Coca-Cola, Walmart Join Oxford in Boosting Women’s Equality Worldwide
by Leon Kaye on
The past couple months have been a long, extended and tortuous watershed moment for women’s equality – culminating in Time’s decision to acknowledge the #MeToo social media movement and recognize “The Silence Breakers” as Person of the Year.
But while many women are increasingly speaking out, others are still in the shadows. True, the world may be nudging closer to the time when women can truly feel equal in the workplace. Yet worldwide, only 50 percent the world’s women are part of the workforce – or at least, that is the ratio of women whose economic contributions are recognized. Contrast that figure with the world’s men, three-fourths of whom work and are integrated into their local economies. Furthermore, depending on the source cited, women earn anywhere from 60 to 75 cents for each dollar a man earns.
So how can women’s financial clout ever catch up with that of men?
That is the question Oxford University’s Global Business Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment (GBC4WEE) initiative, which launched last week, is trying to answer. Joining Oxford on this quest to improve the economic inclusion of women are companies such as Coca-Cola and Walmart.
“The whole agenda would move more quickly if these players were sharing with each other what they were learning,” Oxford University’s Linda Scott, widely recognized as a global thought leader on women entrepreneurs, explained to the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a recent interview.
