MALAYSIA
By Lyana Khairuddin*
The Star
27 Jan 2018
Most eyes are on Davos this week, with world leaders and experts from many fields having gathered there for the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting. While I do not have the resources to be there in person, I was able to be “present” for the panel discussions, thanks to live-streaming technology.
This year’s meeting created history by having only women as its co-chairs. Despite this apparent progress for a forum oft criticized as a playground exclusive for wealthy, powerful men, the effect did not trickle down to the panelists. Typically, a panel was still made up of a token woman surrounded by men.
Data on the gender breakdown of the participation in last year’s meeting shows only 21% of the delegates were women. At time of writing, the percentage of women delegates for 2018 is yet to be publicly available.
Further, diversity in terms of ethnicity and representation of minority groups (such as those living with disabilities and those from the LGBTQ community) is still lacking.
While it can be argued that there is a selection bias at play – after all, it is mostly the elite who can afford tickets to the event and accommodation in the Swiss alpine resort that hosts it – the issue of representation matters.
This is more so for the visibility of women as it is important to show young girls that they are also a part of the global narrative and to empower them to one day make the term “Davos men” obsolete.
Improving gender parity benefits businesses, nations and the world. The Peterson Institute for International Economics found that increasing the share of women in leadership positions from 0% to 30% translates into a 15% boost in profitability.
Yet, the discrimination against women does not end there. Diversity means more than simply having a token woman in every panel or every board of directors. It must include women from diverse backgrounds, covering race, religion, sexuality and socioeconomic status. They ought to be hired and allowed to climb the corporate ladder or ascend to the top ranks of political parties.
The downfall of any expert meeting has long been the barrier to implementation, mainly due to the fact that ideas and policies conceived by the experts often disregard those who are most affected by the ideas and policies. It is thus important to have multiple stakeholder consultations and it can start with Davos.
Use social media and hold online Q&A sessions for as many of the panel discussions as possible. Even better, turn it into a virtual conference. Embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution fully and use it for engagement and access to policy discussions that impact the world.
I find it ironic that the theme for the meeting this year is “Creating a shared future in a fractured world”. The very elitist nature of Davos needs to be first broken down by incorporating diversity along the lines of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability and class. Most of all, there has to be an admission of the very fact that we are already sharing a fractured world.
Despite today’s technological advancements and impressive innovations, young girls and women still face sexual harassment, incest and violent abuse. We use technology to record and upload on social media the incident of a woman being slapped in public and sensationalize stories on incest, but we do not act to stop men from carrying out such assaults.
We live in a world where women journalists who shared their experiences with sexual harassment are told by the president of their union to not “wear sexy outfits”. He was thus normalizing the harassment as part and parcel of the women’s jobs and reinforcing heteronormative tendencies as the underlying tension of such harassment.
Also, some people accuse women of witch-hunting when stories of sexual misconduct are shared years after the incidents have happened. And we wonder why women do not speak up about rape.
We would rather turn a blind eye when a government-backed institution sought to “determine” a person’s gender, thus violating the person’s privacy and liberty, and taking up resources, funded by us taxpayers, that could have been used to ensure transparent distribution of tithe or to find solutions to combat extremism.
We still use sexist terms (such as lipstick squad) when reporting about women in leadership roles, reinforcing patriarchal expectations of how women should behave or look like.
The dichotomy between the annual conversations in Davos and the reality in Malaysia disappoints me. We are a nation rich in natural resources and abundant with talent, and yet we tend to act in a manner that is more regressive than progressive.
Reading comments posted online on the happenings in Davos shows that this dichotomy is evident everywhere in the world.
It is up to each of us to decide whether we want to mend the cracks or give up completely. I sure hope that more of us would choose the former; like it or not, we all share this fractured world.
*Lyana Khairuddin is a Chevening-Khazanah Scholar pursuing a Master of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. The views expressed here are entirely her own.
(First published in The Star – https://www.thestar.com.my/opinion/columnists/naturally/2018/01/27/sharing-a-fractured-world-the-highpowered-annual-conversations-in-davos-could-do-with-more-diversity/#AGPsaRIwzuhrLR0Z.99)
