Name: Women are running Davos for the first time ever | CNBC Reports
Uploaded: 2019-01-07T10:04:07.000Z
Duration: 3 min 13 s
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Modal verbs - B1

Shelley Zalis is no stranger to the Davos Man.

Inside a pop-up on the outskirts of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Switzerland,

We found Shelley hosting high-profile women executives

who she says have been left out of the conversation at Davos for decades.

What it's really all about is creating a destination or really a home for equality.

For world leaders to come and not just admire the problems

and talk about the problems, but to create solutions for change.

Shelley's pop-up, dubbed “The Equality Lounge” this year, has been a fixture at

Davos and major business conferences around the world for years.

And it truly is authentic unplugged conversations

In this lounge, the minority acts and feels like the majority.

Of the roughly 3,000 participants at Davos last year, only 21 percent were women.

But this year at Davos the future looks slightly more female.

For the first time in its nearly 50-year history,

the conference is chaired entirely by women.

There is this economic case for gender parity.

Davos' co-chairs include powerhouses like Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg,

All of those people are reflective of being

some of the most influential people within their particular stakeholder group.

So it's almost irrelevant what their particular gender is, but at the same time

it's powerful that the seven of them are female leaders.

Women still only represent one fifth of all the participants this year,

but we did find the split on stage was a bit more even,

with women moderating nearly as many panels as men.

Outside of the conference, we noticed several companies

jumping on the gender equality bandwagon too.

The myths are taking over some of the narrative

Procter & Gamble partnered with women's leadership platform Seneca Women

to bust some of the myths that women face in the workforce.

Procter & Gamble's North America Group President

says the conversation needs to change around gender equality,

And we want to create a picture of a different world.

And then for Davos, we want to set an expectation that we all lead towards that.

A new report from the World Economic Forum found that among

the 1.4 million jobs in the U.S. expected to be disrupted over the next decade,

The Forum also estimates it will take 100 years

to close the gender gap based on current trends.

So we need to find a way to make progress and

we need to make step-change progress immediately.

We do need to create simple next-step solutions

so that we can look back and say, "Wow, look how far we've come."