Women Need to Be Invested In

Building upon Shital’s post, another article has raised the importance of including women in the global economy. In the recently concluded World Economic Forum, there was a panel titled “Women as the Way Forward” suggesting that even big businesses have fully embraced notion of including the other 51% in the economy. This example and others were provided in a recent Newsweek article. In the article, it says:

Bringing women into businesses creates what Michael Porter and Mark Kramer of Harvard Business School call “shared value”—it helps companies while helping communities too. Consumer-product businesses have quickly understood the benefits—for instance, bypassing retail and hiring women to build person-to-person distribution channels for everything from cosmetics to beverages. More recently, companies have found it especially effective when the purchaser needs to be educated on the product being sold, be it a mobile sonogram machine, an energy lantern, or a cookstove. Women can also be the best innovators of the products they use and sell, sometimes transforming their communities with something as small as the knowledge of the optimal use of a household’s single electric light.

What may seem intuitive in hindsight can at times be much harder to do in practice. The more we can include women in all aspects of global decision-making the better.