Female Participation at the Decision Making Level Makes Good Business Sense – Talal Al Zain

Talal Al Zain is guest blogging for the Forum. He is Chief Executive Officer or Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company and will be attending the Annual Meeting in Davos.

The World Economic Forum is, in no small part, about global leadership across areas of politics, business and economics.  As the agenda for this year’s forum serves to underline, there are many issues that require collective thought and action at the global level.  And none more so than gender parity.

The policy at this year’s meeting at Davos that all Strategic Partners bring at least one female member as part of  their five-person delegation is timely indeed. It is essential that the forum show through action, its commitment to making good on issues of global importance and this is a small, but significant step in that regard.

As CEO of Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company, Bahrain’s investment company and a full community partner of the WEF Women Leaders and Gender Parity Programme, I am pleased to say that in our three year history as Strategic Partners, we have always had at least one female delegate represented.  We are sincerely looking forward to discussing with our colleagues around the world how we can share lessons and ideas, including how the principle of quotas can be applied more broadly. The WEF's Global Gender Gap Report 2010 is a very useful resource to aid these discussions, in particular it serves to highlight the policies implemented by nations which have achieved the most in gender parity.

Thankfully the notion that achieving gender parity comes at the detriment of economic competitiveness is fast becoming outmoded. Since the index’s inauguration, the Nordic countries have consistently occupied the top ten and the success of these countries shows the positive impact of measures such as quotas can have in businesses and politics.  Indeed, the index more broadly shows a strong correlation between countries scoring a high placement on the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index and scoring highly on both competitiveness and GDP per capita measures.

In Bahrain, progress is being made.  For example, women now account for 37% of all Bahrainis working in financial institutions and represent 25% of the sector’s workforce in total. But more can still be done and, as the holding company for Bahrain strategic non-oil and gas assets, we are uniquely placed to set an example and drive this progress forward.  I am pleased to say that at Mumtalakat, almost 40% of our workforce are female. Furthermore, over 15% of our senior executives are women, which is significant progress in a year, given at the end of 2009 we didn’t have any female representation at the executive level.

We firmly believe in the added value of female participation in the work force, and especially at the decision-making levels.  For us, it makes good business sense.

To that end, we are currently actively consulting on new measures to help further boost gender parity at Mumtalakat.  We are aware as partners in this Davos programme that the goal of gender parity will not be achieved overnight.  Decisions must be made in pursuit of the goal that are deliverable and in line with the maturity of individual businesses and wider economy and as part of wider political and societal initiatives.  But we are not talking about aspirations that are unrealistic.

It is clear that in the modern, highly competitive world economy, a country that fails to capitalize on the skills of half its workforce; on the drive of half its population; or the imagination of half its minds will be left behind.

Collectively, we can continue to make substantial progress towards full gender parity.  After all, it is in all our interests.