Irene Natividad is a pioneer in advocating for women's participation in the economic, business and political world. As president of the organisation GlobeWomen Research and Education Institute and of the Global Summit of Womenvisited the offices of PROA together with Margarita de CosThe president of the Spanish chapter of this organisation, before travelling to the summit in Dubai, which will be held between 4 and 6 May. A global meeting in which PROA is participating for the first time with its managing partner Lucía CasanuevaThe programme is in line with its interest in new global markets and the exchange of international professional experiences.
At 74, the Manila-born (Philippines), Washington D.C.-based activist, a New Yorker at heart and with a global outlook, has kept intact the energy and clarity of ideas with which she has worked for decades for the equality. She has done so as a professor at Columbia University, a leader of different political and civil society organisations in the US, advisor to the Sallie Mae Corporation, advisor and speaker at forums such as the G7, G20, World Bank, OECD, European Commission and various UN agencies.
We would like to start with a more personal question: How did you become a women's rights activist?
It wasn't a certain moment, there wasn't a big trigger. It was more of a trend in everything I was doing. When I did my doctoral thesis, it was on American slave narratives. And who would choose that, right? Because there were a hundred narratives written by slaves who moved from the South to the North to escape, and some of them were written by women. So I chose that. And as I moved up in academia, I became head of something called continuing education. And most of the students were women. So in many parts of my life, it was always women and more women. On the other hand, at the same time that I was teaching, I was politically organising women, Asian American women... So it was more of a pattern than a moment of revelation. I left the security of academia for the insecurity of women's advocacy. I started at the national level and then moved to the global level. The Global Summit of Women is the international component of what I have been doing for most of my life.
After these years of work, what is your assessment of the degree of women's incorporation on boards of directors and in other management positions?
It is growing, but it is nowhere near where it should be. Spain is doing something about it, but there are many countries where nothing is being done, there is not even an awareness that it is a priority to put women at the top of companies, not just as workers. So there is a lot of work to be done. But some countries are doing it. Spain has quotas, and I don't care what they think, because they work. In 45 countries there are now quotas for women on boards of directors. A few years ago, there were only a few countries, starting with Norway, but now they have spread to Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. I am surprised that the country we are going to at the next World Summit, Dubai, has quotas. But Bahrain has, Egypt has. So even in the MENA region there are quotas for women on boards.
That's why I get angry when people say: "I don't want a council seat because of a quota". I tell them, "Get over it. It's a door, so you have to push and open that door because it's allowing you to be at the table, to sit at the table and not have to wait for someone to recognise that you're wonderful". And the quotas are not forever, there is a deadline. But what happens is that you create a pool of experienced female directors so that the next time someone says: "I'm looking for a director, and it would be nice to have a woman", they already have a collective. And that's the important part. Experienced female directors are created thanks to a quota that puts them there.
And, by the way, people who think that women who join boards on a quota basis are inexperienced or unintelligent are crazy. I got so bored with that that we did a study on whether it makes a difference when a woman is at the helm. We looked at women CEOs in 36 countries, and what we found was that when a woman is at the helm of a company, the percentage of women on boards and the percentage of women in senior management is higher than in other similar companies. Whether it's because of their own experience or because they don't take gender into account when looking for talent, women, no matter what country you look at, bring in other women.
Have you carried out any other studies on the subject?
I like to do research, it's probably a component of my academic background. We did another report where we looked at women who were appointed to boards just after France implemented its quotas. France has the highest rate in the world right now, well over 40 %, even 50%. We looked at the qualifications of these women and it was amazing, they were at the top. In many cases they were overqualified. No company can afford to have a dumb manager, male or female, in this competitive environment that we find ourselves in. So the women who are being appointed to boards should have been appointed earlier. If there needs to be a quota, let's do it, but it's not enough to think: "Well, women will rise to the top naturally. People will see that". No, they haven't, otherwise the percentage of women in top management would be higher than it is now around the world.
Someone once asked me: "Why is it that the percentage of women on boards is higher than the percentage of women in top management? Because it is easier to bring in successful women than to deliberately grow them year after year to get to the top. Not enough companies do that. In the US just 8% of the CEOs of the S&P 500 are women. That is very low. I have even checked in the rankings of Forbes The salaries of the CEOS of the S&P 500 and the highest paid woman was number 29. So it is a lie that women have already arrived and the problem has been solved.
There is still some way to go towards equality.
Let me tell you why equality matters for the economy. There are all kinds of studies that show that when women are an important part of the economy, GDP increases. There are studies by the World Bank, by Goldman Sachs... McKinsey, before the pandemic pointed out that 40 % of the world's GDP was due to women's economic activity. Imagine if they had equal pay. Imagine if they had access to the highest-ranking and best-paid jobs. Imagine if they got loans for their businesses and could grow. So equality is an economic issue for any country, for any economy. You can't grow at all as a company or as a country if you don't put women at the top.
Small business, in my opinion, is the key to economic equity for women, because women are in charge. It doesn't matter if it's someone who sells in a shop or someone who has a big business. They have economic identity, economic freedom. When a woman earns money, the balance of power shifts in her household, in her community, it's very different. It's very different. Do you know why? There are battered women who stay in an abusive relationship because they don't think they can provide economically for themselves and their children if they leave.
So even that is an economic issue. At the end of the day, everything is, that's why I moved from politics to economics, the key is money. You can't run for public office if you don't know how to raise money. You don't have freedom if you don't have economic freedom. So that's why I've focused on business and economics for 33 years. And that's why I do the Global Summit of Women. What we do there is exchange what works, what works in your company, what works in your country, what works in your business. What do you do as a woman to make it all work? Because we do a lot.
Another issue that is of great interest to us, because this is what we do at PROA, is how they can contribute corporate communication and public relations to this cause.
Well, first, you have to have more women. Second, you have to show women leading things. The media, in general, does not use women as experts when they talk about any subject. In the United States we have women's organisations that have done studies on how many times a woman is quoted, how many times they appear as an expert, how they are described... After Hillary Clinton lost, Harvard University did a study on what kind of coverage Trump received and what Hillary received. Her coverage was 80 % negative. They published exactly what he said about him, even if it was a lie. It was only much later that the coverage was more critical. This was a Harvard study, but I knew it because I campaigned for Hillary. I saw it in the debates, the way they treated her, the way they talked to her, it was unbelievable. So it's not just the coverage, it's what coverage. In any case, communications and public relations firms play a critical role.
In relation to your experience as a pioneer, working for women's participation and leadership in business and political life, how do you see the new generations of women continuing these efforts?
The question is: is there a new generation of women who also advocate for other women? Yes, there is, but they are doing it in a different way. And what I love is that they are even younger. Who is behind climate change activism? Girls. In my country, where gun violence is rampant, who is fighting against it? High school students. They organised a nationwide march against gun violence. There is commitment, but of a different kind, and they use technology a lot. They can create a crowd just by sending a text message. Imagine if we'd had that in my day, when we were demonstrating for everything, and we had to photocopy calls and phone people. We didn't have computers, but we gathered crowds because we were young and we were the ones who were going to change everything. And what we discovered is that change happens, but it can also go backwards. So, in my country, because of a Supreme Court ruling, we can no longer decide on our reproductive rights, which teaches you to be vigilant. A law today can disappear tomorrow. It depends on who is in charge, that's why I want more women in charge, whether in politics or in business. That's why we need more.
Still on the subject of politics, since you are a former president of a bipartisan organisation, the National Women's Political Caucus, how can the so-called polarisation affect women?
I think you mean that there is a right-wing conservative movement that is growing in many countries, in Europe, in the United States, and coming back, for example, in Afghanistan and other countries. That polarisation directly affects our access to the rights that we thought we had, to the freedoms that we thought we had hard-won and that may now disappear. But you can't give up, which is why, at 74, I'm still doing this. Because a friend asked me: when are you going to retire? And I said: what am I going to do when I retire? The last time I checked, there was still no equality. So as long as my health allows me, I will keep going. Change doesn't happen without pressure, and unless women exert that pressure, it won't change. Right now, a lot of pressure is coming from the right wing in many countries. And it's coming mainly from the older groups who feel under siege, who feel that women and maybe people of colour, immigrants, are taking power. They have a sense of despair that the life they knew is gone.
Finally, let's talk about the upcoming Global Summit of Women in Dubai in May. What can we expect from this large international gathering?
At the very least, we will have a good cross-section of women running companies, countries and ministries in one place. And we don't always see women in charge. For example, at the last summit there was a group from IBM, about 20 people in Bangkok, who were enthusiastic. They might go to technology conferences, but they had never been to a business women's meeting where there were also CEOs from different countries, where you see a woman president of a country, where there are male CEOs talking about gender equality in the workplace. A woman from McKinsey, a long time ago in Germany, said in her evaluation of the meeting: "I left with wings on my back". You can't capture that, it's not a paper, it's not a document. It's how to make women feel they can do even more.
Another woman told me that after going to the Summit she had decided to quit her job because she wanted to do something in the international arena. And the thing is that everyone talks about the global as if they understand it, but in reality their real experience of the global is very limited. And that's why the summit manages to show the global without saying anything, because you're on the other side of the table with someone from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Cameroon or Mongolia. It's an experience you can't replicate anywhere else. We really have a global participation, it's a learning that you can't get by going to a regular professional conference. This is what I do, or what I try to do.
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