Partnering with outside organisations
An important part of our focus on global gender diversity is learning from and partnering with outside organisations. We currently work and partner with:
The Arab International Women’s Forum (AIWF) is a London-based organisation, set up to link Arab business women with each other and their global counterparts. PwC is a corporate sponsor of the Forum and Elham Hassan, PwC Bahrain's country senior partner, is actively engaged in supporting their activities. The AIWF's founder and chair, Mrs. Haifa Fahoum Al Kaylani, is featured in the PwC film, "Closing the gender gap".
Founded in 1962, Catalyst is the leading non-profit corporate membership research and advisory organisation working globally with businesses and the professions to build inclusive environments and expand opportunities for women and business. The organisation has offices in New York, San Jose, Toronto, and Zurich and the support and confidence of more than 340 leading corporations, firms, business schools, and associations. Catalyst is connected to business and its changing needs and is the premier resource for information and data about women in the workplace. PwC has been a global member of Catalyst and a sponsor of a wide variety of research projects for many years.
In addition, Catalyst honours exemplary business initiatives that promote women’s leadership with the annual Catalyst award. PwC US was a proud winner of the Catalyst award in 2007.
PwC is a supporter of the LBS Centre for Women in Business—a forum for exchange between the worlds of academia and business, and a centre for thought leadership—and has contributed to two key pieces of research: “Inspiring women: Corporate best practice in Europe” and ”Innovative potential: Men and women in teams”.
NASSCOM is India’s trade body for the IT industry, with over 1,200 Indian and global organisations as corporate members. NASSCOM are very committed to supporting women in IT through their Gender Inclusivity Initiative and, in addition to creating regional chapters of “Women in Leadership – IT”, NASSCOM hold an annual Women in Leadership Summit in Bangalore. The Gender Advisory Council's Cleo Thompson spoke at the 2008 event and described her experiences in this Gender Agenda blog entry.
The Forum was created to highlight and enhance the contribution of women to the economy and society. Its mission is to bring together a critical mass of female leaders in order to create a new force to address issues of global relevance.
PwC has been a sponsor and partner of the Forum since it was established in 2005, and global CEO Samuel DiPiazza is a regular speaker. In October 2007, in partnership with a PwC Genesis Park team, we produced and presented a report on the economic barriers and enablers which impact women in the workplace.
Sam DiPiazza was a panellist at the 2007 meeting, sharing his views in a session titled “Transparency, Trust and Truth” on how corporations should manage people's expectations for increased transparency. Read more about Sam's views of the Forum, and why PwC is proud to sponsor its work, on the PwC Gender Agenda blog.
In 2008, we were once more a founding sponsor of the Women’s Forum and provided the expertise of our sustainability practice to work towards making the event carbon-neutral for the first time, including providing advice to the participants on how to offset their carbon emissions. We also presented a thought leadership report, "Empowering women to empower the earth", investigating the relationship between female empowerment and population growth.
The World Bank Group’s gender programme: Gender equality as smart economics
The World Bank Group is committed to creating opportunities for women in business. PwC has been involved in many projects and reports produced by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Global CEO Sam DiPiazza has recently been appointed to the Global Private Sector Leaders Forum, an initiative of the World Bank Group’s Gender Action Plan (GAP), established to promote women’s economic empowerment. The GAP aims to mainstream gender issues into the work of the World Bank, whilst helping to better leverage the untapped potential of women as well as men in emerging markets.
In addition, three partners from PwC firms in the US, Mexico and France worked on a World Bank project in Tanzania during summer 2008, as part of PwC's Ulysses programme. Working with SELFINA, an organisation which provides micro-leasing for women in Tanzania, the team undertook an eight-week, high-level management review of its operations, which included providing recommendations, training, processes, methodologies, tools and templates to assist SELFINA in better serving women's entrepreneurship. Two of the team contributed blog entries about their experiences—read articles from Dyan and Nicolas on the PwC Gender Agenda blog.
The World Economic Forum, through its Women Leaders Programme, is committed to promoting women's leadership and the issues affecting women's lives globally. The mission of the programme is to promote discussion and targeted action on the status of women across the world and across sectors by engaging business leaders, policy-makers and representatives of civil society organizations and by monitoring progress through new benchmarking tools that measure the global gender gap. Former Gender Advisory Council member Cassie Wong is a regular attendee at PwC sponsored events at WEF meetings in Davos, Switzerland and Dalian, China.
Working Mother Media is the largest multimedia company in the US focused on diversity and the advancement of women. In addition to publishing Working Mother magazine, the organisation also includes a dynamic events division.
PwC is a regular sponsor of Working Mother's conferences, including the South African Advancement of Women Conference in Johannesburg in August 2008. Female PwC leaders, including partner Shirley Machaba, spoke at a number of sessions and, together with top Australian businesswoman Maureen Frank, hosted a mentoring workshop entitled "Mentoring: Challenging Women to Step Up".
Working Mother Media also celebrates companies that are truly focused on work/life initiatives that enable mothers to build rewarding careers—and our US firm is proud to have appeared on the lists for both the 100 Best Companies and the Best Companies for Multicultural Women for a number of years.
