The role of business in female economic empowerment

In November 2014, Nicola Sturgeon said: “As first minister, tackling inequality is at the heart of all I do. Smashing the gender glass ceiling to smithereens is an important part of making progress.

“My simple message to girls and women across Scotland is this: if you are good enough and work hard enough, you can achieve anything.

“As First Minister I will work to ensure there are no limits on women's ambitions.”

It was with this quote that Holyrood editor Mandy Rhodes opened Coca-Cola and Holyrood magazine’s fringe on Gender Equality, with a panel featuring Coca-Cola's Global Director of Women's Economic Empowerment, Charlotte Oades, SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and Cabinet Secretary for Fair Work, Skills and Training Roseanna Cunningham, discussing attempts to boost women's economic empowerment.

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After taking over as FM Sturgeon wasted no time in setting out her plan to confront unfairness – in education, health, land ownership, and perhaps most of all – to confront gender inequality.

Bold promises were followed by the news that Sturgeon’s cabinet would have a 50:50 gender split – the third in the developed world – while the FM also backed the campaign for every public body in Scotland to have a 50:50 gender split by 2020.

But despite the Scottish Government’s commitment, there is a feeling that government alone cannot tackle gender inequality. As Rhodes put it, “this shouldn’t be about governments and politicians telling us what to do, it has to also be about the rest of us”.

This, clearly, is a subject close to the heart of Charlotte Oades, who leads Coca-Cola’s efforts to empower women and fight global economic inequality.

Speaking at the fringe, she outlined how Coca-Cola works with women around the world, specifically outlining its #5by20 project, which aims to create five million female entrepreneurs across the company’s value chain by 2020.

The process began back in 2007, when the chairman of the company asked Oades, along with others, to investigate why women were underrepresented in senior roles at the company. In response it formed a women’s leadership council, which advises the board on how to improve its representation – including making plans for women to make up 50 per cent of positions at every role in the company by 2020.

But it did not stop there. Next, they went further, moving from concern at the company’s representation of women internally to the discrimination faced by women globally.

Some of the measures adopted were rolled out across nations and continents. The company found there are three critical barriers disproportionally affecting women globally – access to skills and training, finance, and business mentors. Sometimes it is all three.

Beyond offering help in these areas, Oades said the company also took action at every level its supply chain – for example ensuring that 50 per cent of its distributors in Africa are female. From farmers to local store owners, she said, the company aims to empower women.

A global reach, with Coca-Cola operating in over 200 countries around the world, should create real potential to transform economic structures, and women’s place within them. As Oades put it: “We operate everywhere except North Korea and Cuba, and now Cuba is opening up too".

She said: “We know, when we look at global statistics, women do 66 per cent of the world’s work, they earn 10 per cent of the world’s income, yet they reinvest 90 per cent of what they earn, into the health and education of their children and into the local economy.

“More and more, people are recognising that women are the key. We believe that investing in women so they overcome the barriers to earning a livelihood and becoming successful in business is one of the critical ways you unleash economic growth and development.”

Clearly though, the same approach will not work everywhere, and central to its strategy, she said, was reacting to conditions in each area it operates, “Coca-Cola is a global company, but a local business”.

Key, too, is engaging with other partners, such as NGOs, the UN, civil society. Part of that also means engaging effectively with men living in the communities they operate in.

Oades said: “In some cultures it is very difficult, and we have to be very careful because there are unintended consequences if you do it wrong. Sometimes we train men along with women so they see there is nothing secret about it, nothing to be frightened of or challenged by. That way they are very supportive and what we see is that women then gain respect from a household because they are learning money for the first time.”

The job has taken Oades all over the world. In fact she seemed surprised at the extent to which the process had changed her personally.

“Seeing the resilience and character and bravery of these women, in trying to do what is right for themselves and their families and trying to make sure they can change it for the next generation is just extraordinary. I have learned a lot from them and that is what makes me proud to do what I do”.

Education emerged as a key factor for all panellists, with Ahmed-Sheikh emphasising how important it was for children to see women in leadership roles.

“To get to the stage where you are in a position to empower yourself as a woman, you need to have had an education. That is one of the things we take for granted.”

She said: “One of the things I found really interesting, and I think it comes from countries where there isn’t a system of social security, is that women have to be innovative, because if they are not, they can’t feed their children, they can’t feed their families and we have so much to learn from that because it is survival of the fittest, because you find ways to make ends meet. I find that hugely inspiring.”

For Cunningham though, the question was how the lessons Coca-Cola had learned about empowering women could be applied to Scotland.

“Everything that is being said about issues in the developing world are true, but we need to be careful not to assume that there aren’t some of the echoes of those same problems going on here.”

Cunningham pointed out that many of the global issues being discussed as barriers to equality are still prevalent in UK society, using the example of how her father had believed there was no value in educating girls past 15 years old. It was her mother, she said, that had fought for her to finish school.

“I loved my father very much, but he was born in 1912 in Rothesay, and he did not have an incredibly modern or enlightened view of women’s place in society – to the extent that he thought it would be a waste of time to educate me past the age of 15. Why? Because you are just going to get married and have kids.”

Continuing, the Cabinet Secretary for Fair Work, Skills and Training laughed, “I think he was a bit nonplussed about what he had for a daughter.”

“But this is a precautionary tale, we mustn’t assume that because we can see some of these issues played out more starkly in other parts of the world, don’t assume that they aren’t still underlying and unspoken sometimes here, and still holding women back. I think it is really important to remember that we are not in any sort of position to preach and judge and we must be careful not to do that. We still have enormous problems right here, right now, in the 21^st century and it is great to reach out a hand but not in a way that says “we have it sussed and we will tell you how to do it”.”

Ahmed-Sheikh followed, describing how, growing up, her father had encouraged her to overcome the barriers in her way. Still though, she said that as a teenager she would try to stop him finding out about some of the worst examples of sexism and racism she experienced in school.

Even now the fight for equality continues. Ahmed-Sheikh said: “Sometimes we face great adversity and great difficulty when we would want to give up, but then you think, and for me, I look at my girls and think, ‘I want better for them’. I think big business has a big role to play because it has the money, the ability and the assets to put programmes in place to help women.”

Oades responded: “We do but I don’t think any one business can do it alone and I think finding the right combination to promote permanent concerns is really important, because unless you create the right opportunities, you won’t create a legacy that can then endure.”

Clearly change needs to be cultural, with the panel agreeing on the need for children to see women in leadership roles. Cunningham described an engineering company she visited, which headhunted women to make up half of its shortlist for recruitment, and get more female engineers.

“They actively went out and changed the way they did recruitment, and surprise, surprise, they are getting women engineers. But it takes a company to understand that they need to make changes. Many of them don’t get that yet.”

Oades responded, saying: “Sometimes it is just about asking the question, “why are you not getting more women for that particular role?” Just starting to think from a gender perspective can help unlock changes”.

So the work continues. As Oades put it: “We are learning all the time. By the end of last year we enabled 865,000 women. That is great progress but we still have a long way to go”.