A Historic moment For switzerland

For the first time in Switzerland, a concrete joint commitment of 30 top leaders has been achieved. Our President Dr Petra Jantzer closed the successful CEO Breakfast with the words: “The summit’s mission is completed. Now, it’s time to act.”

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Gender Diversity makes business sense

The intense working summit was opened by Anette Bronder from our hosting member company Swiss Re. The event was led by Advance President Petra Jantzer, Malvika Singh, Initiator of Advance, and Alkistis Petropaki, General Manager Advance. It was not the traditional conference set-up that expected this group of progressive leaders. They clearly welcomed the highly interactive format and contributed with energy and passion. After a short impulse session raising awareness on the current state of affairs, its structural root causes and the clear business case for gender equity, the CEOs elaborated concrete proposals for actions that were consolidated and agreed on at the end.

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Joint CEO COMMITMENT FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

As a result of this summit and for the first time in Switzerland, a concrete joint commitment of 30 top leaders has been achieved. We are delighted to publish this historic pledge, agreed on by the attending leaders:

30 Committing Business Leaders’ Monday Morning Actions

• We business leaders are passionate sponsors of our female talent to make our companies successful.
• We ensure a gender balanced pipeline bottom to top.
• We demand gender diverse promotion/hiring slates at all levels.
• We commit to setting gender goals and measuring progress.
• We will follow up on progress at next year’s CEO Breakfast (2021)

We need to heal the pyramid…

As the latest Gender Intelligence Report by Advance and HSG reveals, not much has changed in the representation of women in leadership. With an average of 18% women in top management compared to 49% at non-management level, the Glass Ceiling Index is excruciatingly high, meaning that 30 percentage points of the talent potential gets lost on the way up. “We cannot afford this tremendous loss of female talent and need to find ways to stop the leaks in the pipeline. Especially in the light of the current economic challenges”, states Petra Jantzer. She highlights pressing topics like ‘Fachkräfte-Mangel’ and the ‘Baby Boomer’ retirement wave, the latter of which is a unique window of opportunity to increase gender diversity as a good third of all male leaders is over 50 years old.

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… or, in other words, repair the broken ladder

Alkistis Petropaki uses a metaphor to explain the necessary change. “The share of women decreases as we move up along the hierarchical levels. It is as if the ladder that women use to get to the top is broken.” It is a well-known fact that, nowadays, there are more women graduating with a university degree than men. Due to structural reasons and outlived cultural patterns however, many of these skilled women stop pursuing their careers, reduce their work rate and take on family responsibilities while men keep being under the – often straining – pressure of being the main ‘breadwinner’ and pursuing their careers full throttle.

Based on the notion that diverse leadership skills are statistically evenly distributed among the genders, it makes utmost business sense to repair the broken ladder and consciously give women the same chances to advance as men. Together with the 30 committing business leaders, we are convinced we can achieve this. More facts and figures from the Advance & HSG Gender Intelligence Report here.

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2020 Goal of 20% Achieved: New Ambition 2030

At its founding in 2013, Advance stated the goal of reaching 20% women in top management over all Advance Members by 2020. As the results of the new Gender Intelligence Report (GIR 2020) show, this goal has been achieved. With the new ambition, the Advance Board raises the bar:

With this as the north star, let’s get down to work and start ‘healing the pyramid’. It takes all of all of us! Because together we #advance faster.

TIme for a big thank you!

First of all, we want to thank all participating CEOs and Country Heads for their high engagement, valuable time and energy. A very warm thank you goes to our host Swiss Re, whose team led by Antonia Hitz did an amazing job. Everything was perfect! Of course, it takes a lot of coordination to take an event like this off the ground, and our Advance Ambassadors from attending member companies were a wonderful support. A big thank you to all of you, as well as to the Advance team with Alexandra Rutsch and Claudia Solanes at the forefront.

Last and by no means least: What would such an event be without fantastic photos capturing the moment and the unique spirit. A warm thank you to Gian Marco Castelberg & team for their excellent job.

Advance CEO Breakfast 2021

Already, we look forward to our next gathering. Time and place will be announced in due time.

GAllery

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