Is the World Economic Forum a hotbed of feminist thought?

According to The Guardian, Hillary Clinton “chided” the World Economic Forum on Thursday “for not exactly being a hotbed of feminist thought.” She did so in a speech at the Women in the World Summit in New York.

We beg to differ.

Reading her full quote on The Daily Beast, we saw a different Ms Clinton to begin with – one we fundamentally do agree with:

It is hard to believe that in 2015 so many women still pay a price for being mothers,” Clinton said. “It is also hard to believe that so many women are also paid less than many for the same work, with even wider gaps for women of color.” And if you don’t believe what I say, look to the World Economic Forum, hardly a hotbed of feminist thought. Their rankings show that the United States is 65th out of 142 nations and other territories on equal pay.

We couldn’t agree more that it’s hard to believe women still face barriers in the workplace – which jobs they get, how much they are paid and whether they get to leadership roles. It’s indeed nothing to be proud of, either, to be ranked 65th in our wage gap rankings. So we fully support Hillary Clinton in her ambition, when she wants to make the U.S. 1^st on closing wage gaps and, we hope, other facets of gender equality in the workplace. As a matter of fact, in an optimal world we wouldn’t need rankings anymore, as all countries would have achieved full gender parity.

Still, Mrs Clinton did say we are “hardly a hotbed of feminist thought”. As Senior Director of the Gender Parity Programme at the Forum, I can point to at least six things we do as a “hotbed” of gender equality thought and action:

• Publish an annual Global Gender Gap Report, informing governments, business, media, citizens where there countries standing on closing gender gaps – in education, health, economy and politics – and why it matters.
• Make an Industry Gender Gap analysis, that shows which business sectors are leveraging women’s talents and which ones are falling behind.
• Show what companies can do to close gender gaps, based on practices that work already.
• Reveal which policy levers governments use around the world to close gender gaps.
• Point to what governments and companies can do together, in partnerships to close gender gaps.
• Bring global leaders together to commit to transforming the situation for women and girls around the world.

What these initiatives show, as hard as it may be to believe, is that we are just what Clinton says we are not. And we are proud of it, too.

Author: Saadia Zahidi is a senior director at the World Economic Forum, where she is head of the Gender Parity Programme and head of Employment, Skills and Human Capital.

Image: An employee works on a laptop in front of a mural of the New York City skyline, at the New York City Google office, March 10, 2008. REUTERS/Erin Siegal