotas or their own pockets by kidnapping and selling “illegal” children for international adoption – all these offend Western (Christian, human rights, feminist, democratic) sensibilities to the point that even today’s most vehement population control advocates won’t defend them.

India’s health minister maintains it was advances in development more than sterilization and abortions that put Indian population growth in check.

American ecologist Paul Ehrlich, for instance, who in the 1960s supported certain forms of coercion, including suspending food aid to countries deemed “hopeless,” now talks less about adding sterilants to drinking water than about empowering women and reversing wealthy countries’ tax systems so that additional children cost more. A biologist and butterfly specialist at Stanford University, Ehrlich is in no way anti-life. But he fears the worst and, within a generation, his concerns have migrated from the margins to the mainstream.

In his 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that global overpopulation was going to cause imminent catastrophe in the form of widespread disease, famine and/or war. His critics don’t tire of reminding him that none of this came to pass. But as with Malthus, Ehrlich’s prognosis was followed by something of a miracle – the Green Revolution – in which agricultural yields and thus food supply were dramatically increased particularly to those parts of the world that needed it most.

But even Norman Borlaug, the so-called father of the Green Revolution, described these gains as “bought time” and took his 1970 Nobel Lecture as an opportunity to warn of the ongoing “magnitude and menace of ‘the Population Monster’.” Today, with 852 million people suffering chronic malnourishment, the vast majority in developing countries, Borlaug’s concerns have been validated.

It’s unlikely that the world is going to be blessed with another miracle. In fact, as Alan Weisman points out in his just-published Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, the next two billion people are going to have a more devastating impact on the planet than the last two billion did, as we scrape the bottom of various resource barrels. Modern-day cornucopians and free-market environmentalists who claim that technological advances will continue to support unfettered consumption of energy, food and stuff sound like increasingly deranged voices in a rather barren wilderness. Carbon capture, ethanol, genetically modified organisms, space colonization – none of these advances, if that’s what they are, are going to rescue us from ourselves. We are faced with the most inconvenient truth that we might actually have to change our own habits.

Is it too late, or as a paper Ehrlich recently presented to the Royal Society in London cheerily asked: “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?” Despite a grim collective assessment of the current state of affairs – Prince Charles calls humankind’s current behaviour an “act of suicide on a grand scale” – Ehrlich and others find reason for hope.

For one thing, population growth rates are steadily dropping. In the last 60 years, women have gone from having an average of 6 to 2.5 children. Population numbers will continue to increase as the postwar bulge works its way through the system, but fertility rates continue to fall. The burgeoning middle classes in China, India and Africa – increasingly educated and urbanized – are having fewer children than their foremothers. And they’re not behaving as badly as we sometimes claim; in 2012, China committed to put a quarter of its land mass under ecosystem protection.

Furthermore, Ehrlich applauds Europe’s negative population growth and calls on wealthy countries to dispense with early retirement and to plan for rather than bemoan their aging populations. “It’s easier for a 70 year old to be economically productive than a 7 year old,” the 81-year old professor said in a recent phone conversation from California, before jumping on a plane to Australia and New Zealand for lectures, conferences and field work.

The biggest challenge, Ehrlich believes, is to wean the economic system off its addiction to growth. Steady-state economic systems have to be designed and, trickier, sold to a consumer-driven public. Ehrlich makes a plea for a culture of “foresight intelligence” which would eclipse short-term selfishness, enabling people to pay a price today for benefits that will accrue to others tomorrow. Too bad that can’t be sprinkled in the drinking water.

According to Sara Parkin, a further challenge is the male domination of the population debate. The former British Green and founder of the sustainability charity Forum for the Future has observed in her careers as both nurse and politician that men simply can’t talk about sex. They prefer calling for “chalk boards and dollar bills” than anything to do with the reproductive act. While for Parkin, the key lies in contraception.

“Look at Cleopatra,” Parkin exclaims. “She saw half an orange and thought womb cup.” Perfectly shaped and acidic to boot.

Parkin would love to debunk the myth that poor women want lots of children. Poor women are acutely aware of mouths to feed; they simply want children that survive to adulthood. She believes that if women have constant access to contraception – not predicated on roads that wash out, refrigeration that fails and spouses that won’t comply, as is still the case in much of the world – global population could be brought down to the UN’s lowest projection trajectory by 2100.

Honking our way through that chaotic Lagosian street market 20 years ago, I remember thinking of my grandmother, who had fretted about my going to Nigeria. For her, the place was a something of a black hole. A fan of Silent Spring author Rachel Carson, she kept a huge garden at her home in the countryside outside of Hamilton, Ontario, where a rainbow sticker on the front door reassured visitors: “You are entering a nuclear-free zone.”

Every generation has its challenges. My grandmother had six children, but none of her 13 grandchildren have had more than three. In fact, most of my cousins, in their 30s and 40s, are childless. And there hasn’t been nuclear war.

No doubt, with enlightened (and maybe a little more female) leadership, global population can be kept under control, too.

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It’s not what one would call healthy diversity, but there is reason to believe the demand for women directors is growing as CEOs around the world are increasingly threatened with gender quotas. While quotas are not an issue in the United States, business leaders are increasingly feeling pressure from women rights advocates, consumers and investors who seek greater board diversity.

In the recent book Leaning In, author Sheryl Sandberg draws upon her personal experience to offer reasons why even highly educated women tend to lag behind, while their male peers reach positions of economic leadership and power.

The unyielding problem, Sandberg argues, is that women hold themselves back; they are locked into social or behavioural norms, and locked out of the DNA of most businesses. Tackling these barriers requires leadership by example. As chief operating officer of Facebook, Sandberg’s views triggered a national conversation, and for many were considered quite controversial.

The irony was not lost upon the New York Times as it described Facebook’s forced appointment of Sandberg to its male-only board in June 2012. It came after women advocates used Facebook’s social media tools to stage protests at the company’s headquarters, launch a user petition, threaten to boycott the social networking site, and crash Sandberg’s Harvard Business School’s commencement speech. Investors joined the movement as well.

The Facebook firestorm follows years of engagement by institutional investors who have worked behind the scenes to get companies to make boards more diverse. Some business leaders asked for patience. They agreed that board diversity needed to be addressed, but also pointed to the limited talent pool of qualified candidates as a reason for not rushing. Others said there was a lack of empirical evidence proving the economic value of board diversity. They preferred to wait.

In so doing, many business leaders seemed oblivious to the reputational risks they were exposed to as public opinion and investors drew inferences of their positions and a growing number of studies provided empirical evidence that companies with diverse boards outperformed their peers.

With these studies in mind, CalPERS and CalSTRS, two American public pension funds, commissioned the Diverse Director DataSource (3D) initiative, which is owned and operated by GovernanceMetrics International. It is a director database designed as a clearinghouse for corporate director candidates with a more diverse range of backgrounds, perspectives, skills and experience.

In other countries where cultural norms have held women back, legislators have opted for gender quotas. In 2003, Norway led the way by instituting a 40 per cent quota for women within a two-year window. Other European countries such as Spain, France, Italy and Iceland have followed, while Britain and more recently Germany held quotas at bay, after much heated debates.

Corporations in Germany, which has one of the worst records in Europe when it comes to diversity of leadership, are beginning to feel the pressure from politicians, investors and activists.

Deutsche Bank in particular has become a “lightning of criticism” for dragging its feet on leadership diversity, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Women represent just 18 per cent of senior management at the German bank, compared to a rate of 42 per cent across the company.

France, by contrast, is the largest market in Europe to have adopted gender quotas that apply to more than 2,000 companies. Boards of all companies, publicly listed or in private hands, with more than 500 employees or €50 million of revenues must have at least 40 per cent women directors.

European CEOs are not alone in feeling the pressure of quotas: Malaysia requires companies to have 30 per cent women in decision-making roles, and the province of Quebec in Canada has also adopted quotas.

While there is debate on the merit of quotas, having them on the table has led CEOs to take the issue more seriously and find ways to narrow the diversity gap.

We are reaching a time when global demand for qualified female directors is resulting in global searches for candidates. French companies, longtime laggards in geographic and gender diversity, are now leading.

American CEOs are aware that international governance trends promoting values shared by American investors and public opinion have crossed the Atlantic. It was not so long ago that the European practice of “say on pay” regarding executive compensation became the most hotly contested and widely covered business issue.

Other initiatives that widen director search, identify skill sets and promote globally diverse director networks will add to the supply pool of exceptional diverse board candidates. Business leaders will tap that pool as global demand for diversity balloons.

American CEOs should not drag their feet too much if they want to build diverse boards and senior management teams out of the best and brightest candidates. If such people are in short supply now, they’ll been in even shorter supply as this diversity trend gathers momentum.

The post Gender in the balance appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Our 2012 gender ranking features companies that have openly embraced this concept of “more than two,” led by Vancity and Mountain Equipment Co-op, both progressive co-operatives that maintain female-dominated boards well above the 50 per cent mark. Utilities, financial organizations, insurance and retail companies tend to be more gender diverse than the manufacturing and resource extraction sectors. TD Bank leads the big five banks with a board that is 38 per cent female. The chairman of TD Bank Group, Brian Levitt, believes this is the result of a concerted push by the organization. “Diversity and inclusion is a key element of TD’s culture and plays a fundamental role in attracting and retaining the best talent,” he says. “As such, we believe it’s important our board reflects the diversity of our employees in a similar way that our employees reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities we serve.”

Measuring female representation, while important, does not give a complete picture of the diverse Canadian population. Statistics Canada estimates that the proportion of Canadians belonging to a visible minority group is set to grow from 16 per cent in 2006 to between 29 and 32 per cent by 2030. Corporations are looking to appeal to these communities as new immigrant groups enter the consumer market, while natural resource companies struggle to gain a social licence for projects often located in areas with significant aboriginal populations. The arguments made for expanding gender diversity in the boardroom ring equally true when considering the addition of minorities, yet 72 per cent of Canadian boards fail to provide any representation. 

Husky Energy leads the minority ranking for the third year in a row, with seven directors out of 14. Other leading firms are mining companies, including Teck, Yamana Gold, Barrick Gold and Silver Wheaton, along with retail firms Mountain Equipment Co-op and Sears Canada. The provincial crown corporation Manitoba Hydro, ranked fourth overall, was the top-rated utility. As Manitoba maintains a 15.5 per cent aboriginal population, the two native board members are representative of the province’s demographics as a whole. 

Various initiatives around the world are working towards advancing the pace of diversification in corporate boardrooms. In Canada, the Catalyst Accord was launched last year. It calls for Canadian corporations to increase the overall proportion of board seats held by women to 25 per cent by 2017. To support the process, the Catalyst Canada Advisory Board will contribute names to a list of “board-ready” women that will be made available to any signatories.

France, Norway, Spain and Iceland are among the European countries that have created mandatory board diversity requirements for public companies, based on the limited enthusiasm observed for voluntary measures. Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner, announced in October that the union was seriously considering EU-wide quotas for female diversity. Whether voluntary or mandated, we hope these measures grow to incorporate minority representation as well.

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