Highlights from UN Women Seoul Dialogue
I’m deeply honoured to be part of the second annual UNWomen Seoul Dialogue discussing how we build more inclusive workplaces.
There were so many highlights, but I particularly noted:
💡 A great comment to kick us off from Michelle Winthrop – “Organisations with only half the players on the pitch, will lose the match”
💡 The progress that GM Korea (thanks Gwanheum Song) with their “Everyone In” philosophy leading to an increase in new female engineers (a third of the total intake in the last year)
💡 How Kumjoo Huh leveraged good practice from GM to lead the charge on increasing the ratio of senior female executives in her own firm and the G20 Empower alliance
💡 The work that Yongha Oh is doing at LOTTE to increase the level of men taking paternity leave (by making pretty much mandatory!)
💡 Real data and insights from Tara Shrestha Carney on the ongoing challenge of gender pay gaps across OECD countries, exacerbated by the motherhood penalty, but also clearly due to their gender. Balanced by a full understanding of the benefits if we can realise by changing this picture – $5tn GDP improvement if OECD country female employment rates were the same as Sweden’s
💡 Great ideas from Fiona Lee on changing our job adverts to focus on “learning” rather than “hiring the best” which leads to much higher levels of diverse candidate applications
Really looking forward to watching back all the footage to capture further nuggets that I wasn’t swift enough to note down at the time.
A massive thank you to Jeongshim Lee, Ahjung Lee, Janelle Weissman, Sohee Kim, Bomin Park, Katja Freiwald and everyone from UN Women Asia and the Pacific who made this event possible