Companies perform better if their female talent is equally integrated, but a decade of data reflects only marginal change in this area. How can we move beyond awareness towards action?
In partnership with the World Economic Forum, CNBC hosts this debate focusing on gender parity.
Themes: Gender Disparity | Gender Inequality | Sheryl Sandberg | Arianna Huffington
Bio
Orit Gadiesh
Orit Gadiesh is an Israeli-American corporate strategist and Chairman of Bain & Company, a leading management consulting firm. Forbes Magazine has listed her among the world's 100 most powerful women four times since 2004.
A frequent business speaker and journal contributor, Gadiesh is the author of Lessons from Private Equity Any Company Can Use.
Carlos Ghosn
Carlos Ghosn is a Lebanese-Brazilian businessman. He is the current CEO and President of Renault of France and Nissan of Japan. He is largely credited with turning around Nissan.
As an outsider in charge of one of Japan's largest companies, Ghosn has been extremely successful. He was voted Man of the Year 2003 by Fortune magazine's Asian edition and is also on the board of Alcoa, Sony, and IBM. Ghosn became CEO of Renault, in 2005, succeeding Louis Schweitzer, while remaining CEO of Nissan as well.
Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist, author of eleven books and co-founder and editor of the HuffingtonPost.com. She is also co-host of "Left, Right & Center," public radio's popular political roundtable program.
Her weekly commentary is syndicated in newspapers across the country by Tribune Media Services. Huffington's many books include On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work, and Life, Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America, and Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America.
Muhtar Kent
Muhtar Kent is president and chief executive officer of The Coca-Cola Company, and serves on the Company's Board of Directors.
Mr. Kent joined The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta in 1978 and has held a variety of marketing and operations roles throughout his career. In 1985, he was appointed general manager of Coca-Cola Turkey and Central Asia. From 1989 to 1995, he served as president of the Company's East Central Europe Division and senior vice president of Coca-Cola International, with responsibility for 23 countries. Between 1995 and 1998, Mr. Kent served as managing director of Coca-Cola Amatil-Europe, covering bottling operations in 12 countries.
From 1999 until his return to The Coca-Cola Company in May 2005, he served as president and CEO of the Efes Beverage Group, the majority shareholder of Turkish bottler Coca-Cola Icecek. Headquartered in Istanbul and listed on the London and Istanbul Stock Exchanges, Efes is a publicly traded beverage enterprise whose Coca-Cola and beer operations extend from the Adriatic to the Pacific Ocean. Under Mr. Kent's leadership, Efes experienced extraordinary growth, with triple-digit revenue growth and a 250 percent increase in market capitalization. During that time, in addition to taking Efes Breweries International public on the London Stock Exchange, Mr. Kent also served as a board member of Coca-Cola Icecek.
Mr. Kent was named president and chief operating officer of The Coca-Cola Company's North Asia, Eurasia and Middle East Group from 2005 until early 2006, where he was responsible for the operations across a broad and diverse geographic region that included China, Japan and Russia. Mr. Kent served as president of Coca-Cola International through most of 2006, responsible for operations outside of North America, until his appointment as president and chief operating officer of The Coca-Cola Company, overseeing all operations of the business, including Bottling Investments. On July 1, 2008, he succeeded Neville Isdell as chief executive officer of the Company.
Mr. Kent holds a bachelor of science degree in economics from Hull University, England, and a master of science degree in administrative sciences from London City University.
Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook in March 2008 as chief operating officer. In this role, she is responsible for Facebook’s business operations, including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy, and communications.
Ms. Sandberg joined Facebook after six years at Google, where she served as vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations. In that role, she built and managed Google’s online sales channels and managed global operations for Google’s consumer products.
Ms. Sandberg was also a leader for the company’s philanthropic efforts. She created the Google Grants program, which donated over $240 million dollars of advertising to nonprofits worldwide. The Economist called her “the unseen driving force behind the creation of Google.org,” Google’s philanthropic arm, where she served as a founding member of the board and led the search for its executive director, Larry Brilliant.
Prior to joining Google, Ms. Sandberg was the chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department, where she helped lead its work on forgiving debt in the developing world. Before that, Ms. Sandberg was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company and an economist with the World Bank, where she worked on eradicating leprosy in India. Ms. Sandberg currently serves on the boards of The Brookings Institution, Women for Women International, The Ad Council, Leadership Public Schools and eHealth.
Ms. Sandberg received a BA summa cum laude in Economics from Harvard University. She received an MBA with highest distinction from the Harvard Business School. In 2007, Ms. Sandberg was named as one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business by Fortune.
Sir Martin Sorrell
Sir Martin Sorrell is an English businessman, currently the chief executive officer of WPP Group. He has served in that role since he started the company.
Ross Westgate
Ross Westgate co-hosts CNBC's global daily business news program "Worldwide Exchange" live from London with Christine Tan in Singapore and Brian Shactman in the U.S. He also co-hosts Strictly Money, CNBC's new UK business and money programme.
Westgate is one of CNBC's most experienced anchors, with over 11 years experience in financial broadcasting. Prior to "Worldwide Exchange" he anchored "Morning Exchange" and "Power Lunch Europe" and regularly anchored "Squawk Box Europe."
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reflects on her own experiences as a mother and a woman in the corporate world to call for social change in the work/home balance between men and women.
"We all lose because of this [imbalance]," she says. "We limit women's ability to contribute in the workforce and, even more importantly, we limit men's ability to contribute at home."
In language, a grammatical category contrasting distinctions of sex or animateness. Gender marking may be natural, with linguistic markers of gender corresponding to real-world gender, or purely grammatical, with markers of gender in part semantically based and in part semantically arbitrary. In languages with grammatical gender, nouns are partitioned into sets. Membership of a noun in a set may be expressed by its form and/or by the forms of other parts of speech controlled by the noun. Closely related to gender systems in language are class systems, as in Bantu languages, in which the number of sets into which nouns are partitioned is much larger, with distinct categories for things such as plants, animals, and tools, though, as with nouns in Romance and Germanic languages, assignment of most nouns to classes is semantically arbitrary.
Unsolicited verbal or physical behaviour of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment may embrace any sexually motivated behaviour considered offensive by the recipient. Legal recourse is available in cases that occur in the workplace, though it is very difficult to obtain convictions. In 1994 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that behaviour can be considered sexual harassment and an abridgment of an individual's civil rights if it creates a hostile and abusive working environment.
